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Joseph could count on the support of cautious, legalistic administrators and soldiers, those who believed resistance to French power impossible, and those who considered that Napoleon might “regenerate” Spain by modern reforms. These groups became convinced afrancesados, as members of the pro-French party were pejoratively called. Relying on their support, Napoleon entirely underestimated the possibility of popular resistance to the occupation of Spain by French armies. Although the uprising of May 2, 1808, in Madrid was suppressed, local uprisings against the French were successful wherever French military power was weak.
The War of Independence
After the deposition of King Ferdinand, “patriot” Spain outside the control of the French armies split into a number of autonomous provinces. Resistance centred in provincial committees (juntas) that organized armies. A Central Junta at Aranjuez sought to control this nascent federalism and the local levies, and Spanish regular troops defeated a French army of inferior, ill-supplied troops under General Pierre Dupont de l’Étang at Bailén in July 1808. The French retired from Madrid. Napoleon then invaded Spain and by 1809 was in control of most of the peninsula. The Spanish regular army, led by incompetent generals, suffered defeat after defeat.
The War of Independence—or, as the English call it, the Peninsular War—became for Napoleon the “Spanish ulcer,” and he attributed his defeat in Europe to its requirements for men and money. He was defeated not by the inefficient Spanish regular army but by British troops under the duke of Wellington advancing from Portugal with the aid of Spanish guerrillas. As the main battles—Talavera (July 1809) and Vitoria (June 1813)—were fought by Wellington, the guerrillas pinned down French garrisons, intercepted dispatches, and isolated convoys.
The term guerrilla, derived from the Spanish guerra (war), was first used during the Spanish War of Independence. The guerrillas were a complex phenomenon, and they did not share a single motivation for fighting the French. Some were patriotic liberals, and others were driven primarily by their attachment to the church and fought to defend traditional institutions against French-inspired reform.
The Constitution of Cadiz, 1812
The war years both recreated a patriotic spirit to cover the bare bones of Bourbon administrative centralism and resulted in the explicit formulation of a liberal ideology that was to be a dynamic factor in Spanish history. The Central Junta and its successor, the regency, were compelled to summon a Cortes in order to legitimize the situation created by the absence of Ferdinand VII, who was a prisoner in France. Conservatives conceived of this task as the mere supply of the sinews of war on behalf of an absent king. However, the Cortes, when it met at Cadiz in 1810, was dominated by liberals who wished to go beyond the mere support of the war effort and establish a constitution that would make impossible the revival of rule by a favourite like Godoy. The constitution of 1812 was to become the “sacred codex” of Latin liberalism.
The Constitution of Cadiz gave Spain a strictly limited monarchy (the king must work through his responsible ministers), a single-chamber parliament with no special representation for the church or the nobility, and a modern centralized administrative system based on provinces and municipalities. All this had little basis in the medieval precedents quoted in the debates and was inspired by the 1791 constitution of Revolutionary France. Liberal individualism inspired legislation against entail, favouring instead the sale of common lands and the individual’s right to dispose of his property as he might wish. The abolition of the Inquisition represented a mixture of historical regalism and modern anticlericalism. This measure produced a conservative reaction, as did all liberal anticlericalism through to the Second Republic in the 1930s. This reaction gave a popular underpinning to Ferdinand VII’s destruction of liberalism and all its works in 1814 (see below).
In addition to initiating a liberal tradition, the War of Independence bequeathed two problems: first, generals chafed at control by civilian juntas and on occasion overthrew them, thus initiating the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, or military revolution; second, the afrancesados, who were often of liberal inclination but were tarred with the accusation of collaborationism with the French, were left as an indigestible element within liberalism itself.
Ferdinand VII, 1814–33
With the help of an army corps and of conservative sentiment that had been outraged by the liberalism of 1812, Ferdinand returned from exile in France to rule Spain as an absolute monarch. In 1820 he was forced by military sedition to return to constitutionalism during the Liberal Triennium (1820–23). For the last, “ominous” decade of his reign, he returned to a relatively enlightened form of ministerial despotism. From 1814 to 1820 Spain attempted to reestablish its rule in America and to maintain an inflated wartime army with a permanent economic deficit.
The failure of liberalism
The solution of the Cadiz liberals to the imperial problem had been to make the colonies constitutionally part of metropolitan Spain by giving them representation in the Cortes. This did not stop the revolt of the colonies, where the Creoles wanted local self-government and free trade rather than liberal centralization. In 1814 it was not clear that the rebels under Simón Bolívar in the north and José de San Martín in the south would succeed; however, all Ferdinand’s efforts to assemble a large army and a fleet to send to America failed. In 1820 the army that was to subdue the colonies revolted against the king in a pronunciamiento organized by Major Rafael de Riego y Núñez and supported by the local liberals organized in Masonic lodges.
The revolution of 1820 brought into power the “jailbirds”—liberals of the 1812 vintage who had been persecuted by Ferdinand VII. The constitution of 1812 was reestablished together with other liberal legislation, including the sale of monastic property.
The liberal system failed once more because it was a minority creed sustained by a section of the army—the military radicals such as Riego—against a mounting conservative reaction that had been fed by an attack on the church, especially the monasteries. The liberals themselves split. The more conservative wing (led by Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, a dramatist) wished for a more moderate constitution, based on the French Charter of 1814, which would give better representation to the upper classes and would not be totally unacceptable to the king, as was the “prison” of the constitution of 1812. The king gave no support to this movement and, in a cowardly fashion, disowned a rising of the guards’ regiments that backed it. Thus, the extreme radicals (exaltados) gained control by means of demonstrations in the streets, organized by clubs run on the lines of the Jacobins of the French Revolution. The conservative reaction developed in the north around the regency set up at Seo de Urgel. Without French help, the movement would not have been successful, but when Louis XVIII sent French troops (the “Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis”), the liberal armies disintegrated and the liberal system fell.
Once more revolution at home favoured revolution in the colonies. Mexican conservatives, who had no desire to be ruled by Spanish anticlericals, successfully established an independent Mexico under Agustín de Iturbide (1822). Spanish military power in South America finally foundered in the decisive Battle of Ayacucho (1824). Of Spain’s far-flung empire, only the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines remained.
The “ominous decade,” 1823–33
The “ominous decade,” as it was called by the persecuted liberals, began with a severe purge of liberals, but in its later stages the regime became increasingly unacceptable to extreme conservatives, who looked to the king’s reactionary brother, Don Carlos (Carlos María Isidro de Borbón). Ferdinand had to rely either on inefficient traditionalists who could raise no money in the European money markets or on the more liberal ministers who were able financiers. Ministers such as Luis López Ballesteros, a friend of the afrancesados, set the tone with a serious attempt at a government-fostered economic revival.
The return to 18th-century “ministerial despotism” did not satisfy the liberal exiles, who mounted ineffective invasions in 1824 and 1830. More important, the conservatives of Don Carlos’s court faction accepted Ferdinand VII’s rule only on condition that Don Carlos would inherit the crown. In 1829 Ferdinand married his niece María Cristina of Naples, who realized that her influence depended on the elimination of that of Don Carlos. In March 1830 her faction at court persuaded the king to exclude Don Carlos from the succession even if María Cristina produced a female heir. This attack on the rights of Don Carlos was the origin of the Carlist party and of the Carlist wars, which were to be a disrupting influence in Spain for more than a half century. After the defeat of an attempt to force María Cristina to recognize Don Carlos’s rights during Ferdinand’s illness (September 1832), María Cristina’s faction became dominant at court. She succeeded in securing all important military commands in the hands of supporters of the claims of her daughter, Isabella. When, on September 29, 1833, Ferdinand died, Isabella was proclaimed queen, with María Cristina as regent, precipitating almost immediately the outbreak of the First Carlist War (1833–39).
Isabella II, 1833–68
The Carlist wars
The dynastic war between Isabelline liberalism and Carlism was a savage civil war between urban liberalism and rural traditionalism, between the poorly paid and poorly equipped regular army of the liberal governments, supporting Isabella, and the semi-guerrilla forces of the Carlists. The Carlist strength lay in the north, especially in the Basque provinces and Navarre, where there was strong support for the fueros against liberal centralism and for the traditional Roman Catholic order represented by the religious bigotry of Don Carlos and his circle. But the Carlists could not break out of their bases in the north to capture an important city. The great Carlist leader Tomás Zumalacárregui y de Imaz was killed in an attempt to capture Bilbao, and Don Carlos’s expedition to Madrid failed (1837). In 1839 Rafel Maroto, the Carlist commander, staged a mutiny against the clerical court of Don Carlos and came to terms with Baldomero Espartero, the most successful of Isabella’s generals.
María Cristina allied with liberalism out of military necessity, not from conviction. She would have preferred to grant administrative reforms rather than consent that her daughter should become a constitutional monarch. But only the liberals could save her daughter’s throne from the Carlists, and the minimum demand of all liberals was a constitution. As regent from 1833 to 1840, she therefore consistently supported conservative liberals against the radicals. The Royal Statute (1834) represented this alliance between respectable upper-middle-class liberals and the crown.
This conservative constitution, with its steep property franchise and the great powers it gave the crown in the choice of ministers, could not stop the drift toward the left implicit in liberalism itself. The radicals, who were the heirs of the exaltados of 1820–23, were installed in power first by a series of provincial town uprisings in 1835 and later, after a short-lived conservative reaction, by an army mutiny that forced María Cristina to accept the constitution of 1812. The radical politicians, however, accepted a more moderate compromise constitution—that of 1837. Of more enduring importance was the sale of church lands to finance the war. The great disentailment carried out by Prime Minister Juan Alvarez Mendizábal and his successors profoundly altered the social structure of Spain by putting on the market large quantities of land, most of which were bought by large landowners or prosperous peasants.
Moderates, progressives, and the generals
The Carlist wars left civilian politicians discredited, and generals became the arbiters of politics not, as in 1814–20, as intruders but as part of the political machinery. They became the “swords” of the two main political groups. The moderados (moderates), who were upper-middle-class oligarchic liberals fearful of democratic violence and upholders of the prerogatives of the crown, represented the conservative stream in liberalism. Their rivals, the progresistas (progressives), were the heirs of the exaltados and represented a lower stratum of the middle class; the progresistas were prepared to use the discontent of the urban masses in order to bring pressure on the crown to give them office. Their instrument was the Urban Militia. General Espartero used his military faction and his supporters among the younger progresista politicians and their artisan followers in the great cities to oust María Cristina and establish himself as regent (1841–43). Espartero proved a disappointment to the radical progresistas, who now allied with his conservative opponents under his military and political rival, Ramón María Narváez. In 1843 Espartero was ousted by a pronunciamiento.
Narváez jettisoned his progresista allies through a court intrigue, and between 1844 and 1854 he and his fellow generals dominated domestic politics as representatives of the moderados. Their administrative, educational, and financial measures and the formation of the Civil Guard were lasting achievements; however, the generals could not stabilize their rule on the basis of their constitution of 1845, a conservative revision of the constitution of 1837. The period was disturbed by a series of progresista military risings.
To the left of the progresistas, who were prepared to accept the monarchy if it gave them office, developed a Democratic Party, which was prepared to dethrone Isabella II, who was declared of age to rule in 1843. Never strong in numbers outside the towns, the Democrats radicalized politics. Orthodox progresista politicians were embarrassed by their extremist attitudes but could not neglect their potential role as urban revolutionaries.
It was not the Democrats but a group of discontented generals led by Leopoldo O’Donnell who successfully revolted in 1854. They were prepared to sacrifice the dynasty because the queen and her mother favoured a rigid court conservatism that effectively excluded them from influence. The rebellious military oligarchs were forced to call in civilian and radical support. This turned their pronunciamiento into a mild revolution. Isabella survived only through Espartero’s political timidity. Unprepared to accept the backing of the Democrats as the “George Washington of Spain,” he accepted an alliance with O’Donnell, who was determined to arrest the drift to radicalism. In 1856 he broke with Espartero, defeated a demonstration in his favour, and dissolved the National Militia, the instrument of the left-wing Progressives. The radical thrust was thus defeated.
Economic expansion
The “revolutionary” period of 1854–56 saw no important constitutional change, but the further extension of disentailment to the lands belonging to the municipalities (the Land Reform of Madoz [1855]) and the new law for limited companies provided the legal structure for a rapid expansion of the economy. To promote this expansion, there were new injections of foreign credit—particularly French—and new banks. This capital allowed construction to begin on the railroad network that was to provide the transport infrastructure for a national market. The textile industry of Catalonia flourished as a modern wool manufacture grew up; in the Basque Country the second pole of an industrial economy developed slowly around iron. The still-dominant agricultural sector expanded as the church and common lands provided new fields for wheat, the easiest of cash crops; the growth of such towns as Barcelona created a market for vegetables, wines, and fruit.
Expansion resulted in the classic expression of 19th-century liberalism—the haute bourgeoisie of finance and industry. Members of this new class ranged from solid Catalan manufacturers demanding protective tariffs to safeguard their gains to daring speculators such as José, marqués de Salamanca, a railway financier who took an active part in political life and the urbanization of Madrid. It also included successful generals ready to forget their humble origins. Together with the large landowners, these groups formed the oligarchy of liberalism.
The government that presided over this prosperity was O’Donnell’s Liberal Union, which was an attempt to fuse all dynastic parties in a broad-based coalition. It provided a long period of stable government (1856–63), and, had the Progressive politicians been less afraid of losing their left wing to the Democrats and had the queen been willing to grant Progressives power, the dynasty might have survived. Instead, she excluded the Progressives and forced them first to withdraw formally from political life and then to contemplate revolution. Their “sword,” General Juan Prim y Prats (a pharmacist’s grandson and a striking example of the social mobility of the liberal army), was a resolute conspirator and the ablest of the political generals of the 19th century. When Isabella’s court ministers alienated O’Donnell’s followers, a powerful coalition was formed, and Prim dropped his alliance with the Democrats. A series of mediocre ultraconservative governments, a growth in democratic agitation among university intellectuals (whose main concern was the hold of the church over education), and an economic slump caused by bad harvests gave wide support to the military rising against Isabella. Her armies would not defend her, and she was forced to leave for France in September 1868.
