page_title: Cantonal rebellion
section_title: The repression of the cantonal movement
hierarchical_section_title: Cantonal rebellion / The government of Nicolas Salmeron and the repression of the cantonal movement / The repression of the cantonal movement
caption_attribution_description: Manuel Pavía y Rodríguez de Alburquerque (1827–1895)
context_page_description: The Cantonal rebellion was a cantonalist insurrection that took place during the First Spanish Republic between July 1873 and January 1874. Its protagonists were the "intransigent" federal Republicans, who wanted to establish immediately the Federal Republic from the bottom-up without waiting for the Constituent Cortes to draft and approve the new Federal Constitution, as defended by the president of the Executive Power of the Republic Francisco Pi y Margall, a Proudhonian Mutualist supported by the "centrist" and "moderate" sectors of the Federal Democratic Republican Party.
  Pi y Margall was the principal translator of Proudhon's works, according to George Woodcock "These translations were to have a profound and lasting effect on the development of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but before that time Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement which sprang up in the early 1860s." According to the Encyclopædia Britannica "During the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a decentralized, or “cantonalist, ” political system on Proudhonian lines."
context_section_description: The motto of the government of Salmerón was the "rule of law", which meant that in order to save the Republic and the liberal institutions it was necessary to finish off the Carlists and Cantonalists. To quell the cantonal rebellion he took tough measures such as dismissing the civil governors, mayors and military who had somewhat supported the cantonalists and then appointed generals opposed to the Federal Republic such as Manuel Pavia or Arsenio Martínez Campos to send military expeditions to Andalusia and Valencia, respectively. "In addition, he mobilized the reservists, bolstered the Civil Guard with 30,000 men and appointed Government delegates in the provinces with the same powers as the Executive. He authorized the Provinces to impose war contributions and organize provincial armed bodies, and decreed that the ships held by the Canton of Cartagena be considered pirates - which meant that any vessel could take them down whether they were in Spanish waters or not". Thanks to these measures, the different cantons submitted one after another, except that of Cartagena which would resist until January 12 of 1874.
  General Manuel Pavia and the forces that were under his command departed on 21 July from Madrid for Andalusia on two trains, although they did not arrive in Córdoba until two days later because the route was intercepted in Despeñaperros which forced them to deviate through Ciudad Real and Badajoz. The day before his arrival, General Ripoll, who was to be relieved by General Pavia, had managed to disrupt the attempt to proclaim the canton of Córdoba by the "Volunteers of the Republic" who had come to the capital from the towns of the province, although the merit was attributed later by General Pavia, who said that the cantonalist forces dissolved when their arrival in the Cordoba capital took place. The first step Pavia took was to restore the discipline of the troops using expeditious methods and then prepared to attack the canton of Seville because its fall would demoralize the rest of the cantons of Andalusia. Pavia's troops left Córdoba for Seville on July 26. After two days of heavy fighting on the morning of July 30, he occupied the City Hall, although the control of the city was not completed until the next day, at the cost of 300 casualties - the cantonal casualties were many more but nobody accounted for them. The next day, August 1, Pavia made his official entry into Seville, and some of his troops were sent to the towns of the province to proceed to disarm the forces of the Canton of Seville whose capital had just fallen.
caption: General Manuel Pavía.
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