There was no resistance. The extreme threat of anarchy in 1873 had resulted in a strong conservative reaction, strengthened by the religious policies pursued since 1868. The constitution of 1869 for the first time had allowed complete freedom of religion. Despite its failure to deliver political stability, the Revolution of 1868 bequeathed to Spain the model of a modern secular state based on universal suffrage. Anarchism pentrated Spain’s extreme left, especially in rural Andalusia and in industrial Catalonia, where the lower classes deserted a long tradition of political action via the Democratic and Republican parties and moderate unionism. Although anarchists were persecuted after 1873, the movement was kept alive by small groups of enthusiasts.
The independence movement in Cuba, which, along with Puerto Rico, was the last possession of Spain in America, posed the worst problem for Spain in the period 1868–75. Cubans had long resented the failure to reform rule by captains general, to grant some autonomy, and to ease the economic sacrifices that were imposed by the Spanish tariff system. The Ten Years’ War that began in October 1868 made great demands on Spain both in terms of manpower (100,000 by 1870) and money. The war made difficulties for all governments in power in Spain after 1868 and forced abandonment of the most popular of the pledges made by the rebels in 1868: the abolition of the arbitrary and socially selective recruitment system. Like the Carlist wars, the war in Cuba tended to favour the monarchical reaction. The restored monarchy, 1875–1923
Once the Carlists had been defeated and the Cubans had accepted the peace settlement of El Zanjón (1878), the restored monarchy provided the most stable government Spain had known since 1833. This stability was sustained by an uneven but respectable economic growth. Stability, 1875–98
The architect of the restoration itself and of the constitution of 1876 was Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. A superb politician, Cánovas had hoped for a civilian restoration; he accepted Martínez Campos’s coup but used the young Alfonso XII to keep the military out of politics.
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, detail of an engraving by Aruselio Carretero.Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
The Canovite system was artificial in that it required the contrived rotation in office (turno pacífico) of a Liberal and a Conservative party; this in turn demanded governmental control of elections, which were run by caciques, or local political bosses, who controlled votes in their districts and delivered them in return for favours for themselves and their supporters. Only in this way could the government selected by the king and the politicians in Madrid obtain a parliamentary majority. Extensive corruption and the use of administrative pressures on electors were considered the only ways to make the parliamentary system work in an underdeveloped society. This system survived the death of Alfonso XII (1885) and began to falter only in the 1890s, toward the end of his wife’s regency. The Carlist threat weakened with defeat, and the majority of Republicans in Spain were domesticated and reconciled to the use of “legal” means.
“Without being a rich country,” wrote an economist in the early 1880s, “Spain has become comfortably off.” This prosperity, untroubled by the claims of organized labour, was the result of the demand for iron ore after the invention of the Bessemer process (England and France invested heavily in mineral production), the demand for Spanish wine after the devastations by phylloxera in France, and the resumption of railway construction in Spain. The third largest wool industry in Europe grew up alongside the older cotton mills in Catalonia. The boom did not break until the late 1880s, when an agricultural depression set in. A wave of economic pessimism preceded the political and intellectual reaction of 1898.
The loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898 following the Spanish-American War exposed the Spanish political system to severe criticism. No fiscal and political reform sufficient to satisfy Cuban demands could be effected within the framework of the monarchy, partly because of the pressure of the Spanish loyalist party in Cuba. A revolt in 1895 set off another costly war against Cuban guerrillas. The intervention of the United States could not be staved off by a last-minute grant of autonomy. Their humiliating and total naval defeat in 1898 became known to Spaniards as “the Disaster.” Spain now lost the Philippines and the last of its possessions in the Americas at the very time when the great European powers were building their overseas empires. These events exacerbated an already existing pessimism among intellectuals about Spain’s national and racial “degeneration.” Opposition movements, 1898–1923
Criticism of the restoration monarchy came from the Catalan and Basque regionalists, a revived Republican Party, the proletarian parties, the army, the more forward-looking of the Spanish politicians, and intellectuals.
Iberian Peninsula and Andorra, c. 1900Map of the Iberian Peninsula, Andorra, and nearby islands (c. 1900) from the 10th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Basque regionalism, though more akin in its ideas to extreme nationalist movements, was less a challenge than Catalan regionalism. With their own language and a revived cultural tradition, known as the Renaixença, Catalan nationalists moved from a demand for protection of Catalan industry against “Castilian” free trade to a demand for political autonomy. The Regionalist League (Catalan: Lliga Regionalista), founded in 1901 and dominated by the Catalan industrialist Francesc Cambó i Batlle and the theoretician of Catalan nationalism Enric Prat de la Riba, demanded the end of the turno and a revival of regionalism within a genuine party system. Cambó wished to solve the Catalan question “within Spain”—that is, by legal means and in cooperation with monarchist politicians. The revival of Catalanism, however, set off a “Castilian” reaction in which moderate Catalans were accused of selfishness or of hiding separatist aims under “respectable” regionalism.
Anti-Catalan sentiment was particularly strong among army officers, still smarting from the defeat of 1898. A string of antimilitary cartoons in Catalan periodicals led members of the Barcelona garrison to sack the offices of these publications (the Cu-Cut!) and demand the application of military law to insults against the military. The passage of the Law of Jurisdictions (1906), which largely met the officers’ demands, led to the creation of Solidaridad Catalana, a united front of Catalanist parties.
In the 1907 election the Solidaridad Catalana defeated the establishment parties but then divided into a right wing (which accepted a solution within the monarchy) and a left wing (which was to drift to Republicanism). Cambó’s cooperation with Madrid brought Catalonia no tangible concessions.
Republicanism, which had degenerated into local politicking and lived on its memories of 1873, was revived in a number of major cities: in Valencia by the novelist-politician Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, in Gijón by Melquíades Alvarez, and, most significantly, in Barcelona by the colourful demagogue and former journalist Alejandro Lerroux. Lerroux’s Radical Party offered a program that appealed to the alienated working-class voter of Barcelona. Competing with a slow revival of anarchism, Lerroux veered between terrorism, educational propaganda, and union activity; the anarcho-syndicalist union, the National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo; CNT), was founded in 1910. The socialist movement with its union (the General Union of Workers [Unión General de Trabajadores; UGT], founded 1888) was relatively weak except in the mining districts of the north and in Madrid, where it was dominated by its French-influenced founder, Pablo Iglesias. In 1909 the socialists abandoned their boycott of “bourgeois” politics and allied themselves with the Republicans. This alliance gave the party a political leverage in excess of its voting strength.