In reaction against the commercial backwardness and rigidity of the ruling order, Spain was to experience a middle-class revolution in advance of most of Europe. The country enjoyed a brief easing of the chains in the mid eighteenth century, during Charles III’s reign, when the influence of the Enlightenment was felt. Reforms severely reduced the Church’s influence over the army, while many officers were attracted to Freemasonry. This anti-clerical and, therefore, political movement, was inextricably linked with the development of liberalism among Spain’s very small professional middle class. Liberalism became a recognizable force early in the nineteenth century as a result of the ‘War of Independence’ against Napoleon’s armies. The faint-hearted Charles IV was overthrown in a popular revolt because of the corruption and scandals of his favourite, Manuel de Godoy, and the arrival of the French army. Napoleon refused to recognize his heir, Ferdinand VII, and much of the Spanish aristocracy sided with the occupying power. Then Murat’s executions in Madrid provoked a spontaneous rising by the people on the ‘Second of May’ 1808, when they ferociously attacked the French emperor’s Mameluke cavalry with knives. ‘Napoleon’s ulcer’, as the rising was called, was the first large-scale guerrilla war of modern times and 60,000 Spaniards died in the defence of Saragossa. The bitter resistance came from a popular movement, though some liberal army officers played a major role, especially within the local juntas of defence.
The traditional ruling structure of ‘Old Spain’ suffered its first formal upset in 1812, when the central junta of defence proclaimed the Constitution of Cádiz, which was based upon middle-class liberal principles. This opportunity of dispensing with the stifling restrictions of monarchy and Church prompted many towns and provinces to declare themselves self-governing cantons within a Spanish federation. These changes did not last. Ferdinand VII was allowed to return on condition that he accepted the constitution, but he later broke his word and invoked the Holy Alliance, under which in 1823 the French King Louis XVIII sent an army, called ‘The Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis’, to crush Spanish liberalism. Ferdinand dismantled the liberal army and reintroduced the Inquisition to destroy ‘the disastrous mania of thinking’.
Spain in the nineteenth century continued to suffer from the clash between liberalism and traditionalism. After Ferdinand’s death in 1833, his heir was the young Queen Isabella II. The liberal army supported her succession (and later provided most of her lovers). But the traditionalist forces grouped themselves around Ferdinand’s brother and rival claimant, Don Carlos (and thus became known as Carlists). The main Carlist strength lay among the smallholders of the Pyrenees, especially in Navarre, and his supporters became famous for their religious fanaticism and ferocious rejection of modernity. In the first Carlist War of 1833–40 a British Legion, nearly 10,000 strong and led by regular officers, fought for the liberal side. The civil war of a hundred years later would also attract foreign volunteers, but sympathy for such idealistic ventures changed drastically in British governing circles. Admiration for the Byronic tradition of supporting foreign insurrections disappeared after 1918 with the rise of socialist revolution and recognition of the true horrors of war.
The free-thinking liberalism which permeated the increasingly middle-class Spanish officer corps in the early years of the century declined. Liberals profited from the sale of church lands and developed into a reactionary grande bourgeoisie. The governments in Madrid were corrupt and the generals acquired a taste for overthrowing them. This was the age of the pronunciamiento, when generals would form up their troops and make long speeches appointing themselves saviour and dictator of the country. Between 1814 and 1874 there were 37 attempted coups, of which twelve were successful.1 The country lurched along, becoming poorer and poorer, while Queen Isabella exercised her guards officers. She was finally deposed in 1868 after choosing a lover of whom the army did not approve. Two years later Amadeo of Savoy was chosen as her successor, but his earnest goodwill was not enough to win support from a population exasperated with the monarchy. His abdication in February 1873 was followed by a vote in the Cortes establishing a republic.
The First Republic was soon brought down by military intervention. Its federalist programme had included the abolition of military conscription, a very popular measure, but within a few weeks of the first elections sporadic Carlist revolts became a full-scale civil war and the government was forced to break this important promise. The Carlist pretender’s most effective troops were the staunchly Catholic Basques, who were primarily motivated by separatist ambitions of throwing off rule from Madrid. Spanish monarchs were only lords of the Basque provinces, which constituted a señorio and which had never been subjected to central rule like other parts of the peninsula.
The generals saw the army’s main role as enforcing Spanish unity, especially after the loss of the American empire. As Castilian centralists, they were appalled by the prospect of separatist Basque and Catalan nations occupying the Pyrenean frontier. They were also implacably opposed to federalism, so when self-governing cantons were proclaimed in other areas they did not hesitate to crush this movement against government from Madrid as well as the Carlists and Basques. The First Republic lasted only a few months.
The conservative politician Cánovas del Castillo had been planning the re-establishment of the Bourbons since the fall of Isabella. He also wanted to institute stable government while returning the army to barracks. This was achieved when General Martínez Campos proclaimed Alfonso XII king at the end of 1874. Alfonso was Isabella’s son (and therefore presumably of good military stock), but he was still only a Sandhurst cadet.
Under Cánovas’s constitution, which was to last half a century, Church and landowner were back in strength. They had every intention of keeping it that way and elections were unashamedly manipulated. Peasants and tenants had to vote as their landlord told them or face eviction. Canvassing consisted of the political bosses, the caciques, sending out armed gangs known as El Partido de la Porra (the Bludgeon Party) and if that did not look like working, then ballot papers were destroyed or substituted. Political and economic corruption spread from Madrid in a way that far exceeded anything known in previous centuries. The courts were rigged right down to the village tribunals, so no poor person ever expected to have his case heard, let alone obtain justice.
Although there may often have been a vicious rivalry between liberals and conservatives in the provinces, there was virtually a gentleman’s agreement between their leaders in the capital. Whenever there was an unpopular measure to carry out, the conservatives retired and the liberals, who had now become almost indistinguishable from their opponents, came in. The two parties resembled those little wooden men who appear alternately to indicate the weather. But any high-minded figure, however aristocratic, who denounced the corruption was regarded as a traitor and shunned. The trinity of army, monarchy and Church, which had originally made the empire, was also to preside over its final collapse. In 1898 the Spanish-American War saw the pathetic rout of the armed forces and the loss of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Most of the soldiers’ food and equipment had been sold by their officers.
Even the tawdry end of the reconquista vision in Cuba in 1898 did not rouse the rulers of Spain from their myopic complacency. They could not admit that the obsession with empire had ruined the country. To admit that would have been to undermine the institutions of aristocracy, Church and army. This refusal to face reality started to come up against new political forces, which were growing rapidly and which, unlike the liberalism of the early nineteenth century, could not be absorbed into the governing structure. The incompatibility of ‘Eternal Spain’ with these new political movements developed into the clash which later tore the country apart.