The overthrow of Espartero led within a year to the establishment of a new regime of oligarchic liberalism under the hegemony of the Moderates, led by the espadón de Loja, Ramon Maria Narváez. The Moderate party that took shape in the 1840s was based essentially on the wealthy and talented, but above all the wealthy, of the upper and upper-middle classes. It stood for a government built on property and rational administration. It was interested in representative government and constitutionalism mainly because royal absolutism was capricious and inefficient. Its liberalism was limited, however, to representation of those with economic power in the country, and the basis of Moderate rule was extremely narrow.

The position of the Progressives differed mainly in degree. The Progressives were not democrats, but believed that suffrage, to be effective, had to represent a broader cross-section of society. The Progressives stood for fiscal reform and a somewhat more equitable tax system. They were much more anticlerical. Moderates wanted a modus vivendi with the church, allowing it to keep many of its privileges and part of its property. The Progressives wanted to strip the church of all its property and privilege, and tended toward disestablishment and absolute freedom of religion. Both supported central [454] administration to encourage uniformity, efficiency, and modernization. The Progressives, however, were emphatic about local self-government, especially because their support lay in the lower-middle and middle-middle classes of the provincial towns. The Moderates insisted upon central regulation of local affairs, to keep political power under control.

Neither group was effectively organized as a modern political party and neither could operate as an efficient unit. Both were split by a variety of personal, ideological, and provincial factions, and the lines between them tended to blur. The official Moderates tended toward extreme oligarchy, but a puritano group stood for "pure" constitutionalism and reasonable civil guarantees. Radical Progressives were often willing to call down the mob on their side, but moderate Progressives feared violence and extremism and were willing to work with liberal elements among the Moderates.

The movement that overthrew Espartero had been a loose coalition of Moderates and anti-Espartero Progressives with the nominal aim of restoring genuine representative government under the compromise constitution of 1837. The coalition ministry broke down after two successive prime ministers had to resign within a few months. An attempt by the moderate Progressive Olózaga to force the adolescent queen to hand power to a Progressive ministry that would hold new elections backfired, and brought an all-Moderate government to power at the close of 1843.

Elections were held in 1844 under fairly rigorous central control, and the Moderates then moved to write a new constitution and consolidate an almost exclusively Moderate regime. Lacking strong organization or internal unity, their main rallying point was Narváez and his personal domination of the army. With three comparatively brief interruptions, Narváez was premier from 1844 to 1851. He was a man of moderately liberal ideas and authoritarian temperament. A constitutionalist in his youth, Narváez had been expelled from the army in 1823 and did not regain his commission until the Carlist war, during which he rose to prominence as commander of the reserve forces in central Spain. A strong leader, determined and energetic, he possessed the force of personality and will needed to establish a degree of order in the army and hold the factions and cliques of the Moderates together. Narváez was a genuine supporter of constitutionalism and parliamentary government but also a ruthless advocate of law and order. He was not given to capricious persecution, but imposed maximal sanctions against rebels. More than two hundred radicals in revolt against the new regime were executed in 1843 and 1844, and the Moderate government began to establish rural security [455] by the formation in 1844 of a special constabulary called the Civil Guard, modeled on the French rural gendarmerie.

Under Narváez's direction, the Moderates drew up a new constitution in 1845. Most of the seventy-seven articles of the 1837 constitution were transferred unaltered into the eighty articles of the new document, but several fundamental changes were made. The concept of national sovereignty was ignored, and the power of the throne was greatly increased. It was empowered to convoke, suspend, and dissolve the legislature and was given absolute veto power over all legislation. Freedom of the press was guaranteed, but jury trials for offenses were eliminated. The Senate was transformed from an elected body into a lifetime appointive oligarchy composed of the elite of the government administration, army, church, aristocracy, and property owners. Moreover, the Senate was made equal to the Cortes in legislative power. Under an 1846 law, the property qualification for suffrage was drastically raised, reducing the electorate to 100,000 of the most wealthy (and a tiny minority of the best educated) citizens. Even these were not always allowed to cast valid ballots unhindered during the elections of the next twenty years (save in 1854), since general control was exercised from Madrid. Electoral units were organized by single-member districts rather than by bloc voting for whole provincial lists, as the Progressives would have preferred. By 1860 the suffrage had expanded only slightly, to include about 160,000 of the elite, or approximately 1 percent of the total population of Spain.

Moreover, the Moderate regime restored central control over provincial government by repromulgating the local government law of 1840. A central financial system was created for the first time after the Bank of Spain was established in 1847. Four years later it was given authority to issue money for all of Spain. A uniform commercial legal code had already been worked out in 1829, and the Moderates established a common criminal code in 1848. The only regions excepted from it were Catalonia, which retained its own civil and commercial codes, and the Basque provinces (including Navarre), whose fueros, recently suspended by Espartero, were partially restored. A new protective tariff was established in 1849, and a unified tax system for Spain (again excepting the Basque provinces) was finally created. The principal sources of income were taxes on land, urban rents, and industry and commerce, and the consumos (local excise taxes), that weighed heavily on the lower classes. The national debt was finally amortized and brought under control, but the collection of consumos and some other taxes was still not effectively centralized. Control of the collection of district consumos became a central factor in local [456] politics. Much of the proceeds were drained off, and only a comparatively small proportion reached the national government.

A major goal of the Moderate government was to reach an understanding with the church. Sale of church lands was suspended, and a concordat was finally signed in 1851 recognizing Catholic supervision of the moral content of education and providing for financial support of the clergy and the election of bishops by the state. The church in turn recognized the loss of most of its lands, but was to be indemnified with government bonds. The Moderates also created the legal basis for a centralized university network and national educational system. This was eventually completed by the 1857 Moyano law on public education, though the state achieved little in the construction of a public school system.

Thus the Moderate regime in the generation after 1843 managed to establish the legal and institutional framework of a modern, centralized, parliamentary state in Spain. It did not rest upon a social basis sufficient to sustain it, nor could it achieve a viable political structure, but it laid the basis of modern national Spanish administration.

A new social oligarchy quickly emerged under the Moderates, a fusion of some of the old aristocracy and a new monied elite of middle class background. Ten new grande titles and fifty-three lesser titles were created between 1845 and 1850; this was six times as many as had been created between 1835 and 1840 and more than Fernando VII had granted between 1815 and 1820.

The chief theoretician of the Moderate regime was the Extremaduran noble Juan Donoso Cortés, who endeavored to provide a philosophical basis for oligarchic liberalism by stressing the moral authority of a properly constituted society and government. This, he said, should be based on the claims of superior intelligence and of religion. The rights and legitimacy of government so constituted became overriding, and Donoso Cortés urged no hesitation in converting that government into temporary dictatorship if necessary to meet the threat of subversive revolution.

The queen, Isabel, was thirteen years of age when Espartero was overthrown and had been in no position to exercise personal initiative in the establishment of the Moderate (subsequently Isabeline) regime, whose constitution devolved such weighty responsibilities upon her. Good-natured, poorly educated, alternately frivolous and pious, she was of only average intelligence and completely lacked the discipline, constancy, and understanding required of a constitutional monarch. Her marriage in 1846 at the age of sixteen was a disaster; the new consort, Francisco de Asís, a conservative Spanish aristocrat and cousin of the queen, was pious, effeminate, given to intrigue, and probably sexually impotent. The match had been arranged to harmo-[457]nize with French diplomatic interests, since the French government supported the Moderates while England inclined toward the Progressives. The French vetoed a German prince, and a domestic marriage seemed the best compromise. Isabel's younger sister was wed at the same time to a younger son of the French constitutional monarch, Louis Philippe. The sensuous queen, her consort proving a hopeless husband, drifted away into a series of scandalous liaisons that resulted in seven (probably all illegitimate) children. As the years passed, the queen's political relations and favor became increasingly capricious, so that she compounded, rather than neutralized, the factionalism of the Moderates.

The Moderates were divided into three main factions: 1) the official or government Moderates, who clung to the court and government power and became increasingly arbitrary in political practice; 2) the puritanos, who held to "pure" constitutionalism, urged broader civil guarantees including the right to jury trial for press offenses, and opposed the conservative influence of France as well as the French marriage of Isabel's sister; and 3) on the other extreme, the ultraconservative Moderates, who were ultra-Catholic, in some cases ex-Carlist, and stood for a hyperoligarchic form of government with strengthened royal authority.

French and British influence was very important in Spanish factional politics between 1844 and 1850, as it had been during the Carlist war. Diplomatic pressures, added to the resentment against Narváez among other Moderate factions and the court circle, were instrumental in forcing Narváez from power for the second time in April 1846. During the next eighteen months four different ministries were formed, the last two of them puritano cabinets (between March and October 1847) whose main support was the most liberal of the Moderate generals, Francisco Serrano. But the puritanos, aside from British backing, had only forty votes in parliament to back them and could not gain approval for new elections. The only alternative was Narváez. After four years in power, the Moderates had become hopelessly divided by personality, faction, as well as philosophy. The reorganization of government and administration had not yet taken hold, and the new liberal elite was too small and too divided by region and by interests, and too uncertain of its political program to govern coherently.

Narváez held power firmly during 1848-1849, years of revolution in much of the rest of Europe. He suppressed two minor revolts and ended the Carlist insurrection of 1846-1849 in Catalonia (sometimes called the Second Carlist War). The stability of Spanish government during those years of turmoil in continental Europe won the respect of the other powers and completed the rehabilitation of the Spanish [458] constitutional monarchy internationally, with recognition finally forthcoming from the crowns of central and eastern Europe. Narváez dispatched an expedition to Rome to help defend the sovereignty of the papacy in 1849.

The main elements of the Moderates and in the court circle were determined to avoid any broadening of political participation that might include the Progressives--or British influence in politics or free trade--but they also wanted to be rid of the strong personal authority of Narváez. After the danger of revolt passed in 1849, he was forced from power for the third time to make way for an ultraconservative general, the Conde de Clonard, but this roused such protest that Narváez was able to form another government within twenty days. The main period of his rule was finally ended at the beginning of 1851, not by revolt of Progressives, for they were impotent, but at the initiative of the conservative elements of the Moderates. The ultra-conservatives remained in control of government from January 1851 until overthrown by popular revolt in mid-1854.

The new prime minister was a capable civil servant and former finance minister, Antonio Bravo Murillo, who was determined to establish the institutional basis for stable elitist government. After Louis Napoleon's coup d'état in France at the end of 1851, Bravo Murillo felt strong enough to close the Cortés and rule by decree. His goals were to guarantee strong central authority, suppress popular representation, eliminate army influence in politics (which he detested), and reform the administration. He began to reorganize provincial administration and outlined a new road, canal, and railway construction program. The new constitution that he projected in 1852 would have reduced the Cortés to an advisory role and pared the electorate to a mere 7,000 citizens of wealth and status.

This was too much even for the Moderates, who feared that Bravo Murillo would return Spain to domination by crown, church, and aristocracy. Bravo was forced from power at the end of 1852, to be replaced in quick succession by several, only slightly less conservative, Moderate splinter cabinets. By that time it was clear that the Moderates as a functional alignment had completely disintegrated. During 1853 some of the puritanos began to work with the Progressives in the hope of broadening participation and civil rights. In addition to being weakened by the hopelessly narrow basis of the political system, the Isabeline regime was further undermined in the early 1850s by a series of government financial scandals involving the royal family. The first Spanish railroad concessions contained the usual lucrative financial arrangements found in other countries. Much corruption was involved, including perquisites for the queen mother and her new husband, a former army sergeant ennobled by the [459] crown. When the Cortés was presented with a new railroad regulation bill at the end of 1853, it rejected the measure in a fit of opposition, even though the new draft made some attempt to reform the system of concessions. Parliament was then closed by the government and not reopened until after the regime was overthrown. There was a temporary economic downturn in 1853-1854, compounded by the government's effort to collect new taxes in advance. By that time even the upper middle classes were turning against the corrupt and cliquish regime, which had excluded a broader leadership from power.
 

The Spanish revolution of 1854 began with the vicalvarada, a small-scale military revolt of sectors of the Madrid garrison led by several of the more liberal Moderate generals. Its limited aim, encouraged perhaps by the moderate liberal Saldanha coup in Portugal in 1851, was to force a slight broadening of the government. The vicalvarada was defeated, but was seconded by a series of risings in provincial capitals, and then by a revolt of Madrid's lower classes in July that brought four days of street fighting in the capital, the only significant Madrid revolt of the nineteenth century. The government clique was not exactly overthrown but it saw its support disintegrate. The queen found it prudent to recall Espartero from retirement in order to head a provisional government that would hold new constituent elections for constitutional reform. The elections of 1854 were conducted on the basis of an expanded suffrage that enfranchised nearly 700,000, about 5 percent of the population. Electoral participation was about 70 percent, and returned a chamber dominated by Progressives and composed primarily of landowners and lawyers. The 1854 revolt was in a sense the Spanish "1848," though its only expression of nationalism was a growing interest in Iberian union with Portugal under a dynastic marriage. Despite some popular disturbances, its general tone was quite moderate and compared with the explosions of 1835-1837 seemed to indicate civic acculturation.

The new Cortés proceeded to write a new Progressive constitution in 1855. The charter declared sovereignty to rest "essentially in the nation," broadened the sphere of civil liberty, retained the greatly reduced property qualification, but maintained the principle of elitist liberalism with a Senate restricted to the wealthy. The main thrust of the new legislation of the biennium 1854-1856 was to open up Spain more fully then ever before to business enterprise. Disentailment was carried even further; common and waste lands were placed on sale to private owners, together with the lands of the military orders, hitherto [460] exempted from the church disamortization. New corporate laws were enacted for business expansion, along with new regulations to foster banking and credit. The revolution of 1854 thus marked the breakthrough of the middle-middle and upper-middle classes.

There were three principal political factions in the new parliament: the Liberal Union, a reorganization of the more liberal Moderates under General Leopoldo O'Donnell, who had led the vicalvarada; the moderate wing of the Progressives, who were willing to cooperate with the more conservative O'Donnell; and the progresistas puros-- the "pure" or more liberal Progressives, who would not work with the Liberal Union or other remnants of the Moderates. To their left was the small Democrat Party, formed several years earlier by a left-wing split from the Progressives. The Democrats were also split between those willing to work within the legal order and radicals who preached insurrection to achieve universal male suffrage and an end to conscription and excise taxes.

The biennium 1854-1856 also marked the direct entry of the social question into Spanish politics. The urban lower classes supported the revolt actively in most of the larger towns. In general, their demands were vague and their ranks unorganized; their most precise demand was for the abolition or at least reduction of the consumos. Only in Barcelona was there a significant nucleus of organized labor. There thousands of workers joined new syndicates, and some 30,000 participated in a great demonstration in 1855 demanding "Association or Death!"--that is, full legalization of trade union activity. This the Progressive government under Espartero steadfastly refused.

The leading political groups in parliament remained firm in their monarchism and in their elitist liberalism. Internal division and the specter of popular revolt increased their uncertainty. The main danger from the left was the National Militia, an official paramilitary force first organized during the Carlist war, dissolved in 1843, then reorganized in 1854. It was made up of the urban lower-middle and lower classes, and leaned strongly toward the progresistas puros and somewhat less toward the Democrats. Even many of the Progressives became apprehensive about the danger of popular revolt, particularly after the economic downturn of 1856 and food riots in Valladolid and other towns. The only real leader the Progressives had was Espartero, but he refused to lead, crippled by memories of how a combination of "advanced" policies and personal rule had united the center and right of the political spectrum against him in 1843.

Amid the growing tension of 1856, O'Donnell seized the initiative by getting the queen's backing for a new cabinet. The O'Donnell government was nonparliamentary, for Espartero and the Progressivist factions retained their parliamentary majority, but most of the [461] moderate Progressives were not disposed to resist. The only real conflict in Madrid was with the National Militia, put down after several days fighting. This was paralleled by struggle in other cities, particularly Barcelona, where 400 were killed before the army imposed control.
 

O'Donnell offered the only hope for the system by attempting reconciliation rather than exclusion, by offering an authentic compromise and an attempt at "pure" constitutionalism. Hence after the victory in 1856 and derogation of the new constitution, he realized that he could not merely return to that of 1845, and he passed an "Additional Act" to install an elective senate and jury trials for press offenses, two longstanding Progressive demands, reminiscent of Saldanha's Acto Adicional of 1852 in Portugal. This was unacceptable to the ultraconservative remnants of the Moderates and the neoclericals of the court circle, who also wished to reverse terms of the economic and political settlement with the church.

Within a few months Narváez returned to power; he derogated the Additional Act, stifled the opposition press, and repressed several bloody riots by Democrats in provincial capitals. Yet the experience of this ministry, like that of Narváez's final cabinet nine years later, showed that even an ultraconservative and semi-authoritarian government was impossible under the Isabeline regime, for lack of a unified, systematized base of ultraconservative support. Without social backing, it had to rely on the army and the court circle, but both of these were congeries of factions, and the queen was capricious and personalistic. Only an absolute puppet would have retained the support of the court circle, yet the degree of political mobilization in the country was such that stronger leadership was needed even to manage a fake parliamentary system. Narváez was Isabel's only real strong man but had the temperament of a manic depressive; he resigned over the most trivial of issues--royal insistence on promotion of a military favorite.

Hence after two more temporary cabinets the crown had to revert to O'Donnell's attempted compromise. The resulting "long ministry" of O'Donnell (June 1858-February 1863) was the most successful in the history of Spanish liberalism to that date, yet it too ended in failure. O'Donnell had formed the Liberal Union from a coalition of puritano (and some formerly "official") Moderates and moderate Progressives. Under his government the Cortés was kept open much of the time. Though elections were managed by the minister of the [462] interior, Posada Herrera, this was done with discretion, allowing a minority of both radical Progressives and ultra-Moderates to win seats in congress. Gross fiscal irregularities were avoided and relative freedom of the press maintained. O'Donnell hoped to achieve workable consensus through compromise and also through economic development, which would reconcile broader groups with the system. He governed during the height of railway expansion and the economic boom of the 1850s. His government stressed road-building--a prime national need--coastal installations, and development of the navy. It compromised over the final reduction of church properties, but incurred clerical wrath by proposing recognition of the new united (and anticlerical) kingdom of Italy.

O'Donnell also placed emphasis on an aggressive foreign policy and on refurbishing Spain's image abroad, hoping to encourage national unity. Spanish Filipino troops participated in the French conquest of Cochin China (southern Vietnam) beginning in 1858, and Spanish forces formed part of the international expedition to collect debts from Mexico in 1861. The Spanish navy was active off the coast of South America and ultimately involved in the minor naval "War of  the Pacific" off the Peruvian coast in 1865 and the temporary "reannexation" of Santo Domingo. The grandest moment for O'Donnell's policy was the Hispano-Moroccan war of 1859-1860 which grew out of a minor border incident at Ceuta and resulted in a complete, if discreetly limited, Spanish victory--the only clear-cut victory for Spanish arms against a foreign foe in the nineteenth century.

O'Donnell's government failed because its sources of support were too heterogeneous to remain unified and because it was ultimately subjected to strong pressure from both left and right. The fulcrum was too weak to hold the weight; some of the leaders of the puritano elements refused to back O'Donnell's priorities, and after two or three years, personal differences became extreme. The court circle detested the Liberal Union, and the radical Progressives were unrelenting in their assaults, using press freedom to hasten destruction of the only  effective government that had upheld press freedom. The royalist right emphasized pure privilege and the radical left pure doctrine;  O'Donnell was ground between the upper and nether millstones.
 

In 1863-1864 a new prime minister, the Marqués de Miraflores, went through the motions of establishing a two-party compromise, but the ground had already cracked beneath him. If pure constitutionalism would not be permitted under O'Donnell, it would not function under [463] a personal government. Narváez returned briefly in 1864-1865 but could offer only a holding action.

A parliamentary system cannot operate on the basis of a single party. This was the final weakness of O'Donnell's program. Unable to elicit a loyal opposition, he tried to unite all the main factions, but the coalition was too unwieldy and it splintered. In this sense the responsibility for the collapse of the Isabeline regime belonged to Isabel and the palace crowd. The parliamentary monarchy would never work unless the parliaments were allowed to represent most of the responsible interests in the country. The moderate Progressives had fully demonstrated their loyalty to the crown in 1854, but that had made next to no impression. So long as more than half of Spanish liberalism was permanently excluded from direct political power, there was no hope for more than a return to Fernandine despotism. Even the upper classes would not accept that; hence the absolute futility of the regime's policy in the 1860s.

By 1865 the die was cast. O'Donnell's last government came too late, for almost none of the Progressives were willing to go along with the government game. O'Donnell proposed once more a program of pure constitutionalism. He reestablished press freedom, carried through recognition of the new anticlerical Italian state, and reformed the electoral law, reducing by half the property qualification and extending the electorate to a total of approximately 420,000. This had no effect; it was met by the Madrid artillery sergeants' mutiny of San Gil in June 1866, the most subversive military movement in thirty years, for the officer-conspirators lost control of the movement and it became a rising of noncommisioned officers. The revolt was harshly suppressed and forty sergeants were shot.

Narváez then returned for the seventh and last time. As in 1864, he made brief conciliatory gestures, indicating willingness to work with a loyal opposition, but his reluctance to take broadly generous measures and the doctrinaire hostility of the left frustrated such intentions. He governed for a year and a half until his death in April 1868, O'Donnell dying in exile a few months before him. Narváez was the last leader capable of governing within the system, and his demise was followed by a form of political dictatorship under Luis González Brabo, who manipulated a handpicked parliament.
 
 

General disgust with the arbitrary government of the Isabeline regime might not have come to a head when it did, despite the death of Narváez, had it not been for the economic depression of 1866-1868. [464] This brought a collapse of the Barcelona banking system, a major trade decline, and severe budgetary problems. Gonzalez Brabo was forced to cut spending, including the new naval program, and raise taxes. There was already much unemployment by 1867, and the highest wheat prices of the century, bringing new stirrings among the lower classes.

Successive minor military revolts had failed since 1864, but a victorious one was made possible by the union of the center and left opposition between 1866 and 1868. First the Progressives and Democrats made a pact in exile, then the more liberal of the Unionists joined them after the final crackdown by Gonzalez Brabo. Their sole agreement was to depose a futile queen and let the structure of the new regime be determined by a constituent parliament based on universal male suffrage. The resulting revolt of September 1868 was the only one in which the navy played a significant role. Only a portion of the army actually defended the crown. After a pitched battle near Cordoba, the rebels victoriously entered Madrid, having accomplished Spain's "glorious" democratic revolt of the nineteenth century.

The leader of this first effort to establish a representative monarchy was Don Juan Prim, chief military hero of the Moroccan war, head of the Progressive party and the most popular public figure of his generation. Prim was the outstanding figure of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism. The most tenacious, and the most skillful, of the military rebels of the age of pronunciamientos, he had by far the most public appeal and the greatest political talent and insight. Only Prim possessed the peculiar combination of firmness, vision, and political tact to lead a serious effort at implanting functional democratic constitutional monarchy.

In deference to rank and unity, the head of the provisional government was General Francisco Serrano, leader of the Liberal Unionists. Prim became prime minister only in 1869 after the new constitution was drawn up. Elections were held at the end of 1868 on the basis of universal suffrage for all males twenty-five years of age or over, swelling the suffrage lists at one fell swoop from the 418,000 voters of 1865 to more than 3,800,000 and making Spain for the second time in the century the country with the most democratic suffrage in the world. The elections were conducted with comparative freedom and order. Approximately 70 percent of the voters participated, producing a parliament of 130 Progressives, 90 Unionists, 70 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and 17 Carlists.

The constitution of 1869 established universal male suffrage, retained the monarchist form of government, granted the crown a [465] suspensive veto and the right to dissolve parliament, created a bicameral legislature, retained official recognition of Catholicism as the religion of Spain and state support of the church, but for the first time in modern Spanish history guaranteed a vague toleration of other religions in public worship. Its preamble was based on that of the American constitution and it established a broad and comprehensive framework of civil liberties, including freedom of association (bringing the right to form trade unions) for the first time in Spanish history. Provincial assemblies and municipal councils were made elective, though they divided local government power with appointive provincial civil governors. It was a model document and, save for its silence on the issue of Cuban slavery, one of the two or three most advanced in the world at that time.
 
 

Overthrow of the Isabeline regime was followed within one month by a major revolt in Cuba, the principal remaining Spanish colony in America. Cuba had been extremely quiet during the generation of Spanish American independence struggles before 1825. At that time it lacked a strong autonomous creole class, and the existence of a slave society discouraged radical political ideas among the local elite. Rise of sugar and tobacco production during the nineteenth century made the island much more important economically than it had ever been before, and gave it a leading place in Spanish commerce and in the tax system. By the 1860s there had developed considerable support in Cuba for reform, looking toward some type of autonomy and relief from Spanish tariffs. Negotiations on the latter issue had however been broken off in 1867, and taxes were raised.

The revolt that began in backward, semi-isolated southeast Cuba in October 1868 drew only scattered support in the island, in the main from a few middle class rebels, some poor peasants (guajiros), and numbers of runaway slaves. Prim was inclined to be conciliatory and would have favored tax relief and some form of partial autonomy, but the government's hand was forced by conservative landowning, slave-holding interests in Cuba. There had been considerable Spanish emigration to Cuba the generation before, and the immigrants were the basis for a large españolista sector in the Cuban towns that opposed concessions. The government embarked on a policy of military repression but found it almost impossible to come to grips with irregular forces in the mountainous and tangled countryside.
 

The new regime immediately began to fall prey to the same divisions that had ruined the Progressivist biennium of 1854-1856. During the 1860s there had developed to the left of the Democrats a Republican movement that opposed any form of monarchy and advocated extreme federalism, complete political democracy, and the broadest possible civil liberties. The Federal Republicans collaborated with Progressives and Unionists only in order to overthrow Isabel II, and then launched a direct political assault on the elective monarchy, even though the elections of 1868 were generally fair and some form of monarchy was the political preference of the great majority of Spaniards. The Federal Republicans emphasized anticlericalism, which was winning popularity among a certain section of the lower middle classes, and they advocated civilianism and were the first liberal party to reject appeals to military leaders for support. Opposition to the draft was one of their most popular planks among the lower classes in the cities. Their other great appeal was the demand to reduce or abolish the consumos. The principal following of the Federal Republicans was among the lower middle classes, and to some ; extent the lower classes, of the provincial towns of southern and eastern Spain. Their organizational infrastructure was built from the unemployed or semi-employed local intelligentsia eager for positions in local government.

Prim had hoped to be able to reduce the military draft, but the Cuban revolt made that impossible. The government had to face two major Republican revolts in 1869. One was occasioned by the decision to disband the newly formed popular militia, the Volunteers of Liberty, which had been granted a kind of political dole for its unemployed members. The second took the form of an organized Republican insurrection at the end of 1869 after the new monarchist constitution had been completed. The rebellion was strongest in Valencia and Zaragoza, but was suppressed by the army. Meanwhile, civic order was undermined further by the revival of large-scale banditry in the southern provinces.

By 1870 Prim had lost popularity with both the left and right. His main concern was to choose a new candidate for the throne who would make an effective constitutional monarch and provide political balance. Two of the leading candidates were Isabel's brother-in-law, the French Due de Montpensier, and Don Amadeo, a younger son of the reigning Italian House of Savoy. Montpensier was supported by conservatives, while D. Amadeo was the candidate of anticlerical liberals. Prim was seeking a compromise center liberal candidate, and thought he had found one in a younger son of a collateral branch of [467] the Hohenzollern dynasty. But before a secret Cortés election could be arranged, an administrative slipup let word of the proposal leak out. This roused French fears of a German king in Spain and precipitated the Franco-Prussian war. The Hohenzollern candidacy was withdrawn, and Prim accepted the liberal Italian prince as the best alternative. Over strong opposition, Don Amadeo was elected king by a margin of only one vote. Political factionalism had reached white heat, and D. Juan Prim, the only effective liberal leader Spain had yet seen, was struck down by shotgun-wielding assassins in the heart of Madrid on December 27, 1870, and died three days later. Prim's murderers were never apprehended, perhaps because they might have implicated others. The main evidence points to Republican radicals, possibly encouraged or assisted by conservative elements in an unholy alliance to be rid of the centrist Progressive leader.

The arrival of the new constitutional monarch coincided with the death of Prim. In 1871 Don Amadeo's government was supported by three main groups: the Unionists, henceforth called Conservatives, of Serrano, the Progressives, and the cimbrio, or moderate faction of the Democrats (the radical Democrats having gone over to the Republicans). The elections of 1871 were, like the preceding ones, comparatively honest and free of government pressure, returning a majority for the democratic monarchist coalition. Don Amadeo's first cabinet, led by Serrano, lasted only a little over six months, then succumbed to factionalism. Meanwhile the Progressives had split in two. The more practical and moderate followed Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, who favored continued collaboration with the Conservatives. The more doctrinaire and extreme under Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla formed a new Radical party, joined by the cimbrio Democrats. Ruiz Zorrilla gained the confidence of the crown and formed the next cabinet, but could not obtain parliamentary support and had to adjourn the Cortés. When it reopened three months later his government was brought down and was replaced by a new ministry under Sagasta,

The Sagasta cabinet rested to a considerable degree on the Conservatives and stood for a moderate, evolutionary policy of democratic constitutional monarchy. The Radicals insisted that Conservative influence could not be tolerated and that all proclerical elements must be excluded from government. New elections were held early in 1872 to try to find a more workable majority. The Sagasta ministry used a great deal of government pressure in certain provinces and was accused of creating lázaros (reviving the dead in order to use their names for false ballots). The Conservatives and sagastinos (or Constitutionalists) held a majority in the new Cortés, but revelation of the use of a two-million-peseta fund for unexplained political purposes, together with the Radicals' adoption of the tactic of retraimiento [468] (withdrawal from parliament), forced the Sagasta ministry from power in May 1872. Serrano then formed a new government based on the nominal parliamentary majority but, faced by Carlist insurrection and left-wing disorders, insisted on the need to suspend constitutional guarantees temporarily.

Don Amadeo, a scrupulously conscientious constitutional ruler, refused this and granted his confidence to Ruiz Zorrilla, who returned to power and quickly held new elections. These were conducted fairly and honestly, but all the conservative elements abstained because the first Cortés of 1872 had been dissolved before completing the minimum four months specified by the constitution. The result was 54 percent abstention in the balloting of August 1872--the largest abstention yet in Spanish electoral history--and an overwhelming victory for the Radicals. They received 70 percent of the votes cast (though their share was only 32 percent of the nominal electorate) and a correspondingly heavy majority of the seats in the second Cortés of 1872.

Yet the Radicals' complete control of the new parliament was merely the prelude to their own downfall and that of the constitutional monarchy. They carried out a number of notable reforms, severely restricting the budget of the church and abolishing slavery in Puerto Rico, but the absence of any cooperation with moderates and conservatives left the government a prey to extremes. A major Carlist rebellion flared in the north, and the Federal Republicans came out briefly in revolt at El Ferrol. The final crisis of the regime developed after General Hidalgo de Quintana was named captain-general of the Basque region, center of the Carlist rising. Quintana had participated in the mutinous artillery rebellion in 1866, and appointment of a liberal officer with this background led to mass resignations by his former comrades of the artillery corps, whose standards he had betrayed. The conscientious Italian king found himself snubbed and hated by aristocratic society, beset by crippling political factionalism, harassed by Radicals and Republicans, faced with a continuing revolt in Cuba and a Carlist civil war in Spain, and then finally frustrated by the disobedience of the army and a military impasse after Ruiz Zorrilla made the decision to dissolve the artillery corps. Don Amadeo abdicated his seemingly hopeless Spanish throne in February 1873.

This crisis reopened the question of the regime. The Republicans; were themselves split between benévolos, still willing to cooperate with the Radicals (who were still nominally monarchist), and the intransigentes, who insisted on the immediate establishment of a republic even if armed revolt were necessary to accomplish it. That was not required, for Ruiz Zorrilla was now discredited, leaving the [469] Radicals without a leader. After his resignation, dexterous maneuvering by a minority of pro-Republican Radicals and the benévolos resulted in a Cortés vote to immediately establish a parliamentary republic.
 
 

The establishment of the Republic resulted from a flaunting of the democratic constitution, abstention by the conservatives, and the precipitous abdication of D. Amadeo. New elections were held by the Republican government in May 1873. These were the fourth in slightly more than two years, and amid general public alienation, only 40 percent of the electorate, perhaps the smallest proportion in all Spanish history, participated. Since even most of the Radicals abstained, the result was an all-Republican assembly. Yet the nominal Republican monopoly did not mean unity of spirit or purpose, for as Benito Perez Galdos later wrote,

the composition of the new chamber was astonishingly divided. The right was formed by various castes of benévolos; the left by intransigentes split into heterogeneous groups: federalists, pactists, organicists, simple autonomists or decentralizers, procollectivist federalists, and others who were motivated by the most extravagant ideas. The center was a rainbow composed of all the colors of the solar spectrum of republicanism. ⁽¹⁾

[470] Government in Spain seemed to dissolve during the summer and autumn of 1873, while the Carlist threat gathered momentum in the Basque country. Three Republican presidents resigned within four months before Emilio Castelar assumed power in September 1873. The most moderate of the Republican leaders, he was essentially a constitutional democrat who had little faith in the Federalist norms. Castelar suspended constitutional guarantees and restored authority to the army, which then without delay put down most of the local revolts. Only the "canton" of Cartagena, which operated its own pirate navy in the west Mediterranean, held out a little longer. But the Federalists were infuriated with Castelar for using government and military authority to repress rebellion, and voted him out of office at the beginning of January 1874.
 

At that point the captain general of Madrid intervened and closed down parliament. A coalition "national government" was formed which declared a unitary (i.e., centralized, nonfederal) Republic, but it developed into a veiled Conservative Republican military dictatorship under Serrano. By the end of 1874 Spain had reached the point of political exhaustion. Serrano's unitary Republic, without a stable base, had no future. At the end of 1874 it was overthrown by a military revolt aimed at the return of constitutional monarchy under the legitimist heir, the twenty-year-old D. Alfonso, son of Isabel II. The political wheel had turned full circle, but the new leader of the moderate constitutional monarchists, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, had made careful plans to give the restored monarchy a broader base than that of the defunct Isabeline regime.
 

Carlism, which had never died in the foral regions and hill country of the northeast, was revived by the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, by anticlerical excesses in some parts of the country during 1869, and by the 1869 constitution that granted religious freedom, civil marriage, and termination of Catholic moral control of public education. For three years the new Carlist revolt sputtered and was nearly extinguished, but the exclusion of Carlist candidates by Sagasta from the first elections of 1872 sparked a second revolt, which also ended in failure.

The real opportunity for a Carlist resurgence was provided by the [471] advent of an anticlerical republic which proposed separation of church and state and in many places was accompanied by assaults on church people and property. The revolt gathered momentum during 1873, and by the beginning of 1874 the Carlists had organized a local government in the Basque country and Navarre which collected taxes and operated a postal system. The current pretender, D. Carlos "VII," was the most dynamic and attractive leader that the dynasty produced, and took personal command in the field. Moreover, Carlism began to develop a coherent ideology, based on advocacy of a corporative form of Cortés organization and a degree of administrative decentralization, on behalf of the foral regions that supported the movement. It received some new blood near the top by the adherence of conservative Catholic elements and remnants of ultraconservative Moderates who had backed Isabel II.

By the 1870s, however, Carlism seemed too anachronistic even for most Spanish conservatives. The movement rallied almost no support outside of the northeast. Its only organized base was Navarre and the Basque country, and in most of rural Catalonia it was limited to local guerrilla bands. Though the Carlist field regiments won several impressive victories over the regular Spanish army in 1873-1874, the Carlists could not develop a truly national movement as they had seemed on the verge of doing in the 1830s. Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy deprived them of much potential conservative support, and their military nucleus in the Basque country was worn down steadily throughout 1875-1876. The localized revolt in southeastern Cuba suffered the same process of attrition two years later, bringing to an end the long, slow Ten Years' War (1868-1878) in the sugar island.
 

The first half-century and more of Spanish liberalism was a period of repeated frustration. In a broad sense, persistent political breakdown can be explained by the extreme dissidence among the Spanish elite, unable to achieve a functional consensus on political structure. More concretely, a number of factors should be kept in mind when trying to account for the failures of the nineteenth century:

1. The precipitation of liberal political structure in Spain. Liberal leadership seized the initiative to introduce advanced, protodemocratic systems in Spain on various occasions (1812, 1820, 1836-1837, 1854, 1868-1869) when Spanish culture and society had not even achieved the level of other societies still functioning under more [472] restrictive systems. In no other west European country were such advanced forms introduced at such relatively early stages of social and cultural development.

2. The low caliber of Spanish monarchs throughout most of this period. It is almost impossible to make constitutional monarchy work without a constitutional monarch. Fernando VII did everything within his power to frustrate political change. His daughter Isabel II was only slightly better, more often than not subverting the representative process. By contrast, D. Amadeo was a model constitutional ruler, but labored under abnormally severe handicaps.

3. The chronological lag in carrying out the disamortizing agrarian property revolution, compared with the northwest European countries and France. A difficult phase of socio-economic and institutional development was thus added to the difficulty of introducing parliamentary government.

4. The extent and nature of middle-class liberalism. Not only were the Spanish middle classes proportionately smaller than those of France and northwest Europe, but they were less active, less educated, and showed less initiative and motivation overall. The proportion of those who were really effective was thus even smaller.

5. The weakness of the economic base of middle class reformism. Not only was industrialization barely beginning, but the technological renovation of agriculture, begun in the most advanced countries in the eighteenth century, had in Spain started only in Catalonia.

6. The persistence of regionalism in Spain. Whereas regionalism had been largely overcome in France by the end of the eighteenth century and in Britain before that, it continued in Spain, a country with natural barriers, poor transportation, and an economic and cultural lag.

7. The increasing geographic imbalance in Spanish economic, social, and cultural development. Spain's development continued to be concentrated along the peripheries, and provided relatively scant stimulus to national integration.

8. The failure to achieve a modus vivendi with the church, a failure for which the religious and the anticlerical were about equally responsible. Though liberal churchmen helped take the lead in introducing liberalism, they were not supported by most of the church, which swung over to a strongly antiliberal position after assaults by anticlerical radicals. The church refused to concede complete freedom of worship until 1869, and often rendered compromise difficult.

9. Destructive effects of the radical intelligentsia, cesantes (ex-officeholders), and hangers-on in the provincial capitals, who persisted in demanding unrealistic changes and, rejecting orderly constitutionalism, never hesitated to call out the mob to serve their ends. They [473] persistently subverted parliamentary liberalism, from the exaltados of the first triennium, through the progresistas puros, to the absurdities of Federal Republicanism.

10. The failure to develop education and other acculturative facilities more rapidly. Though the Moderates made progress in this regard, it did not compare favorably with other countries at similar stages.

11. The continued burden of empire, which added to the problems of the democratic monarchy, making it more difficult to conciliate radical opinion.
 
 

The liberal regime in Spain was not based primarily on an expanding commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, as in northwestern Europe, but on a new upper-middle-class oligarchy of large landowners. As late as the 1870s there was very little in the way of a genuine Spanish bourgeoisie of the entrepreneurial, industrial variety. Those elements that did exist were confined to Catalonia and a few other peripheral regions and they largely avoided politics.

In general, the mercantile classes of the coastal cities were more inclined toward progressivism than were financiers and industrialists. This more liberal sector of the middle-middle and upper-middle classes was particularly enthusiastic about the revolt of 1854, but twenty years later, after the excesses of 1869-1874, they had become more conservative. The politically active elite under the Isabeline regime consisted mainly of the court circle, the army leaders and the front rank of parliamentary politicians, a select group of Madrid bureaucrats, and the large landowners.

Opportunity for participation in the electoral process varied greatly with the political changes of these decades, as indicated by the variations in the suffrage shown in table 5. Before 1845, the Spanish suffrage was distinctly more liberal than that of France under the July Monarchy, and much more so than was conceivable for any other country at Spain's stage of development. Under the Moderates, the suffrage was cut back sharply. By the early 1860s Spain had the most restricted suffrage in western Europe. O'Donnell's reform in 1865 raised it only a hair's breadth above Italy and Belgium, where 2.3 and 2.1 percent of the population, respectively, were enfranchised.

The Spanish electorate of the nineteenth century was basically an electorate of large landowners. Between 1836 and 1867 landowners made up between 84 and 95 percent of all voters. The urban middle classes not only enjoyed less representation, they also participated less regularly in politics. The level of participation among the enfranchised elite was lower in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the other three Catalan provinces than nationally; the highest degree of involvement was found in the Andalusian provinces and in some of the other rural provinces of central and northern Spain. The pattern changed during the Progressivist biennium of 1854-1856, but after its failure the urban elite tended to withdraw from politics once more.

Under the Isabeline regime, about 5 percent of those on the suffrage lists were capacidades--intellectuals and professional men lacking the financial qualifications to vote but deemed worthy because of their education or training. O'Donnell increased this proportion to nearly 15 percent. Yet the capacidades always had a higher abstention rate than the contribuyentes, indicating either an aversion to politics or a more specific disgust with the Isabeline regime.

An average of about 5 percent of the population were eligible to vote for municipal councilmen--twice as many as could vote in national elections--but in the years 1860-1866 voter participation averaged only 43 percent. This may have been due to a general feeling that no matter what, local affairs would be managed by the minister of the interior and his appointees as provincial jefes políticos and mayors, in conjunction with the chief established local politicians or caciques.
 

Population increase was rapid during the middle decades of the nineteenth century:
 

1833	12,286,000
1860	15,645,000
1877	16,622,000

This increase of slightly more than one-third in forty-five years was the most rapid in Spanish history up to that time, both proportionately and absolutely. During the first half of the century Spain's population growth was 10 percent greater than the European average. Before 1860 there was little emigration, for the traditional outlets in Spanish America seemed less attractive during the first two generations after independence. Toward the end of this period, however, there was noticeable Andalusian emigration to French Algeria. The last major afflictions of severe hunger that could be blamed on poor credit and food transportation occurred in 1857 and 1867-1868, and the last major epidemics, in the form of cholera, ravaged the country in 1833-1835, 1853-1856, and in 1865, when 237,000 died within six months. Though the marriage rate in Spanish society was not particularly high, the birth rate in the 1860s was approximately 39 per 1,000, one of the highest in Europe, and fell very little during the latter part of the century. In 1910 it stood at 33. Only in Catalonia was there a significant diminution of the birth rate; there it fell to 27 at the end of the century and continued to drop. The highest birth rate was in the Canaries.

After 1860, however, Spain fell considerably behind the general European rate of population expansion, in part because of a failure to reduce mortality. General hygienic conditions in Spain remained rather poor. As late as 1900 the death rate stood at 30, compared with a central and west European average of 18.

The pattern of distribution of population set in the eighteenth century continued. Catalonia's percentage of Spain's total had been 8.1 in 1797, rising to 10.5 by 1857 (and later stood at 11.6 in 1950). The populations of most of the other peripheral areas remained proportionately about the same. The major losers were Aragón, Navarre, and León-Old Castile. Over a 150-year period, Old Castile's share of the Spanish population declined from 9 percent in 1800 to 5.8 percent in 1950.

The first reasonably accurate census to divide Spanish society into social and economic categories was taken in 1860 and showed the following numbers for occupational categories: [476]
 

Rural laborers	2,354,000
Landowners of all categories	1,466,000
Servants (male and female)	818,000
Artisans	665,000
Small businessmen (20 percent of them women)	333,000
Factory workers (1/3 of them women)	150,000
Middle class professional men	100,000
White collar employees	70,000
Clergy	63,000
Factory owners (including small producers)	13,000
Miners	23,000

At the beginning of the century, the lower classes in the towns and cities were mainly artisans and servants. Only in Barcelona did an industrial working class begin to take shape, and even then a direct breakthrough into political life was made only partially during the democratic quinquennium of 1869-1874. The urban lower classes were not, however, completely inactive in public affairs, for mobs were persistently aroused by exaltados and Progressives, Democrats and Federalists, from 1820 on. Yet the lower classes were only sporadically mobilized and then mostly for middle-class goals: constitutional liberalization and broadening of the suffrage. Before 1873 their only class interests were opposition to the draft and consumos, and in Barcelona, the struggle for freedom of organization. Random urban violence can be traced to some extent to the existence of a significant stratum of underemployed lumpen, unskilled or unemployable ex-peasants, not integrated into the urban economy and society and never mobilized for systematic political action.
 

The principal economic change in Spain during the middle years of the nineteenth century was the disamortization. Sale of church lands had begun under Carlos IV in 1798, but the main period of sales was 1836-1845. By 1845 58 percent of church lands had been sold, and most of the remainder were disposed of in the two decades that followed. The sale of common lands and the territories of the orders, which began in 1855, was carried on rapidly during the next decade but continued until the end of the century. Whereas nearly all church lands were turned over to private ownership, a large minority of common and municipal lands were retained by the local institutions. Church land placed on the market amounted altogether to at least 20 percent of the arable land in Spain, to which the common lands added at least 5 percent, plus a sizable amount of waste and forest [477] land. Thus in the space of two generations, some four million hectares of land were placed on the market, and their new owners broadened the base of the landowning oligarchy of southern, central, and northwest Spain, helping to form the new interest group that served as the main fulcrum of Spanish politics for the remainder of the century.

In many parts of León and Old Castile the commons were retained and in some districts were still as much as two-thirds of the land. In Galicia and Catalonia commons had never been important, but their sales were felt keenly in much of the center and south and in Aragón, ruining peasants who were living a marginal existence and had been partly sustained by their use. Loss of these lands also greatly reduced local government resources for education and social services. Whereas disentailment and transfer of church lands might in the abstract--disregarding the way it was done and the manner of establishing new title--be considered socially and economically progressive, the effect of the sale of common lands in regions where such losses were most severe was to strip society of its framework in the very areas where its structure was weakest. In much of the north and center, however, reaching as far south as parts of La Mancha, the post-1855 disamortization of common and corporate lands, like the earlier sale of church lands, was of broader benefit to medium- and smallholders. In those areas it also provided greater opportunity for stable family-rental farms. Almost all the new land in Navarre, for example, went to the peasantry, so that there, liberal land legislation reinforced the balance and stability of a traditional, antiliberal peasant society. Meanwhile in many regions the land of smallholders was being steadily subdivided into ever smaller units, for the new nineteenth-century Spanish civil code, like that of France, encouraged equal subdivision among heirs.

Between 1800 and 1860 the area under cultivation in Spain increased greatly, from 8,500,000 to 13,000,000 hectares. Whereas less than 3,000,000 hectares of grain were cultivated at the beginning of the century, more than 5,000,000 were sown in 1860. This extension was prompted in part by the rapid growth of population, as during the preceding century, but was also due to the large acquisitions of land by semibourgeois proprietors, eager to put their new property to market use by cultivating the more marginal strips of soil. Since most of the new land sown was of inferior quality, the introduction of a few modest improvements in farming technique did not prevent the average productivity of grain per hectare from declining approximately 10 percent during the first half of the nineteenth century. Prices also declined somewhat because of the increase in absolute volume of production. Increased output made it possible for Spain to export grain in twenty-five of the thirty-two years between 1849 and 1881. A [478] change occurred after about 1860, when more and more marginal land was retired. Between 1860 and 1880 approximately 1,500,000 hectares were taken out of wheat cultivation, but this period also saw more important improvements in technique. Consequently productivity rose somewhat, as for other reasons did prices.

There was a great increase in Spanish vineyards during the nineteenth century; the area devoted to grapes expanded from 400,000 hectares in 1800 to nearly 1,500,000 hectares by 1900. Moreover between 1800 and 1860, productivity per hectare doubled. Overall, Spanish grape and wine production increased six and a half fold during the course of the nineteenth century.

The only really important industrial development during the mid-century period was the expansion of Catalan textile production, particularly in cottons, which carried out the conversion to steam power after 1845. A fourfold increase in Catalan cotton goods output took place during the ten years 1839-1849. Production of woolens increased considerably in the 1850s. Henceforth Catalan industrialists would be among the wealthiest, though not necessarily among the most politically influential, people in Spain.

Corporate investment and concentration of industrial capital first began to reach notable dimensions after the Spanish company acts of 1848 and 1856 simplified procedures and established limited liability. Corporate investment inside Spain tripled between 1857 and 1865. The concentration of capital in the Catalan textile industry reduced the number of producing firms from 4,500 in 1850 to 3,600 in 1860.

The mining industry also began to develop from mid-century, mostly on the basis of concessions to foreign enterprise, since the initiative, skill, and capital for modern mining was lacking in Spain. The chief fields were copper at the Río Tinto mines in Andalusia, zinc in Asturias, and lead in Cartagena. Only the iron ore of Vizcaya and the nascent coal mines of Asturias remained largely under domestic control.

One of the main achievements of the Isabeline period was construction of a national transportation system. Railroad contracts were a major object of politico-financial manipulation in Madrid, and the key period of development was the five years 1855-1860. For the next decade and after, Spain achieved one of the highest per capita rates of railroad construction in the world. By 1868 5,000 kilometers of track had been laid. The basic road network expanded from 9,500 to 18,000 kilometers under the Isabeline regime (and doubled again during the remainder of the century, reaching 41,500 kilometers by 1908). It was also improved slightly in quality and a considerable number of durable stone bridges were built, but many of the existing roads were so poor and geographical barriers so formidable that parts of the country were still left poorly connected.
 

The basic barriers of distance and terrain that have always hampered communication in the peninsula made railroad development more difficult and expensive than in most countries. The railroads could not stimulate an almost nonexistent modern metallurgy; nearly all rails had to be imported. Despite low labor and operating costs, it long proved difficult to move traffic and passengers at a profit: there was not enough of either to move, and distances between major centers were great.

Railroad building could have a broad stimulative effect only when it was part of a general pattern of complementary development in several key sectors of the economy. This was not the case in Spain, even though the period 1854-1866 was one of modestly sustained growth. Investment in Spanish industry suddenly dropped off after [480] 1857, despite the fact that sales and profits in the stronger enterprises remained rather high. The reasons for this may be in part an entrepreneurial mystery, but alternative investments probably had much to do with it. Nearly 40 percent of the capital for railway construction was raised in Spain, and this presumably diverted investment from other industries. The economic structure was still too weak to provide the complementary factors of development necessary to sustain major growth. Heavy investment in one area alone thus achieved relatively little in the short run.

The two leading fields of Spanish investment were neither industry nor railroads but land and the government debt. The state budget increased 70 percent between 1855 and 1860 and doubled during the decade 1856-1865. The main item was a huge increase in military expenditures to support O'Donnell's neo-imperialist foreign policy. The outlay on the army and navy increased more than 115 percent between 1857 and 1860. State subsidies to railroads came a very poor second to the military. Interest payments on the national debt rose from 89,000,000 pesetas in 1860 to 328,000,000 in 1870. To make matters worse, the disorder of public finance, coupled with the government's tendency to default on foreign bonds, resulted in the closing of the London (1851) and Paris (1861) stock exchanges to standard long-term Spanish loans.

The main source of foreign capital throughout this period was France, 35 percent of whose mid-nineteenth-century foreign investment went to Spain. French interests were particularly important in mining, railroads, the founding of new joint-stock corporations (save in Catalonia), and funding the national debt through short-term loans at steep interest rates. French engineers and skilled workmen played a major role in developing railroads and mining.

Indeed, the Isabeline regime rather than the eighteenth century was probably the high point of afrancesamiento in Spain. French political and economic ideas accompanied the intensified aping of French styles and culture and a snobbish disdain among many upper-class Spaniards for Spanish styles, mores, and even physical appearance. The attitude of the Isabeline elite, like that of France under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, was that economic development was inconsonant with full political liberty and would more than compensate for its absence.

The Bank of Spain, with a monopoly of monetary issue, was established by the Moderates in 1847/56 as an institution of private shareholders. Private banks, centered in Madrid, began to develop in the 1850s but did poorly and made little headway. The first regular Spanish stock exchange was set up at Madrid in 1831. A second was later established at Barcelona and, after 1890, a third in Bilbao. The [481] first full-scale modern stock-market crash was that at Barcelona in 1866, caused by overspeculation and some faulty political manipulations. It marked the beginning of the brief economic decline of 1866-1868.

Foreign trade increased considerably after mid-century, doubling between 1852 and 1862. It doubled again between 1870 and 1897, after which it temporarily fell off. At mid-century the Spanish merchant fleet had begun to reach respectable dimensions and showed considerable initiative in the introduction of steam-powered vessels, but after 1870 foreign competition became too severe and the fleet went into a rather sharp decline.

As a basically agrarian system, the Spanish economy remained in semicolonial status vis-a-vis foreign finance and commerce throughout the nineteenth century. Of the forty years 1860-1900 the trade balance was favorable for only eleven. The difference was made up by foreign investment, a growing national debt, money remittances from abroad by the increasing number of Spanish emigrants after 1860, and sale of part of the considerable stock of gold and silver bullion that was still in the country.

In Spain, as elsewhere, the main economic issue in politics during the nineteenth century was the tariff. The government of Fernando VII had established a fairly strong protective tariff in 1825. The Progressives under Espartero instituted a new tariff in 1841 that was much more precise as well as lower, with rates ranging from 15 to 50 percent compared with the 50 to 200 percent norms of the Fernandine tariff. Even under the Progressives, however, certain types of competing goods were excluded. The Isabeline regime was dominated by large landed interests who wanted cheap industrial goods and low reciprocal duties for their agrarian exports. Hence the 1849 tariff of the Moderates was lower, with no exclusions, which increased the pressure on nascent Spanish industry. Catalan producers organized major protests. Despite this, when the Progressives returned to power with a free-trade ideology the new tariff of 1869 (introduced by a Progressive Catalan finance minister, Laureano Figuerola) set the lowest Spanish rates of the century and came close to free trade. During the next four years the internal market expanded and Spanish exports increased, thanks to generally favorable conditions. The cycle was completed, however, by the Bourbon restoration, which returned to a fairly strong protective tariff in 1875.

Despite the emphasis in Madrid on money-making under the Isabeline regime, there was no Spanish Friedrich List and never any clear concept of integrated national economic modernization. Government resources were not placed behind any major efforts at national development, but were used to support established agrarian [482] interests and provide opportunity for special financial groups backed by foreign capital. Since critical analysis was wanting, it was assumed that sufficient injections of credit would naturally produce expansion. The main overseas resource, Cuba, was not fully opened for free entry of Spanish grain and textiles until the very last years of the Isabeline regime.

As of 1875, Spain had still not begun to develop a real industrial platform, and its economic growth rate was well below that of the industrializing countries. The distance between the Spanish economy and those of the northwest European countries was probably proportionately greater in 1875 than in 1845.
 

Educational development was one of the most pressing needs of nineteenth-century Spanish society. The Isabeline regime established a national educational system for the first time in the country's history, but did not commit the money and energy to build it. Some of the old church and village schools were actually eliminated. Though new public schools were opened in many towns, they made only limited progress. Literacy doubled between 1840 and 1860 but only reached the level of 25 percent. Very little progress was made in higher education, despite the attempt, with the Moyano law of 1857, to coordinate the entire university system under state aegis. French cultural influence here was strong, also, and many Spanish university courses were based on poor translations of French textbooks and ideas.

Note: Though these are the most reliable literacy figures for the period, they are apparently based on the percentage of literacy for the entire population. The figures for adult literacy would probably be at least 5 percent higher.
 

Spanish literature of the first half of the nineteenth century was absolutely second rate. Though romanticism did not dominate Spanish literature until the 1830s, its themes persisted past mid-century, [483] along with costumbrismo--novels, stories, and sketches devoted to capturing the distinctive manners and mores of the regions of Spain. Most of the new reading public, on the other hand, sought more escapist literature, which increased greatly in volume after mid-century. There were some examples of moralistic realism--the comedies of Manuel Bretón de los Herreros, the vignettes of Ramón de Me-sonero Romanes, or some of the costumbrista novels of "Fernán Caballero"--but none of it equaled the criticism in Mariano José de Larra's essays and sketches of the 1830s. Theaters in the larger towns were well attended, though the theatrical writing was inferior. The zarzuela, the native Spanish form of operetta, was also developed during the middle of the century.

The rise of the periodical press began in the 1830s. Its centers were Madrid and Barcelona, though in the 1850s some key provincial newspapers were founded that outlasted the leading organs of the metropolises. The basis of journalism was the sectarian political newspaper, which pullulated on the most marginal financing. During the 1850s in Madrid there were nine Moderate and conservative newspapers, six representing the Liberal Union, three the Progressives, and two the Democrats.

The only new Spanish philosophical school of the century was a domestic variant of Krausism, the transplantation and reformulation of the ideas of Karl C. F. Krause, an obscure Austrian idealist philosopher. Julián Sanz del Río, professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, disseminated his interpretation of Krause's ideas through the newly centralized university system. Krausian idealism in Spain meant a vague pantheism and a creed of tolerance, education, free inquiry, physical and artistic training, religious skepticism, the blossoming of innate natural harmony, and the development of a rounded personality. Though the Krausists strove to avoid conflict they clashed directly with Spanish Catholic culture, and in 1867 the Krausist professors were temporarily expelled from their chairs in Madrid. Restored in 1868, they advanced the chief intellectual rationale for the anticlericalism of the democratic interlude. The principal leader of Spanish Krausism was Francisco Giner de los Rios, a charismatic, fatherly little pedagogue who trained a new generation of independent secular teachers and scholars. One of his primary goals was the elimination of Catholic influence in education. The gentle, simplistic teachings of Krausism exerted considerable appeal in an environment where formal intellectual culture was weak and students were seeking new cultural norms.

During the mid-nineteenth century Spanish science was almost nonexistent. The work of the universities in the sciences was backward in the extreme; rather than making up ground, more was lost. [484] The only achievement in applied science worthy of note was the "Ictíneo" of the Barcelona inventor Narciso Monturiol, an experimental submarine developed in the 1860s.

In popular spectacles the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age of the corrida de toros. The first modern bullfight rings had been built in Madrid (1754) and Zaragoza (1764) and many new ones were added in the early nineteenth century. By 1886 the provincial town of Murcia had one that seated 18,000. Though bullfights were temporarily suppressed from 1805 to 1807, their major development came after 1830, and modern bullfighting was at its height between 1875 and 1950. Yet bullfighting was never unopposed. Progressivist elements were quick to mount strong criticism of the supposed moral effects of the spectacle, and complaints were constant down to 1936.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the full establishment of the myth of romantic Spain, fixed in foreign literature especially by Prosper Mérimée's novel Carmen (1846). This idea, as we have seen, was an essentially esthetic one built around exotic, unmodernized mores--gypsy dancers, bandoleros, music, passion, and honor, the chiaroscuro of Andalusian exoticism. Such images might have little or nothing to do with the Spain that was slowly developing in Madrid, the north, and the east, but they set the vogue in foreign ideas of a country reduced in imagination essentially to the Andalusian and the gypsy.

The domestic equivalent was the spread of Andalusian gypsy flamenco music, so different from northern Spanish folk music, that first gained favor among the upper classes at the end of the eighteenth century. The high point in domestic (as distinct from tourist) flamenco was reached in the late nineteenth century, which also witnessed the development of modern stylized Spanish dance, or ballet español.
 

Spanish Catholicism suffered severely from the onset of liberalism, though at first there was little in the way of a spiritual or philosophical assault on the church. The church suffered economically when it lost nearly all of its landed property. It also suffered spiritually and professionally. The number of religious vocations declined steadily during the eighteenth century, and after the delayed, confused impact of liberal political and social ideas, they declined even more drastically during the first half of the nineteenth century. As noted earlier, it has been estimated that as many as one-third of the clergy renounced their vows between 1800 and 1840. The monastic orders [485] were reduced by legislation and confiscation. By 1860, in a population of 15,645,000, there were only 63,000 religious, proportionately less than one-sixth as many as in the seventeenth century. There was only 1 priest for every 300 inhabitants, and only 1,683 monks in the entire country (but approximately 19,000 nuns).

Early-nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism was not for the most part anti-Catholic but merely moderately anti-clerical. Nearly all the early liberals were believers. After having enriched themselves by expropriation of church land, the liberal elite was eager to effect a rapprochement with religion. The Moderates strove to reach a new modus vivendi, and the Isabeline regime ultimately became rather proclerical (the court circle extremely so). The hold of the Catholic moral imagination on the minds of the great mass of Spaniards was still strong, even among the unchurched. Early democratic and radical demands in Spain were not infrequently couched in terms of the morality of Jesus and the gospels, while opposing Catholic ecclesiasticism. ⁽²⁾

The only Catholic thinker worthy of note in the early nineteenth century was the Catalan priest Jaime Balmes (1810-1840). Balmes hoped to modernize Catholic philosophy, introduce social reform to re-Christianize society, and reconcile the two branches of the dynasty. He wrote several basic popular works of Catholic philosophy. The principal, almost the only, exemplar of evangelical work among the unchurched lower classes was another Catalan priest, Antonio Maria Claret.

The second quarter of the century made it clear that in the larger cities all over Spain, and in large parts of the southern countryside, the lower classes were living outside the direct social and spiritual network of the church. Some of these areas had always been poorly endowed with religious services, and the effects of the disamortization reduced church work even more. The de-Christianization of the working classes--a category in which the peasant farmers of north and north-central Spain should not in this sense be included--progressed steadily during the remainder of the century. On the other hand, direct philosophical assaults on Catholic religion itself became significant only in 1869.

By that time the nadir of the Catholic decline, reached between [486] 1835 and 1860, had passed. From about 1860 a slow resurgence of Spanish Catholicism began, first with a revival of Catholic piety among the upper and upper-middle classes. Significantly more respect was shown for the Carlist clergy by government forces in the mid-1870s than in the 1830s. The Catholic revival among the upper classes continued during the 1880s and 1890s with liturgical and educational reform and the expansion of church education. The result, however, was a religious split in society between the Catholic upper classes and stable peasantry on the one hand, and an increasingly radical anti-Catholic intelligentsia and de-Christianized working class on the other.
 

Internationally, Spain during the nineteenth century was in very much the same situation as Holland and Portugal -- a comparatively weak country still possessing far-flung and important overseas domains. In addition to Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spain retained the African presidios, the Philippines, and three chains of islands in the west Pacific (the Carolines, Marianas, and Palaus). During most of this period, Spanish foreign policy was absolutely static and defensive, seeking only to retain the overseas possessions.

In the 1840s the primary foreign influence on Spain was that of France, whose July Monarchy backed the Moderates against the British-supported Progressives, and pressured Spanish leaders into the disastrous marriage of Isabel with the dismal Francisco de Asís--a match that had destructive consequences for the Spanish polity--to prevent the possibility of her marrying a British-connected German prince. The Spanish government itself intervened once in Portuguese affairs for the same political ends: a Spanish military expedition in 1847 helped put down a progessivist revolt in Porto, opening the way for the return of the Chartists (the Portuguese equivalent of the Moderates). French policy supported Spain fully, while the British were inclined to back the other side in Portugal.

The stability of Narváez's government in 1848 marked a kind of coming-of-age for nineteenth-century Spain in the concert of nations. Narváez even managed to expel the British ambassador for meddling in internal politics, and relations with Britain were not regularized until 1850. The Moderate regime then enjoyed very friendly relations with the French Second Empire, which tried to give some support to Spanish interests just as it did to Italian nationalism, on the theory of [487] fostering amity among the Latin powers and a kind of Romance-speaking bloc. The Spanish expedition of 5,000 troops to Rome on behalf of the papacy in 1849 was in support of a French initiative.

The Hispanic version of the national unification drives of the period 1848-1870 was the idea of Iberian union between Spain and Portugal, backed up by the peninsular railway construction of the 1850s. The ideal of Spanish and Portuguese union did not have deep roots in either country but received strong support from some groups, particularly the Progressives. It was usually associated with the goal of a dynastic union, first seriously broached in the 1840s when Isabel was married, then again after 1868. The Federalists hoped ultimately to include Portugal in a broad peninsular federation, but the ideal of Iberian union faded after 1874, partly because it had been supported most strongly by the more radical and was viewed with suspicion by conservatives as a revolutionist's scheme.

Spanish political leaders continued to be reluctant to concede the independence of Spanish America. That of Mexico was officially recognized in 1836, but thirty years were required before the same recognition was given to all the new states. Reform in Cuba was persistently ignored, and after 1837 the Antilles were denied further representation in the Madrid Cortés. Spain's defensive policy, virtually restricted to the peninsula, changed only once during the period, and that was during O'Donnell's long ministry, which endeavored to foster unity and stability by an active, not to say aggressive, foreign policy. The high point of this orientation was the Moroccan war of 1859-1860, in the settlement of which Spain was granted titular possession of the territory of Ifni, along the southwestern Atlantic coast of Morocco. Between 1858 and 1863 small Spanish forces, mainly Filipino, served in Indochina in support of the French occupation and conquest. In 1861 the O'Donnell government accepted a request from the nominal president of strife-torn Santo Domingo to re-extend Spanish sovereignty over that area. This infelicitious effort was officially canceled by Narváez in 1865 after four years of frustration and limited military occupation. The fourth incident was the so-called War of the Pacific off the western coast of South America between 1862 and 1866, a series of absurd, intrinsically unimportant naval encounters mistakenly calculated to enhance Spanish prestige.

The advent of the Republic in 1873 was received with great hostility by other governments. Only the United States and Switzerland granted recognition to the new Spanish regime, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1875 was accepted abroad with a sense of relief.
 

[705] The main work on Spanish politics from 1844 to 1854 is J. L. Cornelias, Los Moderados en el poder (Madrid, 1970). Two general works on early liberalism are Luis Sánchez Agesta, Historia del constitucionalismo español (Madrid, 1955), and Luis Díez del Corral, El liberalismo doctrinario (Madrid, [706] 1956). V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (Oxford, 1966), provides a descriptive account.

The principal narrative of Spanish politics from 1868 to the end of the century is Melchor Fernández Almagro, Historia política de la España contemporánea, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956, 1968). Clara Lida and Iris Zavala, eds., La Revolución de 1868 (New York, 1970), provides a general introduction to the revolutionary sexennium. The best study of the Republican period is C. A. M. Hennessey, The Federal Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1962). Antonio Jutglar, Federalismo y revolución: Las ideas sociales de Pi y Margall (Barcelona, 1966), and Carmen Llorca, Emilio Castelar (Madrid, 1966), explain the ideas of the two key Republican presidents. On the Democrats, see Antonio Eiras Roel, El Partido Demócrata español (1849-1868) (Madrid, 1961). Important insights into Carlism may be gained from J. Aróstegui Sánchez, El Carlismo alavés y la guerra civil de 1870-1876 (Vitoria, 1970). J. M. Cuenca Toribio, La Iglesia española ante la revolución liberal (Madrid, 1971), analyzes the relationship between the church hierarchy and politics.

The attention devoted to the history of the working class movement in the years 1868-1875 is entirely disproportionate to its influence. This topic can first be approached through Maximiano García Venero, Historia del sindicalismo español (Madrid, 1961), and Historia de las Internacionales en España, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1956). The key work on early Spanish anarchism is Max Nettlau's La Première Internationale en Espagne (1868-1888), 2 vols. (Dordrecht, 1969). Other noteworthy books are Fernando Garrido, Historia de las asociaciones obreras en España, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1870); Casimiro Martí, Orígenes del anarquismo en Barcelona (Barcelona, 1959); José Termes Ardévol, El movimiento obrero en España: La Primera Internacional(1864-1881) (Barcelona, 1965); and, on the only social revolution in 1873, R. Coloma, La revolución internacionalista en Alcoy (Alicante, 1959).

Two general introductions to modern Spanish economic history are J. Nadal Oiler, "La economia española (1829-1931)," in El Banco de España: Una historia económica (Madrid, 1970), pp. 315-417, and J. A. Lacomba, Introducción a la historia económica de la España contemporánea (Madrid, 1969). Agriculture has been little studied, but on prices and the beginning of industrialization, see Juan Sardá, La política monetaria y las fiuctuaciones de la economía española en el siglo XIX (Madrid, n.d.); L. Beltrán Floréz, La industria algodonera española (Barcelona, 1943); and F. Sánchez Ramos, La economía siderúrgica española (Madrid, 1945). The principal railroad history is F. Wais San Martín, Historia general de los ferrocarriles españoles (Madrid, 1967). There has been very little study of nineteenth-century Spanish society. On the growth of the bullfight, the basic work is J. M. Cossío, Los toros, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1943).
 

1. La I República (Los Episodios Nacionales) (Madrid, 1953), p.87.

2. Enrique O'Donnell, brother of the Liberal Union leader, commented: "Ask our absolutists about the basis of their principles, and they will not say thirty words without mixing in religion and divinity thirty times. Inquire of our democrats and you will hear them speak only of Jesus and the Gospel. Neither group knows how to act politically without dressing up as monks." La democracia española (Madrid, 1858), p. 13.