CHAOS
To say that the six-year period from 1868 to 1874 was an almighty mess is an understatement, even by the standards of a country no stranger to political turmoil. In an almost farcical string of developments, during that very short time Spain managed to squeeze in: a revolution; a civil war; the overthrow of the reigning monarch; the setting up of a provisional regime; a new constitution; a regency; a constitutional monarchy with an invited, foreign king; the assassination of a king-maker; an abdication; the establishment of a unitary republic (the country’s first); then a federal republic (regarded as a continuation of the first); the break-up of the country into autonomous inter-warring ‘cantons’; three simultaneous civil wars; a coup d’état; another regency (or dictatorship); and finally the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy whose overthrow had initiated the chaos (albeit in the form of a new king, Alfonso XII). Astonishingly, the period turned out to be the last hurrah of the roller-coaster ride of the nineteenth century as it was followed by twenty-five years of peace and stability, ushered in not least by collective exhaustion after so much infighting and disorder.
The revolution of 1868 which sparked the turbulence could well have gone the way of the many hundreds of pronunciamientos which preceded it. But the shift in Spanish society played a decisive factor: ordinary people, who only recently had put a brake on reformist-driven military coup attempts, now became more radicalised, angered by the drop in their own standards of living, fed up with a corrupt ruling class, and buoyed by the new political ideas arriving from the rest of Europe. To the cries of Abajo la Isabelona, fondona y golfona (‘Down with big-arsed, sex-mad Isabella the Fat’), they rallied to the cause of the rebellious generals. A brief civil war ensued in which Isabella’s loyal troops received a bloody nose outside Cordoba at the hands of one of her majesty’s former lovers, General Serrano. The queen herself, spending the summer months in San Sebastián on her doctor’s orders, realised the game was up and slipped across the nearby border into French exile (she died in Paris in 1904). The Bourbon dynasty, brought in amid the violence of the War of Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century, appeared to have ended.
Spain, however, had a problem: after so many, mostly failed, attempts over previous decades, a pronunciamiento had now finally brought about a quite spectacular result. Which meant that those who had been calling for change and reform now found themselves in the position of having to follow their words with deeds. Unfortunately for Spain, they were not up to the job. The country needed urgent answers to the questions that had dogged it for so many centuries: what was it? What kind of a country did it want to be? There were a multitude of possibilities, none of them with a clear majority of support. Over the next few years a number of them would be tried out on a suck-it-and-see basis. All of them failed. And in the meantime the country resorted to its default setting when the political centre crumbled – of breaking up into its multiple parts.
In the absence of any better ideas, the first step was the creation of a provisional government by supporters of a constitutional monarchy. They drew up a new magna carta in 1869 introducing reforms such as universal suffrage for men, and freedom of press and worship. They also made first mention in an official state document of the ‘Spanish nation’ but, curiously, declared that the country was a hereditary monarchy. Given that they had just kicked out the ruling, hereditary dynasty, this gave them a problem. The proposed solution was to shop around for a new king. And so began an absurd, Pirandello-style drama of subjects in search of a sovereign. The spectacle was made all the more poignant by the fact that no European prince wanted to touch Spain with a barge-pole, not surprisingly given its recent history. Eventually the prime mover behind the idea, General Prim, found a willing victim in the shape of Prince Amadeo, Duke of Aosta, who agreed to take the crown. It appeared the charade could come to a close. But on the very day that the hapless duke arrived to be declared King Amadeo I of Spain, Prim, his one and only supporter, was assassinated. The rest of the political class made no bones about the fact that they didn’t welcome the newcomer, who was immediately isolated. The poor man struggled on for a couple of years, surviving assassination attempts on his own person all the while, only finally to abdicate in 1872, unable to make headway or any sense of the chaos which he had inherited. ‘I don’t understand anything,’ he declared. ‘This is a madhouse.’
In his farewell speech he went further: ‘Spain lives in constant infighting . . . Those who perpetuate and worsen the ills of the nation with the sword, the pen or with words are all Spanish.’
He left for Lisbon, eventually returning to his home town of Turin, where he died in 1890 aged forty-four.1
With no king, the logical step was for Spain to declare itself a republic, which it duly did in February 1873. It was a farce from the beginning, as no one could agree what kind of a republic it should be, not least because most of the deputies in parliament who voted it in were actually monarchists . . . The eleven months of its existence saw the coming and going of four presidents, none of whom could bring order to the further chaos into which the country was descending. Things got worse when one of them, Francesc Pi y Margall, who managed to hang on to power for a staggering thirty-seven days, suggested that Spain should be a federal republic, with power flowing from the bottom upwards. According to his political model, families joined to form communities, communities to form ‘cantons’, cantons to form provinces, provinces regions, and regions combined to form a nation. Federalism, in his view, would serve to unite the country. Curiously, Pi y Margall was a historian, which makes you wonder how he thought the plan could possibly work, given Spain’s track record. Not surprisingly, the federal model only pushed an already crumbling state into anarchy, with the establishment of thirty-two cantons around the country centred on major towns and cities, all of them autonomous and beyond central control. The taifas of the Moorish period were back. And just as in the past, they immediately started fighting amongst themselves: Jaén declared war on neighbouring Granada; Utrera went to war with Seville; Coria was at war with Cáceres; and the most belligerent and successful of all the cantons, Cartagena (which had its own flag and currency), went to war with none other than Madrid itself in a five-monthlong struggle which even saw a battle at sea! If that wasn’t bad enough, the third and final Carlist War was simultaneously under way in the north of Spain, while civil war had broken out in the country’s last important colony, Cuba.
The chaos of the Cantons
Things were at their lowest ebb, but the chaos still had some life in it yet. In January 1874 General Pavía rode on horseback into the parliament building and staged a coup. Not wanting power himself, he handed it over to General Serrano (Queen Isabella’s former lover who defeated the royalist forces in 1868). Serrano ruled as dictator until Christmas that year when he was himself overthrown by another general, Martínez Campos, who brought an end to the years of political experimentation by restoring the Bourbon monarchy. Isabella II’s son, Alfonso XII, was asked to take command. He did so, and the whole of Spain gave out a long sigh of relief. Peace and stability were restored. The generals put away their swords. Party politics took centre stage, alternating power between reformists and moderates like clockwork for the next few decades.
Exhausted, Spain as a whole basked in its new-found serenity. Perhaps it could exist, in fact, as a peaceful, harmonious country, free from bloodshed and civil conflict. And for a while it seemed that it might. The new constitutional monarchy appeared to function, and in time the country began to prosper.
But before too long, events were to occur which would shake the new regime, events which would bring an end, as in the past, to the brief pause in internal fighting. Soon Spain would be pitted once more against Spain. The greatest civil war of them all was just over the horizon.
1 Brief, ill-fated reigns became something of a family speciality when Amadeo’s grandson held the throne of Croatia for, again, just two years from 1941 to 1943 as Tomislav II, a puppet m
onarch of a kingdom invented by Hitler and Mussolini.
PART FIVE
BEFORE
THE ROAD TO A SECOND REPUBLIC
The Bourbon monarchy was restored, republicanism was buried, regionalist dreams were in abeyance . . . For a full quarter-century from 1874, Spain knew only peace and prosperity and political stability. As if by magic, all the convulsions of the past vanished in a puff of smoke. Yet it was a charade, a game most agreed to play through sheer exhaustion after the high drama of the previous six years. The architect of this oasis of calm was a man called Cánovas de Castillo, commonly regarded as the ablest politician Spain has ever produced. Cánovas was the driving force behind the new constitutional monarchy and installed a bi-party system along the British model; he led the conservatives himself, and found an obliging opponent to head the liberals in the shape of a politician of almost equal skill named Sagasta. These two men effectively shared power until the end of the century, their parties alternating in office in mechanical fashion, and always mutually respectful of each other’s decisions and achievements. And, amazingly, the system worked. But it could not last indefinitely for the simple reason that it was a sham. The ‘elections’ in which one or the other party ‘won’ the popular vote were rigged, specifically designed to ensure that the swing should continue to operate. The idea that the government in any way enjoyed democratic support was a joke, not least because, in addition, any parties that didn’t support the system were automatically banned from taking part. Worker groups such as the union movement and the anarchists, or regional parties such as the ones developing in Catalonia, the Basque Country and elsewhere, had no voice. Which meant their activism was consequently clandestine and increasingly radicalised.
Nonetheless, things continued at their gentler pace, with the young Alfonso XII as titular head of state. Even the shock of the king’s death at the age of twenty-eight in 1885 (from tuberculosis) was skilfully sailed through, and his widow, María Cristina – a Habsburg, no less, and daughter of the Archduke of Austria – took over as regent. She was pregnant at the time, and to the delight of all, later gave birth to a son, a boy who, from the very first breath he took, was king of Spain, Alfonso XIII. María Cristina continued at the helm while her offspring grew up, strictly following the last piece of advice given by her dying husband: ‘Cristinita, you know what to do: Cánovas to Sagasta, and Sagasta to Cánovas. And don’t shag about!’ (¡Guarda el coño!) For her scrupulous morals she became known as Doña Virtudes (‘Mrs Virtue’), and proved a steady hand on the tiller for the next twenty years.
And then everything began to fall apart.
The first blow came in 1898 in an event which became known simply as The Disaster. For a while the US had been arming and supporting rebels in the Spanish colony of Cuba. When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour, killing over two hundred men on board, passions were already running so high that war between the two countries became inevitable.1
The resulting conflict was a huge embarrassment for the Spanish in which their naval and land-based forces were rapidly outclassed and outmanoeuvred by a virile new country testing its strength on the international stage. The Spanish military suffered combined losses over the period of some sixty thousand men, and in the peace agreement that followed, in December 1898, the once great empire on which ‘the sun never set’ (the British later copied the phrase) was reduced to nothing: Spain’s last overseas territories were lost, with the Philippines, Puerto Rico and the jewel in the crown, Cuba, all passing into American hands. (A band of Spanish soldiers held out in a besieged church in the Philippines until June 1899, waiting for a relief that never came; when they finally surrendered they were hailed by their opponents for their bravery and tenacity.)
There is, of course, an irony in the fact that an empire which was built on the discovery of America should be dealt its death blow by a son of the new continent, Spain’s Uranus defeated by the USA’s Zeus. And a poetic justice in an accidental empire (no one was expecting to find a whole new world across the Atlantic) brought low by another accident, in the shape of the Maine’s sinking. But the reaction within Spain to the news was anything but sanguine. Final loss of empire came as a huge blow and led to several years’ ‘post-colonial’ soul-searching and introspection to try to explain how such a terrible state of affairs could have come about. It in turn gave birth to a generation of writers and intellectuals known as the Generación del ’98, people who sought to identify the source of the country’s woes in everything from rampant corruption to social inequality, or historical anomalies (from a Euro-centric perspective) such as the Moorish period of the country’s past.
El Desastre also woke other forces into action, however, and eventually brought the stable, alternating bi-party system to an end: the Cánovas–Sagasta duopoly was mortally wounded, not least because – in an event which curiously augured what was about to happen to the country as a whole – Cánovas had been assassinated the year before by an anarchist. The cry went up for a real democracy, with new republicans and revolutionary worker movements demanding a role. In addition, Basque and Catalan industrialists, who had had important interests in the now lost colonies (Bacardi rum was a Catalan concern) turned away from a central state which, in their eyes, was incapable of defending their markets, and started to move towards the respective burgeoning independence groups in their regions.
And into the middle of all this, in 1902, stepped Alfonso XIII, declared by the government to have come of age and now able to reign as king. He was sixteen.
Alfonso was a spoilt brat, mollycoddled by a mother and aunt who constantly reminded him that he was king and hence above the law and able to satisfy his every whim and desire.2 The new king was also physically weak and emotionally dependent on his mother. In fact his eventual downfall and capitulation in 1931 might be explained in part by his mother’s death two years earlier, leaving Alfonso alone and depressed, unable to cope with affairs of state. Like his grandmother Isabella II, he liked sleeping around, having dozens of mistresses and even a private collection of porn films made specially for him by the Count of Ramanones (a prime minister on several occasions). In 1905 he married Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, Victoria Eugenie, who duly converted to Catholicism and brought with her the same family-bred haemophilia of the Battenbergs which so blighted the son of Tsar Nicolas II. Two of Victoria Eugenie’s sons would inherit the disease.
Just as the arrival of Alfonso XII in 1874 had ushered in a new era for Spain, so did his son’s. But not in a good way. Despite being head of state of a constitutional monarchy, Alfonso XIII arrived at the first meeting of his council of ministers only to put his feet on the table and start ordering everyone about like a tinpot dictator. That someone so lacking in political skills should take command at such a moment could hardly have been worse timed, for in the wake of the loss of empire, Spain was facing many more problems.
Now that the gloves were off politically, infighting and backstabbing became the norm, and instead of regularly alternating governments, the country reverted to short-lived and often ineffectual administrations coming and going in chaotic fashion, not least because rather than remaining aloof, the king got involved in the fight. In the first four years of his reign, eleven different governments were sworn in.
Meanwhile, in order to soothe her wounded imperial pride, Spain took control of northern Morocco as a kind of mini-empire meant to boost its role on the world stage. The problem was that the locals, Riffian mountain people, were anything but docile, taking umbrage at the idea that anyone, let alone the Spanish, should order them about. Using guerrilla tactics which the Spanish themselves had so successfully employed against Napoleon a hundred years before, they engaged the invaders in painful attritional warfare which turned into a long-running and very bloody sore. The violence escalated on several occasions and in time Spain’s African territory would have a game-changing role in the Spanish Civil War. But the first serious sign that the country’s Moroccan entan
glement wasn’t quite the adventure originally envisaged came in 1909 with what became known as the ‘Tragic Week’. After suffering heavy defeat at the hands of the Moroccan ‘irregulars’, the Spanish government called up forty thousand young men to fill the army’s numbers. They were nothing more than cannon fodder, sons of poorer families who couldn’t pay the several thousand pesetas that the wealthier handed over to remove their own children from the draft. In Barcelona a crowd bidding farewell to a troopship grew restless and events quickly turned into a full-scale insurrection. Several churches were burnt down in the resulting clashes, with priests seen as defenders of the ruling classes. The police and military responded aggressively, arresting over a thousand people and condemning seventeen to death. Of these, five were eventually executed, including the anarchist thinker and activist Francisco Ferrer. Such was the national and international outcry over the move, however, that Alfonso panicked and sacked his prime minister, installing yet another new government.
‘Tragic Week’ was over, but was a signal of more to come, both in Morocco and at home, particularly in Barcelona. Spain remained neutral throughout the First World War, and her industries – Catalan textiles, Basque iron and Asturian coal – thrived as they happily did business with both the Allies and Central Powers. But the consequent boom brought higher prices and more demands from worker groups for improved labour rights and higher pay. The year 1917, so crucial in Russia, came close to bringing about a similar outcome in Spain when street violence broke out and a ‘revolutionary strike’ was called in which up to two hundred people were killed. In the crackdown many leaders were arrested and sentenced to death, although this time their penalties were commuted. Among them was union leader Francisco Largo Caballero, later a Socialist prime minister during the Civil War.
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