Reign of Alfonso XII

The reign of Alfonso XII of Spain began after the triumph of the Pronunciamiento de Sagunto of December 29, 1874, which put an end to the First Spanish Republic and ended with the death of King Alfonso on November 25, 1885, giving way to the Regency of his wife, María Cristina of Habsburg. During the reign, the political regime of the Restoration was created, which was based on the Spanish Constitution of 1876, in force until 1923. It was a constitutional monarchy, but neither democratic nor parliamentary, "although far from the party exclusivism of the Elizabethan era". "It was defined as liberal by its supporters and as oligarchic by its critics, particularly the regenerationists. Its theoretical foundations are to be found in the principles of doctrinaire liberalism", Ramón Villares has pointed out.
According to Carlos Dardé, it was "a brief reign ―just under eleven years― but an important one. At its end, the situation of Spain in all areas was much better than when it began. And, in spite of the uncertainty caused by the disappearance of the monarch ―especially because of the unknown succession― the improvement continued during the regency of María Cristina of Austria, during the minority of her posthumous son, Alfonso XIII. The foundations laid proved to be sufficiently solid. That reign had been a new starting point of the liberal regime in Spain".
The almost eleven years of the reign were years of economic growth based on the continuation of the railway network, foreign investments, the mining boom and the growth of agricultural exports, especially wine, taking advantage of the great phylloxera plague that was devastating the French vineyards. The great beneficiaries of this economic boom were the nobility and the high bourgeoisie, increasingly intertwined by matrimonial, personal and economic ties, thus constituting the "power bloc" of the Restoration, intimately connected with the political elite, fully identified with their interests. At the opposite extreme, in a society that remained agrarian (two thirds of the working population belonged to the primary sector) and in which the middle classes made up only 5 to 10% of the population, there were millions of poor day laborers in the southern half of the country.
The Glorious Revolution of September 1868 put an end to the reign of Isabella II and initiated the Sexenio Democrático. The queen, who was in San Sebastian, had to leave Spain and go into exile in France, under the protection of Emperor Napoleon III. She was accompanied by her daughters and the Prince of Asturias, Alfonso, who was about to turn 11 years old. They established their residence in Paris in the "beautiful" Basilewsky Palace which the ex-queen renamed the Palace of Castile. Prince Alfonso was enrolled in the elite and private Stanislas School and his political education was under the guidance of his preceptor Guillermo Morphy.
At the end of February 1870 the prince traveled to Rome to receive the first communion from Pius IX, but without achieving, as the ex-Queen intended, that the pope publicly recognize the Bourbon dynasty as the legitimate depositary of the rights to the Spanish throne and that he condemn the "revolutionary regime" established in Spain. What did happen was that of the forty-three members of the Spanish episcopate who were in Rome on the occasion of the celebration of the First Vatican Council, thirty-nine visited the prince, and one of them, the prestigious Archbishop of Valladolid, Cardinal Juan Ignacio Moreno y Maisonave, prepared him to receive the Eucharist.
Meanwhile in Madrid a Provisional Government had been established, presided over by General Serrano, who called elections to the Constituent Courts, which were the ones that elaborated and approved in June 1869 the new Constitution that established a "democratic" Monarchy. The Regency was assumed by General Serrano while General Prim occupied the presidency of the government and was in charge of touring the European Courts to find a candidate for the Spanish Crown.
To lead the Elizabethan cause in the interior of Spain and to work for her restoration to the throne, which she did not believe was far off, the ex-Queen appointed the moderate traditionalist Juan de la Pezuela, Count of Cheste, but he had to resign shortly afterwards, feeling disavowed by the letter sent to the ex-Queen in April 1869 by members of the leadership of the Moderate Party ―the party that had held power almost exclusively during her reign― in which they reproached her for continuing to be surrounded by the same people who were responsible for having caused her to lose the Crown. On the other hand, among the supporters of the Bourbons, the idea was spreading that the restoration of the dynasty would only be possible if Isabella II abdicated in Prince Alfonso of Asturias. The queen initiated a series of consultations on the question, and except for the narrow group of close friends headed by Carlos Marfori and the neo-Catholic sectors ―who considered that Catholic unity could be endangered―, all the others, a part of the moderates and all the unionists who had not joined the "revolution", were in favor of abdication. The Marquis of Molins expressed his wish that the coming prince would bring "more hopes than memories". Among the supporters of the abdication there was also a small group of deputies of the Constituent Courts self-defined as "liberal-conservative opposition" led by the former Unionist Antonio Cánovas del Castillo ―which would be the nucleus around which the Conservative Party of the Restoration would be formed―. Cánovas indicated in a letter to the ex-Queen how convenient it would be for his dynasty "to be represented by a new prince, well educated and totally alien to the complicated contemporary events".
Isabella II took a year to make up her mind and during that time she did not yield to the pressures she received. She abdicated the Crown to her twelve-year-old son Alfonso on June 20, 1870 in a "hasty and improvised" act, according to Isabel Burdiel, or "with extraordinary solemnity", according to Carlos Seco Serrano, held in the Palace of Castile. The reason she did so then was because the Prussian prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had shown his willingness to accept the proposal made to him by the president of the Spanish government, General Prim, to occupy the throne of Spain. But the immediate cause was the threat of Napoleon III that if he did not abdicate he would have to leave Paris. The French emperor was opposed to the candidacy of the Duke of Montpensier because he was a member of the House of Orleans and above all he was opposed to the candidacy of the Prussian prince, which would end up provoking the Franco-Prussian war and, after the French defeat in September 1870, the fall of the Second Empire. When the Republic was proclaimed in France, Isabella II, Prince Alfonso and the Infantas left Paris and went to live in Geneva, where they would reside until August 1871, when they returned to the French capital. The military man Tomás O'Ryan was in charge of the prince's education. In December 1871 he would be replaced by Morphy as the prince's tutor.
Once the option of Prince Hohenzollern was discarded, on November 16, 1870, the Cortes voted as King of Spain the new candidate proposed by General Prim: the second son of the King of Italy Victor Emmanuel II, Prince Amadeo of Savoy, who would reign under the title of Amadeo I. Regarding the new monarchy, while the Moderate Party continued to defend to the hilt the return to the situation prior to 1868, the small group of Cánovas maintained an "expectant" position, but when that failed and, above all, when in February 1873 the Republic was proclaimed, the Canovist group decidedly joined the defense of the cause of Prince Alfonso, whom Cánovas had known since he was a child and with whom he sympathized. From that date onwards he became the most prominent spokesman for "Alfonsism".
The ex-queen Isabella II had abdicated in June 1870 without having appointed anyone to assume the guardianship of Prince Alfonso (so it was she who continued to hold it) and also to direct the process of his restoration. A year and a half later, in January 1872, that position was occupied by her brother-in-law, the Duke of Montpensier, after having negotiated the conditions in Cannes, where he was residing at the time, with the former queen mother María Cristina, to whom Isabella II had delegated in September "the direction of the family affairs". Montpensier's strategy was reduced almost exclusively to seek the support of the high commands of the Army, especially that of General Serrano, and when he failed to achieve it, he resigned in January 1873, with which Isabella II recovered the guardianship over Prince Alfonso. The latter, as part of the "Cannes agreement" signed by Montpensier and María Cristina, had been sent in February 1872 to study at the renowned Royal and Imperial Teresian Academy of Vienna or Theresianum. During a visit he made with his mother to the castle that the Montpensier family had in Randan during Christmas 1872, he met their daughter, María de las Mercedes, twelve years old ―he was fifteen―, whom he would marry for love in 1878.
What was to be a decisive step in the Alfonsine restoration took place on August 22, 1873 ―in the midst of the cantonal rebellion after the proclamation of the Federal Republic and only one month after the pretender Carlos VII had returned to Spain, thus giving a great impulse to the third Carlist war― when Isabella II gave her full support to Cánovas, in spite of her antipathy towards him, and entrusted him with the direction of the Bourbon dynastic cause. As Carlos Dardé has pointed out, "the letter in which Cánovas was informed of his appointment ―signed by Isabel and by Alfonso, in accordance with the condition imposed by the politician from Malaga―... implied the explicit approval of the conduct followed by Cánovas in the revolutionary period". Cánovas opposed any revengeful policy and showed himself "resolved not to exclude". "I will not ask the one who comes [to our side] what he has been; it will be enough for me to know what he intends to be. If we ever succeed in placing Prince Alfonso on the throne, we will make use of all that is usable in the movement that overthrew Queen Isabella. To insist on re-establishing what happened would be a serious fault and its disastrous consequences would be felt first by the Monarchy and by us", wrote Cánovas. "For Cánovas conciliation was victory; revenge, his political and personal defeat", José Varela Ortega added.
The queen also granted him full powers to take care of the prince's education, and Cánovas decided that it was time for him to begin his military training, and "stop being a schoolboy", with the aim of turning him into a "King-soldier" because as he said in a letter to the former queen Isabel "we must give all honest military men the hope that from now on and as soon as Don Alfonso is in Spain, they will have in him a true leader and that under him they will serve the Motherland...". Although it took him a year to achieve his objective because of the opposition he encountered from the preceptor of Prince Guillermo Morphy, who wanted him to stay one more year at the Theresianum in Vienna so that he could finish his "moral and physical" training, in October 1874 Cánovas sent the prince, with his agreement ―although Alfonso would have preferred to go to a university in order to have a better knowledge of government affairs as a future constitutional king― and his mother, to the British Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst because, as he explained in a letter, "D. Alfonso has already been too long in Austria for it not to be convenient as soon as possible... to transfer him to a country... where there are more constitutional traditions". On the other hand, the ex-Queen seemed to assume the Canovist project that the restoration would only be possible with the support of all the liberal groups, without exclusions, unlike what had happened during her reign. She assured him in a letter: "Your idea is my idea and without this union of all the parties in the shadow of my son's flag, which is the only savior of the country, each one preserving his political aspirations, there is no possible future and the ruin of Spain is inevitable". In fact, as Isabel Burdiel has pointed out, "his intervention was decisive in getting the moderates to accept the Canovist leadership".
The original Canovist group was joined by former Unionists and even "repentant" former "revolutionaries" of 1868, such as Francisco Romero Robledo. All of them received the support of the social and economic elites ―especially from the Catalan and Madrid business world, particularly those related to the colonies― which was decisive in the consolidation of the "Alfonsinos". Manuel Suárez Cortina has pointed out that "the identification between revolution and democracy, the fear radiated by the Parisian Commune and the decisive fact that the Sexenio had not substantially altered the foundations of power had stimulated the reorganization of the sectors most inclined to liquidate the democratic experience. Thus, the Army, the Church and the middle and upper classes saw in the figure of Alfonso XII and the Restoration of the monarchy a new order, more adequate to the new international reality and the expectations of the conservative classes".
Cánovas did not want the Bourbon restoration to take place by means of the classic recourse to the pronunciamiento —"I would not want the Restoration of the legitimate constitutional Monarchy to be due to a coup de force", he wrote to a friend—, although he did not leave aside at all the contacts with the military commanders, but rather that it should be the result of a broad movement of opinion. As Suárez Cortina has pointed out, "Cánovas understood that the monarchy could not come about only through military action, but that it had to mature through political action, and only in a subsidiary way should the Army intervene, when the political work had already been developed".
This is how Cánovas himself explained it to the former Queen Isabel and to Prince Alfonso in two letters of January 1874, written after the triumph of the Pavía coup d'état which some generals linked to the Moderate Party had wanted to take advantage of to "pronounce themselves" in favor of Prince Alfonso and whom Cánovas himself managed to dissuade, in which he told them that it was necessary to create "much opinion in favor of Alfonso" with "calm, serenity, patience, as well as perseverance and energy". In April he insisted again in another letter sent to the former queen that "what we must do is to prepare the opinion widely and then wait with patience and foresight for a surprise, an outburst of the opinion itself, a blow perhaps unthought of, which will have to be taken advantage of promptly so that it is not wasted".
In order to win over "opinion", Cánovas encouraged the creation of Alfonsinos circles, which spread throughout the country, and of a related press —little by little they were buying newspapers both in the capital, where La Época stood out, and in the "provinces"—. As Manuel Suárez Cortina has pointed out, "it was soon fashionable to be Alfonsino: the clergy, the women of high society and the bourgeoisie, and broad sectors of the Army spread the Restoration ideal in a particularly effective way. As the English ambassador had pointed out, The Ladies Revolution, the presence of middle and upper class women, and the work of the tertulias and salons were fundamental in the diffusion and triumph of the Alfonsino movement". Among the supporters of the Canovist project —some historians, such as Manuel Espadas Burgos, consider it decisive—, the Spanish-Cuban pressure group, the slave lobby headed by the Marquis of Manzanedo and of which the Queen Mother María Cristina de Borbón —owner of a sugar mill on the island— was a member, very worried about the project of abolition of the slavery and that had a wide network of Spanish-Ultramarine Circles in Spain and Spanish casinos in Cuba and that especially counted on important bonds in the Army (in fact this group, with the count of Valmaseda, former captain general of Cuba to the front, will be behind the conspiracy that led to the pronunciamiento of Sagunto that made possible the restoration).
With the establishment of the unitary Republic presided over by General Serrano —after the triumph of Pavia's coup d'état on January 2, 1874— the conspiratorial initiatives in favor of the Bourbon restoration accelerated and multiplied. As Feliciano Montero has pointed out, "the problem for Cánovas was not so much to prevent military intervention as to control it and submit it to his broad restorationist, conciliatory, non-revanchist project". For this he counted on General Manuel Gutiérrez de la Concha e Irigoyen, a military man not linked to the Moderate Party, and who was in command of the Army of the North deployed in the Basque Country and Navarre, the strongholds of Carlism. The project of Cánovas and Concha was to take advantage of the end of the war which would have meant the capture of Estella, the capital of the Carlist State —the first step had already been taken with the capture of Bilbao in May 1874—, to proclaim Prince Alfonso as King of Spain, but General Cocha died in the siege of Estella, which did not fall, thus frustrating the whole plan. On the other hand, Cánovas did not trust General Martínez Campos, who would finally lead the pronunciamiento of Sagunto, due to his links with the Moderate Party, whose project was not the same as the Canovist one, as would be demonstrated at the beginning of the Restoration. On the other hand, when Cánovas went to see the ex-Queen in Paris on August 8 and 14, he reiterated his idea that the restoration of Prince Alfonso should come as a result of a broad movement of opinion.
On December 1, 1874, three days after Prince Alfonso had turned seventeen, Cánovas del Castillo took the initiative with the publication of what would be known as the Sandhurst Manifesto, carefully drafted by him and signed by the prince. Formally, it was a letter sent from the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where Prince Alfonso had entered at the beginning of October at the initiative of Cánovas with the aim of enhancing his constitutional image, in response to the numerous congratulations he had received from Spain on the occasion of his 17th birthday.
The letter-manifesto, although by Cánovas, passed through several hands, including the ex-Queen Isabella II, who, according to Cánovas, discussed it "at length". It was sent to several European newspapers, but not to any sovereign. Cánovas' objective was "that it is already understood that Spain has a king, capable of sceptre the power as soon as he is called", according to what he wrote to the ex-queen Isabella II.
In the Manifesto Prince Alfonso offered the restoration of the "hereditary and representative monarchy" in his person ("the only representative of the monarchical right in Spain") as "the only thing that already inspires confidence in Spain" since "the nation is now orphaned of all public right and indefinitely deprived of its liberties". The Manifesto concluded: "Whatever my own fate may be, I will not cease to be a good Spaniard, nor, like all my ancestors, a good Catholic, nor, as a man of the century, truly liberal". There is a broad historiographical consensus in considering that the Manifesto is a synthesis of the principles on which the political regime of the Restoration was to be based.
According to Ramón Villares, "its content should be understood as the expression of the political pact reached by the different internal factions of Alfonsismo at the end of 1874 to legitimize the Bourbon alternative and launch a program of action for the young prince... Its objective was to present both in Spain and abroad the general outlines of the political operation that was in the making".
Although Cánovas did not want it to be the work of a military pronunciamiento, in the early morning hours of December 29, 1874, General Arsenio Martínez Campos pronounced himself in Sagunto in favor of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Don Alfonso de Borbón. There he proclaimed him as the new king of Spain. "It was the "event" that was expected in the flag rooms and in the aristocratic salons adorned with the fleur-de-lis," commented Ramón Villares.
Behind the pronunciamiento were the generals linked to the Moderate Party, headed by the Count of Valmaseda, who had not liked the Sandhurst Manifesto because Cánovas had put his own thoughts into the prince's words, and its publication accelerated the preparations for the military coup. Valmaseda, who had been captain general of Cuba and during his mandate Martínez Campos had been its chief of staff, had the support of the Spanish-Cuban pressure group, interested in maintaining the status quo of the colony ―that is, the slave system― and worried that the war in Cuba would not result in "a second Haiti, from which horrified humanity averts its eyes", as it was said in a manifesto of the Spanish nobility.
Given the scarcity of the troops that Martínez Campos had assembled (some 1800 men), "since no other force was formally committed", the success of the pronunciamiento was due to the support given to him by the "september" general Joaquín Jovellar, commander in chief of the Army of the Center deployed to fight the Carlists. Jovellar sent a telegram to the Minister of War in which he told him "that a sentiment of elevated patriotism, inspired by the public good and the need to keep the Army united to confront the civil war and prevent the reproduction of anarchy, impelled him to accept the movement and place himself at its head". Martínez Campos also telegraphed the Minister of War and the President of the Government asking them to accept the new unique situation capable of "freeing the country from anarchy and civil war".
The government presided by the constitutionalist Práxedes Mateo Sagasta was willing to face the "rebels" and on the night of the 30th he got in telegraphic contact with the president of the Executive Power of the Republic, General Serrano, who was in Tudela —or in Miranda de Ebro—, leading the Army of the North that was going to launch a great offensive against the Carlists. But Serrano informed him that he had very few loyal forces willing to go to Madrid, once the decision of General Jovellar to support the pronunciamiento was known. In the last telegram —the exchange of messages had lasted an hour and a half— General Serrano told him: "Patriotism forbids me to have three governments in Spain [his, the Alfonsino and the Carlist]". He then crossed the Spanish-French border.
Almost at the same time, the captain general of Madrid, Fernando Primo de Rivera, another "septembrino" general who had initially shown himself loyal to the government, communicated to Sagasta that "I see myself in the sensitive necessity of manifesting to you that the garrison of Madrid is associated to the movement of the Army of the Center, and that a new government is going to be constituted" —at that moment the troops had already occupied the strategic points of the capital and surrounded the headquarters of the Ministry of War where the cabinet was meeting—. The response of the president of the government was to hand over power to him. It was 11 o'clock at night on December 30, 1874. The pronunciamiento initiated in Sagunto had triumphed.
On December 31 a Ministry-Regency was formed, presided over by Cánovas del Castillo, who during the pronunciamiento had remained "detained" in the civil government of Madrid together with other prominent Alfonsinos and where he had received the visit of General Primo de Rivera placing himself "unconditionally at his orders". "I have wished the Restoration in another way, but in view of the attitude of the Army and the unanimous opinion of the country, I accept and assume the procedure; I cannot oppose it; it is my duty; the Restoration is a fact", declared Cánovas. They immediately sent a telegram to the ex-Queen Isabella II to communicate to "her august son" that he had been proclaimed King of Spain "without struggle or bloodshed":
The Ministry-Regency assumed power on behalf of the king until he arrived in Spain from Paris, where he was spending the New Year with his mother and sisters ―he had arrived from London on December 30 in the afternoon― and without having any knowledge of what was being prepared, since in a letter he had assured Isabella II that he would return to Sandhurst "after the Epiphany with you". The ex-Queen gave him the telegram from Cánovas (and from Primo de Rivera) that she had received early in the morning of the 31st ―although the Prince already knew what had happened because of an anonymous note written in French that he had received the night before while attending the performance of an operetta at the Théâtre de la Gaîté―, but Prince Alfonso took five days to reply ―according to Seco Serrano, because "he preferred to wait until the new situation was confirmed"―. The telegram, whose content would be published in the Gaceta de Madrid on January 6, read as follows ―the allusion that his reign would be one of "true freedom" did not please the Moderate Party at all―:
Cánovas wrote to the king that he should return to Spain alone, in reference to his mother not accompanying him (nor the Duke of Montpensier). In a later letter Cánovas explained to the former queen, "with a hardness that Isabella II had probably not heard from anyone", why he should remain in Paris: "V.M. is not a person, it is a reign, it is a historical epoch, and what the country needs is another reign and another epoch different from the previous ones". The new King Alfonso XII arrived in Barcelona on Saturday, January 9, 1875, from Marseilles, where he had traveled from Paris on the 6th ―before leaving, he had met with the Spanish embassy staff, assuring them that his intention was "to be king of all Spaniards"―. General Martinez Campos ―the military man who had led the pronunciamiento of Sagunto and who had just been named captain general of Catalonia―, boarded the screw frigate Navas de Tolosa that had brought him from Marseilles to greet him and then walked through the streets of Barcelona, being acclaimed by the crowd. In response to the welcoming speech of the mayor of the city, the Marquis of Sentmenat and Ciutadilla, the new king said that he considered "as one of my best glories the title of Count of Barcelona: of this noble and industrious country that I love so much since I learned its history". This was followed by a solemn Te Deum in the cathedral and in the evening a gala performance at the Gran Teatro del Liceo. The king telegraphed to his mother: "My mother: the reception that Barcelona has given me exceeds my hopes, would exceed your wishes...". Late on Sunday, January 10, he left for Valencia in the same screw frigate Navas de Tolosa that had brought him from Marseilles, and from there, after a brief stay in which again "the popular enthusiasm was reproduced", he went by train to Madrid where he arrived on the 14th. His entrance in the capital was "apotheosic", according to the chronicles of the time. However, Carlos Dardé has pointed out that "the Restoration, however, was far from arousing great enthusiasm. What several impartial observers emphasized most was precisely the opposite, the indifference with which the majority of Spaniards welcomed both the fall of the previous institutions and the establishment of the new regime".
As soon as he arrived in Madrid, Alfonso XII confirmed the government that Cánovas had formed in his name on December 31. He had taken care to integrate in it not only his supporters, such as Pedro Salaverría in the Treasury or the Marquis of Molins in the Navy, but also two significant politicians of the Sexenio, Francisco Romero Robledo, Minister of the Interior, and Adelardo López de Ayala, Minister of Overseas Territories, as well as a military man who represented the generals, the "septembrist" General Jovellar, who occupied the portfolio of War. His objective was to make "liberal, but conservative politics" and to avoid giving in to "democratic principles", but not to be dominated by "reaction", which was already represented by the Carlists, still at war. It also included a member of the Moderate Party, the Marquis of Orovio, who was at the head of the Ministry of Development. Cánovas did not offer any ministry to General Martínez Campos, nor to his main supporter, the Count of Valmaseda, both linked to the Moderate Party. He named the former captain general of Catalonia and the latter captain general of Cuba, thus distancing them from Madrid. Many moderates rejected the offer to join his government when they learned that they were going to form part of it known as "septembrinos" and when Cánovas confirmed to them that he did not intend to reestablish the Constitution of 1845. One of the most prominent moderates, Claudio Moyano, told him that he considered collaboration impossible "given the path I presume you intend to follow".
A few days after his entry into Madrid, Alfonso XII marched to the northern front, assuming the role of "soldier-king" that Cánovas had assigned him. In Peralta (Navarra) he appealed to the Carlists in favor of peace ("Before unfurling my flag in battle, I want to present myself to you with an olive branch in my hand"), but he also assured them that he was not going to "tolerate even a useless war like the one you wage against the rest of the nation" and "that they had no reason to continue it" ("if you took up arms moved by the monarchic faith, see in me the legitimate representative of a dynasty that was loyal to you until its passing fall. If it was religious faith that put arms in your hands, in me you already have a Catholic king like his ancestors. I am indeed also, and will be, a constitutional king, but you, who have such great love for your venerated liberties, can you harbor the evil desire to deprive the other Spaniards of their legitimate and already accustomed liberties?"). But the "proclamation of Peralta" had no echo among the Carlist ranks ―the war would still last another year― and before returning to the capital he passed through Logroño where he greeted the progressive general Baldomero Espartero, a symbol of openness to all the liberal families of the new monarchy. The King had already made this clear when, as soon as he arrived in Spain, he responded with a firm tone to the speech of the Archbishop of Valencia who had warned him that he was ascending "to the august throne of the Reccareds and the Ferdinands": "My desire is to give peace, justice, true freedom to all, absolutely all Spaniards, because I am not coming to be king of a party but of the whole of Spain". Precisely on his role as constitutional monarch Cánovas commented privately:
The King was at the front for two weeks, his life being in grave danger on one occasion, and on his return to Madrid, where he made his entry on February 13, he made some gestures with the "September revolutionaries", such as the decoration he gave to Dr. Pedro González de Velasco ―a well-known leftist man―, the interview he held with General Serrano, the last Head of State of the Republic, or the banquet he gave in the Palace to which he invited the leaders of the Constitutional Party, including its leader Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the last President of the Government during the Republic. Both Serrano and Sagasta were in favor of collaborating especially to "defeat the enemy of freedom", Carlism. In fact, on January 5, only a few days after the triumph of Martínez Campos's pronunciamiento, an editorial in La Iberia, the newspaper of the constitutionalists, had said that the Constitutional Party, "the most genuine representation of the September Revolution", "maintains the defense of the Spanish Constitution of 1869, but shows itself ready to collaborate with the new regime to defeat Carlism and put an end to the Cuban insurrection". In a speech delivered a year later before the Cortes, Alfonso XII recognized the work done by the constitutionalists "before my accession to the throne to reorganize the country, giving it the means to dominate the Carlist civil war, the Cuban filibustering and internal anarchy".
However, the leader of the Radical Republican Party Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla maintained his rejection of the new regime and that same month of February he was expelled from Spain accused of maintaining contacts with the military for conspiratorial purposes. The journalist Ángel Fernández de los Ríos was also banished, in spite of having been a friend of Cánovas.
The Liberal-Conservative Party governed between 1875 and 1881 with Antonio Cánovas del Castillo as president of the executive except for two brief periods when the politician from Malaga resigned for tactical reasons. The first was between September and December 1875 when Cánovas handed over the presidency of the government to General Jovellar so that the responsibility of calling general elections by universal suffrage would fall on someone else, since he was against this procedure. The other brief period was from March to December 1879, when General Martínez Campos replaced Cánovas at the head of the executive because the latter did not want to preside over an electoral process twice in succession ―and also because he did not want to take charge of the difficult application of the peace of Zanjón which Martínez Campos had agreed with the Cuban insurgents―. Cánovas returned to power when Martínez Campos resigned due to the obstacles placed by the Cortes resulting from the Spanish general elections of 1879 to the colonial and military reforms he wanted to implement.
For the liberal opposition, headed by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the conservative government had extended too long, and denounced it as "an authoritarianism bordering on dictatorship". The truth was that between January 1875 and January 1877 Cánovas del Castillo governed under a regime of exception, with very limited public liberties, which is why this period is also known as the "dictatorship of Cánovas". This regime of exception lasted beyond the promulgation of the Constitution in June 1876, since it was only put to an end with the approval of the Law of January 1877, which regulated, albeit restrictively, the freedoms, in addition to justifying the period of exception.
The fundamental objective of the political project of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo ―who prided himself on "paying due tribute to prudence, to the spirit of compromise, to the law of reality"― was to achieve, at last, the consolidation and stability of the liberal State, on the basis of the Constitutional Monarchy defined in the Sandhurst Manifesto. And for this, Cánovas thought, it was essential not to repeat the mistake that led to the failure of the Monarchy of Isabella II: the exclusive linking of the Crown with one of the currents of liberalism (moderantism), which forced the other (progressivism) to resort to force (the pronunciamiento and juntismo) in order to gain access to power. Thus, it had to be possible, Cánovas thought, for the various liberal factions to alternate in the exercise of power without endangering the system itself. Furthermore, if the "political game" was based on the peaceful "turn" in the access to power of the two great currents of liberalism, the military would be relegated to its specific sphere and civil society would regain the leading role. It was therefore necessary to demilitarize (civilize) political life and depoliticize the Army.
In order to implement his political project, Cánovas had the absolute confidence of King Alfonso XII, who in a conversation with the British ambassador Austen Henry Layard had expressed his desire to "introduce in Spain the constitutional system to which England owed its liberties and greatness". For this reason, Cánovas was pleased with the king whom he considered "frank, noble and loyal".
The main obstacle that Cánovas del Castillo encountered did not come from the left, but from the Moderate Party ―"the reactionary section of the Alfonsino party", as the English ambassador Layard called it― which wanted to return to the situation prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1868, as if nothing had happened since then. Although the ultimate goal pursued by Cánovas was to divide them and attract them to his project, at the beginning he made concessions to the moderates and the first measures agreed by the new government meant a revision of what had been done during the Sexenio, besides building a very negative image of the period and especially of the first year of the First Spanish Republic, described by the traditionalist Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo as "times of apocalyptic desolation".
Cánovas' harmony with the moderates was especially evident in three areas: relations with the Catholic Church, fundamental rights and academic freedom. In the first, the government agreed to the reestablishment of the Concordat of 1851 —which meant the restitution of the budget for Worship and Clergy to cover the expenses of the Church— and the repeal of the laws of the Sexenio most fought against by Catholics, among which civil marriage, established for the first time in Spain by the Provisional Civil Marriage Law of 1870, stood out —thus reintroducing canonical marriage as obligatory—. In addition, the government ordered the closure of some Protestant temples, newspapers and schools, and tolerated the publication of insulting articles against non-Catholic beliefs. Contacts were also initiated to re-establish relations with the Holy See and archives, libraries and artistic objects were returned to the Church. In the decree regulating the press of January 29, 1875, the crime of insulting the Church was included.
In the second area, that of fundamental rights, their exercise was very limited, such as the freedoms of expression, assembly and association ―hence the term "dictatorship of Cánovas" was used to refer to his first two years of government, since during that time he governed under a regime of exception―. Some opposition newspapers were closed ―the republican ones almost disappeared― and the rest were subjected to the regime of prior censorship. A decree issued as soon as the government was formed established what the press could and could not publish, expressly prohibiting "direct or indirect attacks, nor by means of allegories, metaphors or drawings, on the monarchic-constitutional system" (although criticism of the government and its policies was admitted). The jury law was also suspended. Four years later, in 1879, a very restrictive printing law was promulgated on the initiative of the Minister of the Interior, Romero Robledo, in which it was considered a crime to "proclaim maxims contrary to the monarchical-constitutional system" or "to question the legitimacy of a general election". In June 1880 a law on the right of assembly, also very restrictive ―it differentiated between legal and illegal parties―, confirmed "the authoritarian, almost dictatorial, component that moved much of the legislation and political action of the Canovism in this first stage". On the other hand, the law of December 16, 1876 established that the mayors of towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants would be appointed by the king, that is, by the government, and that the municipal budgets had to have the approval of the civil governor of each province, appointed by the government.
In the third area, that of academic freedom, the Orovio Decree, signed by the reactionary Minister of Public Works Manuel Orovio Echagüe and promulgated in February 1875, prohibited university professors from teaching ideas contrary to Catholic orthodoxy and the constitutional monarchy, which gave rise to the second university question. In the circular that accompanied the decree addressed to the rectors of the universities and signed by Minister Orovio, the latter were invited "not to consent that in the chairs supported by the State they should explain against the Catholic dogma that is the social truth in our country" and it was also warned that any professor who "did not recognize the established regime or taught against it" would be sanctioned. The first conflict provoked by Orovio's circular took place at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where professors Laureano Calderón (Pharmacy) and Augusto González de Linares (Medicine), both disciples of the Krausist Francisco Giner de los Ríos, were removed from their professorships and imprisoned in a military prison for explaining Darwinist doctrines. Calderón declared: "I have not been appointed professor to train catechumens of any religion or supporters of any political system, but to teach science". A wave of solidarity was immediately unleashed by about forty university and high school professors, led by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Nicolás Salmerón, the latter a former president of the executive branch of the Republic, who were joined by prominent liberal and republican politicians and academics, including Emilio Castelar, who had already been the protagonist of the first university question of 1866. All of them were removed from their professorships or resigned from them. Many of these professors expelled from the University founded the following year the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, an educational organization ―a "counter-university"― that would exert an enormous influence on Spanish cultural and scientific life, especially during the first third of the 20th century.
According to José Varela Ortega, "what happened reflected, in reality, the frictions between the two factions of Canovism, between the politicians of Moderate origin and those of September origin; and, ultimately, it was one more episode in the offensive of the Moderate Party against Canovism". Feliciano Montero has subscribed to Varela Ortega's interpretation of the episode insofar as it would indeed form part of "the moderate-Canovist struggle for the definition of the new regime. The Orovio decree... would be a maneuver of the moderates to sabotage the presumed openness of Canovism towards the unionists and the constitutionalists, as well as to affirm their intransigent positions in defense of Catholic unity. Cánovas, in spite of his efforts to reach a de facto agreement with the Krausists so as not to make the punishment effective, would have been forced to accept for the time being this situation so contrary to his projects". In fact, Cánovas considered the Orovio decree "a barbarity" —so did the king— and tried to mediate, without success, with the university professors who refused to obey it and left the University. At the first opportunity, Cánovas dismissed Orovio and his replacement, the "septembrino" Cristóbal Martín de Herrera, immediately repealed Osorio's measures (although the professors would not recover their professorships until the arrival of the liberals to power in February 1881). Moreover, the Krausistas did not find any obstacle to start up the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and develop their activities. But, "the episode soured relations between the Government and the Radical and Constitutional politicians".
Manuel Suárez Cortina, for his part, considers that Cánovas allowed the "Orovio decree" to facilitate the entry of the moderates into the new order ―and into the new liberal-conservative party he wanted to lead―. With the same purpose ―"to give confidence to the moderate sectors and neutralize any attempt to put an end to the regime"― he also "sought the reestablishment of relations with the Vatican, restored the budget for worship and clergy [the economic endowment that the State gave to the Catholic Church] and reintroduced the obligatory nature of canonical marriage". According to Carlos Seco Serrano, Orovio's presence in the government ―and his controversial decree― was due to "the fact that the civil war had not yet been defeated, demanded, in any case, the adoption of political measures that could suppose a more or less homologous "gesture" with the monarchic and religious concept that animated the Carlist camp ―in order to disarm it ideologically"―. Eleven years later, at the beginning of the Regency of María Cristina de Habsburgo, Cánovas would defend this policy in Parliament against the attacks launched against him by the Republican Nicolás Salmerón, one of the victims of the "Orovio decree", who described him as Torquemada. On that occasion Cánovas replied:
But Cánovas did not compromise with the three demands of the moderates, in which he had the full backing of King Alfonso XII: the reestablishment of the Spanish Constitution of 1845 ―which had governed the Monarchy of Isabella II―, the restitution of "Catholic unity" ―with the consequent prohibition of all non-Catholic worship and the Church's monopoly in the primordial social activities (birth, marriage, burial) and in education― and the immediate return of Queen Isabella II from her exile in Paris ―although Cánovas did consider it "essential" that the King's older sister Isabel de Borbón y Borbón, popularly known as La Chata, should return to Spain alone, since she was the next in line to the throne, while Alfonso XII had no descendants, and therefore held the title Princess of Asturias; and he also authorized the return of General Serrano, the last president of the Executive Power of the Republic―. General Martínez Campos himself threatened with a second pronunciamiento if Catholic unity was not recognized and the Constitution of 1845 was not reestablished. Only the personal intervention of the king and the promise to send him to Cuba managed to dissuade him, although other generals, such as the Count of Cheste and the Count of Valmaseda, continued to press for the return of the ex-Queen Isabella II to Spain.
The moderates mounted an impressive opinion campaign demanding the return to the prohibition of non-Catholic worship. They demanded to return "to Spain its fortunate Catholic unity [because], possessing the only truth in religion, it was absurd for a Catholic nation to grant equal respect and rights to an error as to the [Catholic] truth, symbol of the greatness of other times, emblem of our ancient glories and the most brilliant and splendid flower of the Crown of two worlds". So many signatures were collected that the sheets were taken in wagons to the seat of government. The Holy See also pressed firmly for the reestablishment of Catholic unity, even threatening not to send a new nuncio. It had the support of the Spanish bishops —one of them proclaimed: "the immense majority of the nation wants the Roman Catholic apostolic religion alone! alone!"— and of a broad sector of the population, especially those linked to the moderates and the Carlists, for whom this question was non-negotiable. A lady of Madrid's high society threatened to "make Don Carlos king" if the king and the government tolerated "missionaries and Protestant propaganda in Spain". But Cánovas flatly refused to reestablish Catholic unity because he considered that it would prevent the "revolutionaries of '68" from supporting the new monarchy, which would make it non-viable in the long run, and also because it would isolate it internationally —religious tolerance was the "way to convince Europe that the Restoration did not mean a reaction", Cánovas affirmed—. The king supported it without fail, in spite of the "systematic siege" to which he was subjected "by Moderate politicians, a large part of the nobility and high clergy, and even by the princess of Asturias, favorable de cuore, in the opinion of the pontifical representative, to the Catholic cause". To the bishop of Salamanca, Alfonso XII said in a public reception: "I am a Catholic king but, nevertheless, I will do everything in my power so that in my dominions any religion can be practiced with freedom; besides it is useless to discuss this question because Europe has already decided on it".
As for ex-Queen Isabella II, unwilling "to play decorative roles", Cánovas sent her a letter to Paris in April 1875 explaining why she should not come to Spain:
Not only Cánovas, but also his own son urged him not to travel to Spain, alleging that "no one can impose his will on the King". Isabella II was only allowed to come to Spain after the approval of the Constitution and she was not authorized to take up permanent residence in the country or to live in Madrid. As Isabel Burdiel has pointed out, "when she briefly returned to Spain, she did so feeling, as she herself said, a kind of vagabond: she resided for some time in Seville, spent time in the spas of the North or in the royal palaces around Madrid. Over time, her stays in the capital were tolerated, but it was always ensured that her visits were as short and discreet as possible". His greatest humiliation was not being informed of his son's decision to marry her niece, María de las Mercedes de Orleans, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier and her sister María Luisa Fernanda de Borbón. In fact he tried to make public his opposition to the marriage, but Cánovas prevented her from doing so. "She did not attend the wedding [held in Madrid on January 23, 1878]. Her return to Paris was considered definitive. She lived there until her death [in 1904], although she returned to Spain on several occasions," Isabel Burdiel has pointed out.
In view of Cánovas' determination to approve a new Constitution, which became clear in May 1875 when the parliamentarians of the two previous monarchies, the Elizabethan and the Amadeist, met and formed the commission of notables to draft it, many moderates switched to Canovism and were rewarded with government positions. According to Fidel Gómez Ochoa, "in that act the Liberal-Conservative Party took its first form". The definitive blow to the Moderate Party was dealt by Francisco Romero Robledo, Minister of the Interior, when in the Spanish general elections of 1876, held in January, he only allowed it to obtain a very limited number of seats (12), compared to 333 for the Canovists —the Moderate Party would be dissolved seven years later—. According to Feliciano Montero, Cánovas' refusal to reestablish Catholic unity "became precisely the key to the dissolution of the moderates as a group, and the definitive configuration of their political party, the liberal-conservative". The same affirms Fidel Gómez Ochoa —the denial of Catholic unity was "a reason for the moderates to consider the Restoration amputated and confidence violated"—, but he also adds the call for the first elections by universal suffrage, which a prominent moderate rejected in a letter addressed to the king because it "called into question the legitimate right of V. M. to the throne".
In response to the Moderate Party's pretensions to reestablish the Spanish Constitution of 1845, Cánovas imposed his criterion of drafting and approving a new Constitution. For this purpose, he attracted the sector of the Constitutional Party headed by Manuel Alonso Martínez, who formed a new political group called the Parliamentary Center. On May 20, 1875, on the initiative of the "centralists" supported by the government, an Assembly of Notables met, made up of 341 ex-deputies and ex-monarchist senators from the Elizabethan era and the Sexenio. Alonso Martínez established the limits of the meeting (the Monarchy of Alfonso XII could not be questioned) and its purpose (the establishment of constitutional bases to consolidate the throne).
As in the Assembly of Notables the moderates had the majority, Cánovas maneuvered so that the elaboration of the constitutional bases would be entrusted to a commission of 39 of them, in which moderates, canovists and centralists would be equally represented, entrusting the drafting of the bases to a subcommission formed by nine people, among them Alonso Martínez. The main difficulty in the work of the commission and of the subcommission was the question of Catholic unity, which would not finally be included in base 11. The moderates publicly expressed their disagreement in a manifesto of August 3 calling for a protest by Catholics. On the other hand, around the Canovist nucleus, which was joined by former moderates, the Liberal-Conservative Party would emerge, headed by Cánovas himself, and whose birth is considered by some historians to have taken place precisely in the Assembly of Notables.
The government then summoned elections, opening a debate in the council of ministers on whether universal (male) suffrage should be maintained in accordance with the Electoral Law of 1869, a legislation of the "revolutionary era". At the proposal of Cánovas himself, it was agreed that they would be convened by universal suffrage "for this one time only", a concession to the constitutionalists so that they would be integrated into the new monarchy and this outraged the moderates. Cánovas then presented his resignation in order to be coherent with his own convictions against universal suffrage and to replace in the same operation the three most right-wing ministers, all of them of moderate origin, one of them the Marquis of Orovio. He was replaced by General Joaquín Jovellar, who would occupy the presidency of the Government exclusively during the period of preparation of the electoral lists, although in fact "the chief was Cánovas and the policy was made from his private residence", as a foreign ambassador commented. Cánovas' opposition to universal suffrage would not change and when it was finally approved in June 1890 at the proposal of the liberal government of Sagasta, he stated during the debate on the law that its "sincere" application, "if it gives a real vote in the governance of the country to the crowd, not only uneducated, which would be the least of it, but [to] the miserable and beggar crowd", "would be the triumph of communism and the ruin of the principle of property".
On the eve of the celebration of the elections, held on January 20–24, 1876, while the ecclesiastical hierarchy deployed a campaign forbidding Catholics to vote for the propagators of "that freedom of perdition", in reference to the religious tolerance advocated by the Canovists and the centralists, the Commission of Notables published the Manifesto of the Notables in which it justified the constitutional bases it had drawn up with a vision of the great objective of "strengthening . ... the conquests of the modern spirit, establishing public order on solid foundations and protecting the fundamental principles of the Spanish monarchy from dangerous contingencies".
As a result of the "maneuvers" of the Minister of the Interior Francisco Romero Robledo, the elections, in which there was an abstention which, according to official figures, exceeded 45% —65% in the large cities— resulted in an overwhelming majority for Canovas in the Cortes (333 deputies out of 391) and the moderates only obtained twelve seats —"they were destroyed at the ballot box"— so that many members of the old party of the Elizabethan era joined the party of Cánovas. The definitive straw was dealt to the moderates by Cánovas when, on the occasion of the discussion of article 11 of the Constitution, that did not recognize the Catholic unity advocated by the moderates, he forced them to pronounce themselves by raising a cabinet question. The "agony" of the Moderate Party, "however, lasted until 1882. The total absorption of Moderantism by the Liberal Conservative Party was only completed when, in 1884, the Catholic Union, founded by Pidal in 1881, joined the party".
On the contrary, to Sagasta's constitutionalists, after a previous pact, Romero Robledo "granted" them twenty-seven seats ―one of them for Sagasta himself for Zamora, which he would enjoy almost permanently― as a reward for the recognition they had made in November 1875 of the new monarchy by publicly declaring their pretension of "being today the most liberal party of the Government within the constitutional Monarchy of Alfonso XII".
The Cortes that came out of the elections, baptized by some critics as Las Cortes de los Milagros in reference to the massive electoral fraud, were the ones that from February 15, 1876, the day on which the king solemnly inaugurated the legislature, discussed the draft of the Constitution in very few sessions ―the titles relating to the Crown and its powers were not debated at the proposal of Cánovas, despite the protests of the few republican deputies, such as Emilio Castelar― and finally approved it on May 24 in Congress ―by 276 votes against 40― and on June 22 in the Senate ―by 130 against 11―. "The Cortes found themselves confronted with the fact that their work was not properly constituent. They limited themselves to accept the text of the Commission and to approve its content... On the last day of June the Constitution was ready for its promulgation".
The Constitution, a brief text (89 articles plus one additional article), was a sort of synthesis of the Constitutions of 1845 ―moderate― and 1869 ―democratic―, but with a strong predominance of the former, since it included its fundamental doctrinal principle: the shared sovereignty of the Cortes with the king, to the detriment of the principle of national sovereignty on which the Constitution of 1869 was based. The latter retained the broad declaration of individual rights, but recognized them with restrictions by opening up the possibility of ordinary laws limiting them, restricting their exercise or even suspending them.
As for the conflictive issues, an ambiguous wording was chosen, to be determined by the laws that would develop it, thus making it possible for each party, conservative or liberal, to govern with its own principles, without the need to alter the Constitution. This was the case of suffrage, since it was left to the electoral law to determine whether it would be restricted ―as defended by the moderates and the Canovists― or universal ―as defended by Sagasta's constitutionalist "revolutionaries"―. However, with one or the other law ―the 1878 law that determined the return to restricted suffrage, with which only 850,000 people had the right to vote; or the 1890 law that definitively established universal suffrage (male), with which between four and a half and five million people had the right to vote― fraud was what characterized the elections of the Restoration. Governments were formed before the elections and then called and always obtained a large majority in Congress.
As for the most controversial issue, which was undoubtedly the religious question, the freedom of worship recognized in the Spanish Constitution of 1869 was abolished, but Cánovas had to use all his authority to prevent the reintroduction of Catholic unity (as in the Constitution of 1845). Cánovas' alternative affirmed the confessional (Catholic) character of the State, but at the same time established tolerance for other religions which were allowed to worship privately. The conflictive article 11 of the Constitution, personally drafted by Cánovas himself, finally remained as follows:
The Catholic Church would end up accepting the new situation, since it trusted that the subsequent organic laws would respect its interests, which indeed happened, as the Spanish Cardinal Primate acknowledged years later: "article 11 of the Constitution has protected Catholic interests more effectively than a prohibitive provision".
For the drafters of the Constitution, with Cánovas del Castillo at the forefront, "the Monarchy in Spain was not merely a form of government, but the very core of the Spanish State. That is why Cánovas suggested to the Commission of Notables that in its opinion it should propose the exclusion of the titles and articles referring to the Monarchy from the examination and debate of the Cortes. The Monarchy was thus above the legislative determinations, both of an ordinary and constitutional nature". "In Cánovas' thinking, the Monarchy was the representation par excellence of sovereignty, but also the symbol of legality and permanence, above the struggle of the parties", said Manuel Suárez Cortina.
For Cánovas del Castillo, what happened during the Monarchy of Isabella II and during the Sexenio Democrático showed that it was not the opinion of civil society that determined which political option was to occupy power, since it was the governments that "made" the parliamentary majorities they needed to govern, rather than the elections that "made" the governments. The proof was that governments always won elections, regardless of their party. "If there is anything in which we have an evident inferiority with respect to all other constitutional nations, that something is the strength, the independence, the initiative of the electoral body," said Cánovas. "Here the government has been the great corrupter. The electoral body, in great part,... is nothing but a mass that moves at the push and at the will of the governments", he added. An opinion that was shared by other politicians, such as Manuel Alonso Martínez: "The electoral body is completely lacking today in Spain (...) There is nothing more unequal in Spain than the struggle of the elector with the government; the power, which has in its hands immense means, is generally prodigal and generous with the friendly elector, while it is unjust and even cruel with the adversary elector...". Also by the constitutionalists of Sagasta. His newspaper La Iberia published in March 1877: "Can it be denied that our customs are bad?... What government has been defeated in the electoral struggle?.... None. This proves that we lack... good practices and the moderation, temperance and impartiality of the rulers".
Thus, it would be necessary to resort to some other instrument to guarantee the alternation of the two great liberal political options, and for Cánovas del Castillo, that "other" instrument was the Crown. The Crown thus became the "moderating power", the guarantor that the governments would not perpetuate themselves in power, even if they had lost the confidence of "opinion" ―of public opinion, of the voters― thanks to the mechanisms they possessed to manipulate the elections. The Crown, then, will be the one to determine the changes of government based on the interpretation it makes of the changes it detects in "opinion". In short, for Cánovas, the Crown was the only possible guarantor of "national sovereignty" given the lack of political independence of "civil society" as a whole. "The king does not abide, in order to designate a government, by the opinion of the electoral body expressed in parliamentary majorities. It was the opposite: the king appoints a head of government who proposes ministers to the king, who receives a decree of dissolution [of the Cortes], and who calls new elections, agreeing on the results with the various political forces ("encasillado") capable of mobilizing their respective clienteles; in this way "elections are held" which, unfailingly, provide comfortable majorities to the government that convenes them", stated José María Jover.
Consequently, as Carlos Dardé has pointed out, "in the king was deposited the practical exercise of sovereignty since it was he who granted power to a party which then held elections, in which it always obtained victory. This royal attribution ―the task of forming the government, which carried with it the decree of dissolution of the existing Cortes and the call for new elections― was called "the royal prerogative" par excellence. And indeed it was". "Given the governmental practice of using all the resources of power to achieve victory in the elections, the monarch became the cornerstone of the system". The British ambassador to Spain, Robert Morier, put it this way in 1882 to his government:
However, as Ramón Villares has pointed out, the exercise of the "moderating power" by the king will be "plagued with difficulties to the point that the function of the monarch could be defined as that of a "pilot without a compass", that is, a figure endowed with enormous powers but lacking the necessary instruments to perform them adequately". José María Jover has posed the same problem: "Lacking the indicator of authentic elections, to what indicator does the king abide to give power to one or another leader, to one or another political party?" Jover answers following José Varela Ortega: to "his capacity to maintain the "unity of the party", his capacity to agglutinate his own political hemisphere, within the bipartisanship imposed by the constitutional practice".
The principle of "shared sovereignty" king/courts sanctioned in the Constitution ―in its article 18 it is said that "the power to make laws resides in the Cortes with the King"― was the legal cover for the Crown's function of distributing power to the parties. This meant, undoubtedly, granting the Crown a personal and extraordinary power ―not absolute, as it was limited by the Constitution and the other political conventions―, but it was justified, according to Cánovas, by the lack of an electorate independent of the governments. "The Monarchy among us has to be a real and effective, decisive, moderating and directing force, because there is no other in the country", Cánovas affirmed. "It is necessary that the Moderating power [the Crown] supplants some of the functions that in a normal and perfect representative regime should be performed by the electoral body", stated the liberal politician Manuel Alonso Martínez, a great ally of Cánovas in the drafting of the Constitution of 1876. In short, as the historian Ramón Villares has pointed out, "the monarch held in his hands all the keys to the political system of the Restoration". Thus, governments must enjoy the "double confidence" of the Cortes and the King in order to exercise as such. "According to article 49, no mandate of the king could be carried out without the endorsement of a minister. When the king disagreed with his ministers, there was no other formula than to dismiss the Government or to compromise and submit to its criterion".
Thus, the figure of the king constituted the basic axis of the Restoration regime, since political life revolved around him. The so-called "royal prerogative" consisted precisely in the Crown's capacity to arbitrate over it. As Manuel Suárez Cortina has pointed out, "Cánovas achieved an old purpose, that the Monarchy should be real and effective, moderator and director of political life as long as there was not a stable and mature electoral body to determine the channels through which the action of the Government should go". However, Suárez Cortina warns, the price was "the permanent fraud with which the elections were carried out in the Spain of the Restoration... Political life represented a fiction, where the real actors, the voters, were substituted by the royal will, propitiating a political turn that gave stability to the system, but which in turn was done with its back to the national will. It was the means used by the conservative bourgeoisies, after the political morass represented by the democratic Sexenio".
Carlos Dardé agrees: "By deciding that it was the king who alternatively distributed power, the pronunciamientos as a mean to achieve it became meaningless, but it also discouraged the electoral struggle... It did not completely annul the competition between the parties ―because the king, in the exercise of his function, should take into account the social component of each one― but it tended to weaken it, and to delay political mobilization. Worse still, the clientelist component of the parties was reinforced; that is to say, favor and cronyism as basic criteria in the distribution of the benefits inherent to power, rather than general, rational and universal principles. Given, on the other hand, that justice was also mediatized by political power, "corruption and bribery had no other brake than individual morality," as Joaquín Romero Maura has pointed out. The system's lack of moral legitimacy ended up taking a costly toll". The king himself privately confessed that he had completely failed in his ambition to "moralize the Spanish public administration" and that "the worst thing was that all this was seen with the greatest tranquility".
As José María Jover has pointed out, "any historical analysis of the Constitution of 1876 must start from the fact that the political dynamics foreseen in its articles ―the decisive role of the electoral body, of the parliamentary majorities that theoretically share with the king the function of maintaining or overthrowing governments― not only is it not going to develop in practice in accordance with such formal provisions, but its very architects count beforehand on this mismatch between the letter and the reality of its application". Based on this duality "formal constitution and real functioning of political life", "the parties could [from power] develop their projects at the same time that they had the budget and jobs in the administration to satisfy their clientele; that is, to grant favors to their followers, who could share common ideas, but also sought material benefits", asserted Carlos Dardé.
One of the priorities of the conservative government of Cánovas was to put an end to the two wars that still continued when the monarchy was restored: the war in Cuba and the Third Carlist War. Regarding the latter, the government's political objective was to try to eliminate the support received by the Carlists from Catholic sectors and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The revision of the "anti-religious" measures adopted during the Sexenio went in this direction ―"Carlism, more than with arms, will be defeated by taking away the flag", Manuel Duran y Bas had told Cánovas in February 1875―, as well as the presentation in May 1875 of a complaint to the Vatican for its lack of cooperation for "the termination of the civil war" and for its support to a clergy that "conspires and is in arms against the King". A political achievement of the government was to get the old Carlist general Ramón Cabrera, then resident in London, to recognize Alfonso XII as king and also to declare the fighting between Catholics sterile. The reaction of the Carlist pretender Carlos VII was to strip Cabrera of all the honors and jobs he had granted him. According to Carlos Seco Serrano, the "conversion" of the old Carlist "caudillo" was especially due to the pleasant impression made on him by Prince Alfonso when he visited him at the Sandhurst Academy. In exchange he would obtain recognition as captain general and the titles he used.
On the military level, the first operation, commanded personally by the Minister of War, General Jovellar, was directed against the so-called Carlist "center" zone, which included territories of Aragon, the extreme south of Catalonia, the north of Valencia and Castile, where guerrilla groups were active. The success was complete, since after the capture of several strongholds, such as Miravet and Cantavieja in June, the army under the command of General Antonio Dorregaray was forced to retreat towards the Basque provinces ―a decision that some Carlists considered a "betrayal"―. The disappearance of the "center" zone facilitated operations in Catalonia, the second Carlist fiefdom, whose forces occupied two thirds of the territory. There the army, commanded by General Martínez Campos, achieved in August 1875 the surrender of La Seu d'Urgell, after thirty-seven days of siege, which opened the door to the control of the whole territory ―on May 19 Olot had fallen―. The third and last military operation was directed against the great Carlist stronghold, the Basque Provinces and Navarre, where they had formed an embryonic State with a large regular army. It was a pincer action of the Army of the North ―to which military troops from the "center" and Catalonia had been added― from Navarre (on the right) and from Biscay (on the left), which culminated on February 19, 1876 with the capture of Estella, seat of the court of the pretender Charles VII, after the government troops under the command of General Fernando Primo de Rivera won the battle of Montejurra. At the end of February Carlos VII crossed the French border defeated.
Cánovas saw to it that the supreme command of the armies that fought in the "North" was held personally by the king, who was present in the Basque-Navarre theater of operations. In fact, he entered at the head of the troops first in San Sebastian and then in Pamplona (in the latter city on the same day of February 28 in which Charles VII left Spain). In his proclamation to the Army on the occasion of the end of the war, Alfonso XII presented himself as the incarnation of the "soldier-king" (the role that Cánovas had assigned him):
In the "Somorrostro proclamation" of March 3, an appeal for reconciliation was made: "no one should be humiliated by his defeat; in the end, the victor's brother is the vanquished". When Alfonso XII returned to Madrid he was acclaimed by the crowd. He made his entrance into the capital under triumphal arches and was given the nickname of "The Peacemaker".
The attributions of the "soldier king" —an "unusual image in 19th century Spain, outside of Carlism"— were embodied in the Constitution approved in June 1876 —the King "has supreme command of the Army and Navy and disposes of the land and sea forces" (art. 52) and "grants military ranks, promotions and rewards in accordance with the laws" (art. 53)— and were confirmed by the Constitutive Law of the Army of 1878 which granted "exclusively" the King supreme command of the Army, exempting him from the need for his orders to be countersigned by the signature of a responsible minister when he "personally" took command. The monarch also had a prominent role in the appointment of all military chiefs.
These military powers of the "soldier-king", in Cánovas' vision, had the function of "civilizing" political life, restraining the tendency of the military to intervene (thus avoiding the praetorianism and "caudillismo" of some generals). And this objective of removing the Army from politics would be fully achieved as would be demonstrated by the fact of the little importance, and the failure, of the few republican pronunciamientos that took place. The king himself took credit for the success of "excluding the army from public life".
Once the Carlists had been defeated, Cánovas finally resolved the problem of the reintegration of the Basque provinces into the "common legality" of the constitutional monarchy, which had been pending since the Law of Confirmation of Fueros of 1839 passed after the convention of Vergara that put an end to the First Carlist War ―unlike what had happened in Navarre where an agreement had been reached and the Ley Paccionada of 1841 had been passed―, although a Royal Decree of 1844 had already introduced some modifications in the foral regime of the "Vascongadas" (judicial unity was established, customs were transferred to the coast and to the frontier, the "pase foral" was abolished, etc.).
Cánovas summoned in April 1876 the commissioners of Alava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay "to hear them on the immediate fulfillment of article 2 of the law of October 25 [1839]", but no agreement was reached, so he promoted the approval by the Cortes of the Law of July 21, 1876 (Gaceta de Madrid, July 25, 1876) which the Basque authorities called "abolitory" law of the foral regime and which they resisted to apply. The law did not abolish the foral regime —the Juntas and the Diputaciones were maintained—, but "it was limited to abolishing the two exemptions that Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay had enjoyed until then because they were incompatible with said principle [of constitutional unity]", although "the Cortes granted full powers to the Government of Cánovas for the execution of said law". Article 1 of the Law referred precisely to the fiscal regime and the system of quintas:
As Luis Castells has pointed out, "the commotion was terrible in the Basque Country, where the opinion spread that with this law the foral regime was suppressed", although neither the General Assemblies nor the foral Deputations were eliminated. In fact, it was these institutions that led the movement of resistance to the application of the law "suppressing the fueros, good uses and customs of the Basque Country", as the three deputations jointly declared. For their part, the respective General Assemblies also considered that the law was "derogatory of their Fueros, institutions and liberties". In reality, according to Castells, "the will of Cánovas was not to suppress the foral regime in its totality; yes, he wanted to apply the constitutional unity in the sense already mentioned (taxation, service of arms), to reinforce the political unity, but leaving the administrative regime subsisting. As he stated on several occasions, his idea was to implement in the Basque provinces the Navarrese model which emerged in 1841, suppressing what he understood to be outdated privileges...". In fact, Cánovas had praised the Basque fueros years before in the prologue he wrote for the book Los vascongados by Miguel Rodríguez Ferrer.
The government demanded compliance with the law, that is to say, that they began to contribute with money and men, but the foral institutions publicly stated that they were not going to "cooperate directly or indirectly in the execution of said law" because it implied "the loss of our liberties without which it is not possible to conceive the existence of the Country". A constant struggle then began between the government and the foral authorities which would last for two years (for example, at the beginning of 1877 the Basque provincial councils and town councils put all possible obstacles in the way of preventing the enlistment of young people for military service and around the same time the government even prohibited the publication of articles in the Basque press which were contrary to the law).
During this time the transigents positions of the Basques willing to negotiate with the government, to find "the way to reconcile the rights of the province with the general interests of the nation", were gaining ground in Gipuzkoa and Alava, while in Biscay, with its General Deputy Fidel Sagarmínaga at the head, the intransigeants opposed to any "foral arrangement" continued to predominate. The government's response was to replace in May 1877 the Provincial Council of Biscay by a Provincial Deputation like those existing in the rest of Spain. For their part, the Deputations of Gipuzkoa and Álava were willing to negotiate, but as they continued to insist on not recognizing the law of 1876, the government also dissolved them six months later, replacing them with ordinary provincial councils. "Now we could really refer to the foral abolition, although its legacy will continue to be present in the Basque Country", commented Luis Castells.
Cánovas then negotiated with the representatives of the three provincial deputations, now dominated by the transigents, reaching an agreement that was embodied in the royal decree of February 28, 1878, which established the entry of the three Basque provinces into the "economic agreement of the nation". According to the decree, the deputations would collect the taxes and would deliver a part of them ―the "quota"― to the State ―this same solution had been applied in Navarre a year before, by means of a different procedure―. "The formula of the economic agreement was, therefore, a compromise solution in accordance with the whole of the Canovist political operation. In fact, it seems that the aforementioned concerts were not excessively contested for the time being by the population and the provincial authorities, although the aggravation to the foralist sentiment would potentially remain as a source of the future nationalist movement", Feliciano Montero has pointed out. According to José Luis de la Granja, "the Agreement, similar to the Navarre Agreement, was well received by the Basque bourgeoisie, especially by the Biscayan one, which was then starting the process of industrial revolution, since it was very advantageous for its businesses as it was based on indirect taxation and it was hardly taxed with direct taxes". According to Luis Castells, the "economic agreement" implied "that the administrative specificity of the Basque provinces persisted, although based on a different foundation". "It was almost unanimous the criterion of the benefits that it generated to the Basque Country, starting with the fact that already from this first moment "those provinces were much less burdened with taxes than the others", as recognized by Cánovas himself", adds Castells. In fact, in the Spanish general elections of 1879 the transigents won and "since then the Basque provinces were integrated into the Monarchy of the Restoration, without the Fueros but with the Conciertos, which meant an important economic and administrative autonomy, but not a political autonomy".
Once the Constitution of 1876 was approved, to which the Catholic sectors showed their opposition because it did not recognize Catholic unity, the conflict was transferred to the application and development of article 11, which granted certain tolerance, reduced to the private sphere, to non-Catholic confessions ("No one shall be disturbed in Spanish territory for their religious opinions or for the exercise of their respective worship, except for the respect due to Christian morality. However, no ceremonies or public manifestations other than those of the State religion will be allowed"). Cánovas tried to reassure the Catholic hierarchy by restricting the scope of article 11 through a circular he sent on October 23, 1876 to all the civil governors giving them instructions for its application. In the instructions, disagreed by the less conservative ministers of the government such as Manuel Alonso Martínez or José Luis Albareda and also by the foreign ambassadors, particularly the British one, it was stated:
In relation to the scope of article 11, a new conflict arose with the Catholic hierarchy when the government presented its bill on Public Instruction to the Cortes in December 1876. Pressure from the bishops and Catholic sectors, supported by the Vatican, finally succeeded in having the bill withdrawn, postponing its possible approval until the following legislature (in reality it was necessary to wait until 1885). The bishops were opposed to the bill because it established the principle of compulsory primary education, which they understood to enshrine the State's monopoly on education to the detriment of the Church and families. Furthermore, it did not guarantee the right of the bishops to inspect and censure the content of education (as recognized in the Concordat of 1851, which was still in force) because it was subordinated to the high inspection of the State. In 1885, during the second conservative government of Cánovas, the neo-Catholic Minister of Public Works, Alejandro Pidal y Mon, approved a decree that favored private religious education, which from then on gained enormous momentum.
Another source of conflict was the question of canonical marriage. One of the first measures adopted by the Cánovas government had been to reestablish the full civil validity of canonical marriage by means of a Decree of February 9, 1875, which modified the Provisional Law of Civil Marriage of 1870, approved at the beginning of the Democratic Sexennium. Problems arose when a bill on the civil effects of marriage was presented in May 1880, which the Catholic hierarchy rejected because it denied the State the power to regulate a sacrament, such as marriage, and therefore subject only to canon law. Only after seven years of negotiations did the Holy See recognize the power of the State to regulate the civil effects of religious marriage, and the agreement reached in March 1887 was included in the 3rd base of the Civil Code of 1889.
On the other hand, the government of Cánovas tried to get the Holy See to disqualify the most fundamentalist Catholics, who still did not accept the new restored monarchy because it had not recognized the principle of Catholic unity, rejecting any type of collaboration with it, and among them were a good number a good number of bishops who embraced the traditionalist-Carlist postulates. The arrival of Leo XIII to the pontificate in February 1878 facilitated the rapprochement because the new pope maintained a possibilist position with respect to the liberal regimes and not one of complete rejection like his predecessor Pius IX, author of the Syllabus. The fruit of this new Vatican possibilism was the foundation in 1881 of the Catholic Union headed by Alejandro Pidal y Mon, but promoted by the hierarchy, and whose name responded to the purpose of uniting all Catholics, both Carlists and Alfonsinos. But the possibilist Catholic Union would continue to be a minority against the traditionalist sector headed by Cándido Nocedal, founder of the influential fundamentalist newspaper El Siglo Futuro, as would be demonstrated by the pilgrimage to Rome in 1882 to "make amends" to the previous Pope Pius IX, which Nocedal would try to take advantage of to disqualify the Catholic Union and the defenders of possibilism, and which was finally disavowed by the Vatican. The Pope himself was forced to intervene and made public the encyclical letter Cum Multa addressed exclusively to Spanish Catholics, but which did not achieve its purpose of ending the division among them. Leo XIII indicated in Cum Multa the need to "flee from the mistaken opinion of those who mix [and] identify religion with some political party, to the point of having those who belong to another party almost separated from Catholicism. This, in truth, is to wrongly bring sides into the august field of religion, to want to break fraternal concord and to open the door to a multitude of inconveniences".
After the victory in the Third Carlist War, the government of Cánovas proposed to end the other war that remained pending: Cuba. Initiated in October 1868, it had already caused nearly one hundred thousand deaths, of which more than 90% had been caused by disease. Between 42,000 and 70,000 soldiers were sent to the island as reinforcements ―to face 7,000 insurgents― and a loan of 200 million pesetas was subscribed with the recently created Banco Hispano Colonial to finance the campaign. General Martinez Campos was sent to the island to command the operations and disembarked in November 1876. In an attempt to reduce the support of the population to the rebels ―especially the rural population― he introduced humanitarian norms in the actions of the Spanish soldiers that began to produce results, taking advantage of the growing internal division of the rebels.
In the autumn of 1877, Martínez Campos initiated conversations with the rebels that culminated with the signing of the Zanjón agreement or convention on February 10, 1878. In it, Cuba was granted the "same political, organic and administrative conditions enjoyed by the island of Puerto Rico". The "peace of Zanjón" was seen as the beginning of a new era for the island, "in which many of the formal liberties of a liberal state were available to Cubans. However, many planters and slave owners did not see it in the same way "because it seemed to them too much what was granted to the enemies" and one of their representatives described it as "the thousand times cursed peace of Zanjón".
The good news of the end of the war in Cuba was overshadowed by the illness and death of Queen Maria de las Mercedes of Orleans. The doctors diagnosed her with "essential toxic fever" so as not to use the word "typhus". She died on June 26, 1878, two days after her 18th birthday. Alfonso XII was shocked by the death of his wife, whom he had married for love only five months and three days earlier. Four months later, on October 23, the king suffered an attack as he was passing on horseback through the Calle Mayor. An individual hiding among the people crowding the sidewalks pulled out a pistol and fired two shots at the king, who was unharmed. He missed because one of the spectators deflected the hand in which he was holding the pistol. The author of the attempted regicide, Juan Oliva Moncusí, who declared that he belonged to the IWA, was arrested on the spot. He would be executed by garrotte on January 4, 1879. The attack activated Cánovas' plans for the king to remarry and thus ensure the continuity of the dynasty. "Don Alfonso resignedly accepted his obligation: he told Cánovas that he should choose". The chosen one would be the Austrian archduchess Maria Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine, twenty-one years old, Catholic and niece of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria. The wedding was celebrated on November 29, 1879 in the basilica of Atocha, attended by the former queen Isabella II, who had come expressly from Paris.
At the beginning of 1879 Martínez Campos returned to Spain, convinced that only the introduction of political and economic reforms could avoid a new insurrection in Cuba. On March 7 he assumed the presidency of the Government due to the prestige he had earned as peacemaker of the Greater Antilles and given the difficulties that the government of Cánovas was having in applying what had been agreed in the "peace of Zanjón" ―in reality Cánovas actually preferred to avoid the clauses of which he did not entirely agree with―. Sagasta's constitutionalists protested because they were not called to govern, but, according to Carlos Dardé, "it seems clear that this party was still too weak and, above all, that some important military elements of it, such as General Serrano, Duke de la Torre, had not yet fully accepted the new monarchy and were involved in republican projects". According to José Varela Ortega, this was one of the reasons that led Cánovas to advise the king to change the government: to stop the "revolutionary threats" by putting a "victorious and prestigious general like Martínez Campos" at the head of the cabinet. On the other hand, Cánovas maintained the levers of power as would be demonstrated in the elections of April 20 and May 3, during those elections, the Canovistas maintained an ample majority.
The elections were held by census suffrage (only 847,000 men had the right to vote), in application of the new Electoral Law of 1878, approved in December of that year under the government of Cánovas, which only recognized the right to vote for "capacities", which not only included men over 25 years of age who had a certain economic capacity (contributors to the Treasury with a minimum quota of 25 pesetas per year for territorial income or 50 pesetas per year for industrial income), but also those who had the intellectual capacity to vote freely (members of the royal academies and cathedral chapters, parish priests and coadjutors); parish priests and coadjutors; senior civil servants —with an annual salary of over two thousand pesetas—; Army and Navy officers exempt from military service or retired, etc. ). The electoral "maneuvers" resulted in the Liberal-Conservative Party, whose leader continued to be Cánovas, obtaining, as in those of 1876, an overwhelming majority: 293 deputies against the 56 of Sagasta's Constitutional Party. With this result Martínez Campos "was at the mercy" of Cánovas, warned José Varela Ortega. After the opening of the new Cortes, the president of the Congress of Deputies welcomed the representatives of the "Gran Antilla" (Cuba) —"it was the first time they had done so [taking a seat in the Cortes] since their expulsion in 1837"— encouraging them to intervene "with their brothers from the peninsula in all the business of the monarchy".
The bill for the abolition of slavery in Cuba —there were then some two hundred thousand slaves on the island— presented to the Cortes by Martínez Campos provided for the liberation of the slaves, but with a transitory formula, since the former owners were granted the "patronage" of their slaves for eight years, which meant that they retained the right to continue using them, although obliged to pay them a salary, clothe them, feed them, attend to their illnesses and provide the children with primary education. Despite the proposed "patronato" formula, the plantation and mill owners, and their political supporters on the peninsula, opposed the bill. The parliamentary debate was postponed until December 5 in order to prepare for the king's second wedding, which was to be held on November 29.
The situation became more complicated for Martínez Campos when in August there was a resurgence of the war in Cuba with the beginning of what would be known as the "Guerra Chiquita" (which would end in December of the following year). A new concern for the government was the terrible floods that occurred in October in the provinces of Almería, Alicante and, above all, Murcia, which would be known as the Santa Teresa flood. King Alfonso XII immediately went to the affected areas, gaining the affection of the population.
Once the royal wedding was celebrated, discrepancies became evident within the government over the tax reform and tariff reduction project proposed for Cuba by the Minister of Overseas Salvador Albacete and over the bill for the abolition of slavery that the Cortes was about to begin debating. This forced Martínez Campos to present his resignation to Alfonso XII on December 9. After trying other options to avoid the "kidnapping of the royal prerogative" ―that Martínez Campos should continue at the head of the government, which he refused; appoint José de Posada Herrera as president of the government, who was firmly opposed by the conservatives of Cánovas and also by the constitutionalists of Sagasta, who claimed power for themselves; or appoint the president of the Congress of Deputies, Adelardo López de Ayala, but he was very ill: he would die on the 30th of that same month of December― the king had no choice but to call again Cánovas to form a government.
Cánovas made an effort to reestablish the unity of the conservative party and finally, aware that it was no longer possible to withdraw it, he made Martínez Campos' project for the abolition of slavery his own, in which he apparently had the support of the king -—the captain general of Cuba had written to him asking that the abolition be as "broad and liberal as possible in favor of the slave"— and in spite of the opposition he encountered from the Cuban slaveholders of the Constitutional Union. After introducing several modifications to the Martínez Campos project favorable to the slave owners (such as the maintenance of corporal punishment, which was opposed by Sagasta's constitutionalists), he managed to have it approved in February of the following year. The slaveholders succeeded in getting the law's implementing regulations to introduce even greater restrictions, such as the application of the punishment of "stocks and shackles" to "sponsored slaves" who refused to work, left the plantation without authorization, promoted strikes or disobeyed the orders of the overseers. With all these changes, the Constitutional Union declared in August 1880 that it accepted the "patronage" system.
The replacement of Martínez Campos by Cánovas at the head of the Government provoked the confrontation between the two characters ―as Feliciano Montero has pointed out, in reality "the brief cabinet presided over by General Martínez Campos (March to December 1879) [was] a Government captive to the guidelines and the political and administrative staff of Canovas"― and finally the departure of the Conservative Party from the group that supported the general, many of them military friends of his, and their rapprochement to Sagasta's Constitutionalists, which would constitute a decisive step for the birth of the Liberal-Fusionist Party, the other great party of the political regime of the Restoration. Six months after the departure of the government, on June 11, 1880, Martínez Campos and Cánovas held a bitter debate in the Senate, during which the former emphasized the role of the Sagunto pronunciamiento in the advent of the monarchy and the latter scorned it. "Is it serious, when dealing with such a great event as the restoration of a monarchy, to pretend that everything has been done by raising two battalions without firing a single shot and denying the cooperation of great elements, of immense forces, when almost everything was done...?", said Cánovas.
On December 30, the king, this time accompanied by the queen, suffered a second attack. It occurred when they were about to enter the Palace after a ride in a phaeton driven by the monarch himself. The perpetrator, Francisco Otero Gonzalez, a confectioner by profession, fired two shots, but missed and the king and queen were unharmed. Shortly after, it was made public that the queen was pregnant. It was a girl, who would be born on September 11, 1880.
Unlike the Conservative Party, which in 1876 was already almost completely configured under the leadership of Cánovas, although the process had been "arduous and traumatic", the Liberal Party was not definitively constituted until the spring of 1880. It was then when the majority of the members of the Constitutional Party of the Sexenio, following the line drawn by the "centralists" of Manuel Alonso Martínez ―who had split from the party in May 1875 to "enter" the system, and in December 1878 had returned to the party―, stopped definitively claiming the validity of the Spanish Constitution of 1869 and completely broke off their contacts with the republicans of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla and Emilio Castelar. The leader of the Constitutionalists, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, was a pragmatic politician like Cánovas, who was convinced that "in politics one cannot always do what one wants, nor is it always convenient to do what is most just".
The change of position of the Constitutionalists was confirmed by their "fusion" with the group of politicians (and high-ranking military officers, such as General Pavía) from the Conservative Party headed by General Martínez Campos, who was at odds with Cánovas after the failure of his government experience. Thus, in May 1880 the Liberal-Fusionist Party was created, the result of the "fusion" of the constitutionalists of Sagasta, the conservatives of Martínez Campos and the "centralists" of Manuel Alonso Martínez, all of them under the leadership of the former. In the final gestation of the new party King Alfonso XII was no stranger. "It was a heterogeneous party, not very cohesive, in the opinion of Cánovas and the conservatives, who were reluctant to give up power", stated Feliciano Montero. In fact, Cánovas had confessed two years earlier to the British ambassador that "he intended to stay in his post [as President of the Government] as long as he could" because "the opposition parties were so divided into factions that, if his government failed, there was no liberal party in whose hands he could leave power in the confidence that he would carry the Restoration forward".
Sagasta presented the new "fusionist" party before the Cortes on June 14, 1880. In his speech he showed his adherence to the Constitution of 1876, an essential condition to be able to accede to the government:
At the same time, the liberal deputy Fernando León y Castillo denounced the identification between Cánovas del Castillo and the Restoration regime (the "ministerial dictatorship") in a parliamentary intervention in which he said the following:
From its creation, the new liberal-fusionist party pressured King Alfonso XII so that "in an act of personal energy" he would give it the government, even threatening revolution. The truth was, as Carlos Seco Serrano has pointed out, that "the Canovist party had already been in power for five years ―since the Restoration―. According to this historian, the king "for the moment preferred to avoid a new dissolution of the Cortes and the calling of new ones ―which would have been necessary if Sagasta had been called― when the last elections were so recent". According to Varela Ortega, in an interview that Sagasta, Martínez Campos and other fusionist leaders met with the king in June, who assured them that he would call them to govern "whenever he was sure of finding an organized Liberal government willing to replace the Conservatives". On January 19, 1881, in the midst of an intense parliamentary debate, Sagasta claimed from the "royal prerogative" his right to govern, warning that without his concurrence the Alphonsine Monarchy would not be consolidated and launching a veiled threat:
Shortly afterwards, the king received the highest party officials at the Palace on the occasion of his birthday (January 23) and finally forced the resignation of Cánovas on February 6 when he refused to sign a decree that he presented to him, and then entrusted the formation of a government to Sagasta. "On February 8, 1881 the first Liberal cabinet in the Restoration was sworn in". According to Carlos Seco Serrano, it was Cánovas himself who "provoked the crisis" by including in the preamble of the debt conversion decree "the need to prolong the life of the Government itself for several years, so that the operation would have all its effects". However, according to Carlos Dardé, "it was a personal decision of Alfonso XII, which he took without carrying out consultations and, from what can be presumed, against the opinion of Cánovas". Ángeles Lario agrees with Dardé ―"Cánovas had fallen because he lacked the royal confidence"― and emphasizes that Cánovas had to make the king's decision "constitutional" by presenting the decree with the preamble with which the monarch would show his disagreement, which obliged the government to resign. The same affirms José Ramón Milán García: "the crisis was provoked by the monarch himself in February 1881 to force the arrival of the liberals to power". "Don Alfonso was able to appreciate the undoubted change experienced by a liberal opposition that, although it still maintained revolutionary impulses inherited from the old progressivism, had shown itself capable of admitting among its ranks elements of proven dynastic loyalty and had lowered some of its historical leitmotifs [such as national sovereignty], so in early 1881 he sent clear messages to Cánovas that he should leave the way open to the liberals, which forced the consequent government crisis that ended with Sagasta being commissioned to form a new cabinet". José Varela Ortega also considers that it was a decision of the king. "The reasons; the same ones that were already pointed out in previous crises: division in the ruling party [on whether to give way to the liberals] and threats from the dynastic opposition to join a revolutionary coalition".
The conservatives reminded the liberals how they had reached the government, as explained by the newspaper of that tendency, La Época: the liberal-fusionist party "does not owe its elevation to any parliamentary victory but to the free initiative and will of the King". The conservative Romero Robledo, for his part, declared: "We have fallen. We had a majority in the Chambers..., but a higher wisdom than ours... believes in its high designs that the time has come to change policy. There is, therefore, no choice but to respectfully abide by these designs and die with dignity". As Carlos Dardé has pointed out, "what became clear in February 1881 was that the last interpreter of the state of things, and the one who had the power of decision ―above the parliamentary majority and the president of the government― was the monarch".
With the arrival to the government of the liberals in February 1881 ―which caused a deep impression among certain sectors that did not forget the "revolutionary" antecedents of some of them, starting with their leader Sagasta― the "turn" between them and the conservatives that was to characterize the political regime of the Restoration. "At that time it meant the end of exclusivism, the fulfillment of one of the basic principles of the new regime, the guarantee of its consolidation, or, in a broad sense, the end of the political transition", pointed out Feliciano Montero. The same has been affirmed by José Varela Ortega. "The call to power in February 1881 opened a new phase in the Restoration, breaking with the restrictive approaches that had dominated the five-year period of Canovista", indicated Manuel Suárez Cortina. "At the time, for the conservative classes, Sagasta and his followers were nothing more than that sector that had made the revolution, that maintained contacts with the barricade and that permanently pointed out their loyalty to the liberal ideals rather than to the Crown", added Suárez Cortina. And the truth was, as Carlos Dardé pointed out, that "the "traditional obstacles" which, in Salustiano Olózaga's phrase, were opposed to the progressives governing, had disappeared".
Thus, as José Ramón Milán García has pointed out, "the arrival of the fusionists to the government in February 1881 was undoubtedly one of the fundamental milestones of the reign whose relevance did not escape its protagonists, aware that the monarch's initiative opened the doors to overcoming the entrenched confrontation between left-wing liberalism and the Bourbon dynasty, and therefore of the Cainite struggles sustained for decades between the various families of Hispanic liberalism".
The government formed by Sagasta and presented to the king on February 8 was made up of members of the three sectors that had formed the liberal-fusionist party the previous year: the constitutionalists, the centralists of Alonso Martínez, and the sector coming from the conservative party headed by General Martínez Campos ―the other prominent member of this last group, José Posada Herrera, a former unionist, would preside over the Congress of Deputies―. The constitutionalists formed the left of the party and defended the principle of national sovereignty, centralists and campistas constituted the right and defended the doctrinal principle of "shared sovereignty". "The rivalries and difficulties between all these [political] families were immediately apparent when it came to the distribution of administrative posts and political positions in the municipal and general elections", Feliciano Montero has pointed out.
Sagasta had to maintain the balance between all of them, also taking into account that the liberals, like the conservatives, "were organized, like any party "of notables" of the time, in dense clientelist networks that spread from Madrid throughout the peninsular geography and whose loyalty depended, more than on great ideological programs or personal friendships, on their ability to dispense all kinds of favors to their co-religionists that presupposed the discretionary, arbitrary and, therefore, fraudulent use of the administrative mechanisms". Sagasta was aware that "his power depended on his ability to preserve the unity [of the party]", since that was the condition imposed by the king to hand over the government to him, as the conservative press constantly reminded him.
The first decisions of the government showed its new attitude towards public liberties, recovering "a considerable part of the principles of '68", and correcting "those extremes in which the policy of the Restoration had been, in fact, a policy of reaction". Thus, the authorization of the demonstrations and banquets on the occasion of the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, on February 11, 1873, was followed by a royal decree which, after announcing that the government would present a new "printing law", put an end to the suspension affecting several newspapers and ordered the withdrawal of the complaints before the special courts and the dismissal of the cases pending before the ordinary courts. A circular issued by the Minister of Grace and Justice Manuel Alonso Martínez lifted the prior censorship on political issues because "it is not licit to confuse lively polemic, acrid and passionate censorship, with slander and calumny, as long as the responsible powers are involved". This circular was followed by another one from the Minister of Public Works José Luis Albareda repealing the Orovio decree of 1875, which meant that the professors who had been dismissed ―Emilio Castelar, Eugenio Montero Ríos, Segismundo Moret, Nicolás Salmerón, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Francisco Giner de los Ríos, among others― could return to their posts.
As Feliciano Montero has pointed out, "the extension of the legal framework for expression, assembly and association, promoted by the fusionist government, made it possible to organize some mobilizations, expressions and public demonstrations, in response to certain policies (fiscal) or social crisis situations (Andalusia). The republican, liberal-secularist propaganda, and, in general, of the political and ideological groups opposed to the system, found more possibilities to meet and express themselves". For his part, Miguel Martínez Cuadrado, quoted by Seco Serrano, has emphasized that "it allowed a very flourishing resurgence of political life and public opinion".
The republican possibilist Emilio Castelar valued very positively the new government in a public letter addressed to a French journalist:
The government called the Spanish general elections of 1881, which were a landslide victory for the Liberal-Fusionist Party thanks to the "maneuvers" of the Minister of the Interior Venancio González y Fernández. In the liberal candidacies Sagasta favored the "centralists" and ex-conservatives to the detriment of the constitutionalists ―who in some cases were forced to withdraw― in order to strengthen the unity of the party. This more right-wing line was also manifested in the government program that Sagasta presented before the new Cortes, aiming to demonstrate, in Sagasta's own words, "that the liberal parties can govern Spain without upheavals, without fears and without disturbances". "Let the liberal parties go slowly and they will last as long as the conservative parties. This is what I aspire to", he added.
As for the work of the Liberal government, a distinction is usually made between political measures and economic measures. Among the former, the provincial organic law, which established an electoral census close to universal suffrage ―on the other hand, the bills on local administration, right of association, contentious-administrative jurisdiction and trial by jury were not debated in the Cortes― and among the latter, the trade treaty with France in February 1882, which aimed to open the French market to Spanish wines in exchange for tariff concessions to French industrial products, which was contested by the protectionist sectors, especially in Catalonia, and the reform of the Treasury, carried out by the Minister of Finance Juan Francisco Camacho de Alcorta ―which included a law on the conversion of the public debt, which with notable success allowed to lighten the burden of this in the budgets and to recover the credit in the international markets―, although the changes in the fiscal field were minimal (the consumption tax, falling on the popular classes, continued to be the most important after the customs tax).
In the judicial sphere, the greatest achievement of the government was the approval of the Law of Criminal Procedure of 1882 and the institutionalization of the oral and public trial, on the initiative of the Minister of Grace and Justice Alonso Martínez, although he was unable to move forward with the draft of the new Spanish Civil Code due to the problems that arose with the Vatican because of the legal status of canonical marriage and the difficulty of accommodating the foral regimes and Catalan civil law. In the educational field, the Minister of Public Works Albareda, after the derogation of the Orovio decree, proposed to dignify public primary education, although without curbing the growing role of the schools run by the religious orders, and in 1882, influenced by the men of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), created the Pedagogical Museum, under the direction of one of them ―in addition, the institutionist Juan Francisco Riaño occupied the General Directorate of Education, and Albareda himself was present at the laying of the foundation stone of the ILE building―. His concern for popular education led him to promote popular libraries and the Schools of Arts and Crafts. About the latter Albareda said: "This kind of school of Arts and Crafts, which are nocturnal and free, are generally attended only by workers, who find in them reasons to enlighten themselves and at the same time to improve their social position".
In January 1883, Sagasta reshuffled his government, "which was already suffering too much pressure from the different political families that had made up the fusionist party", among them the most numerous and prominent group of the right wing headed by Carlos Navarro Rodrigo (his followers were known as the "tercios navarros"), who aspired to replace Sagasta. The latter took advantage of the confrontation that took place within the cabinet between the Minister of Finance Juan Camacho and the Minister of Public Works José Luis Albareda on the occasion of the former's project to put public mountains and pastures for sale to increase the income of the Treasury, which the latter opposed because it hindered various initiatives to improve agriculture, then the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Works. Both Camacho and Albareda left the government and were replaced respectively by Justo Pelayo de la Cuesta Núñez and by Germán Gamazo, the latter a man of the "tercios navarros", the first step for Navarro Rodrigo to end up accepting Sagasta's leadership in the party.
According to José Varela Ortega, the change of government was Sagasta's response to the offensive of the new party Izquierda Dinástica, founded a few months earlier, whose objective was "to accelerate the decomposition of the majority, to disarticulate the coalition in power and, eventually, to bring down the Sagasta government". Thus, Sagasta got rid of the most significant men of the right wing of the party, particularly Manuel Alonso Martínez, who was replaced at the head of the Ministry of Grace and Justice by Vicente Romero Girón —a politician of the left-wing Dinastic Left whom Sagasta had attracted to his ranks—. However, Sagasta could not fully fulfill his objective due to the resistance offered by campistas and centralists to abandon the government, so he finally had to include in the cabinet several right-wing ministers, "a temporary and unsatisfactory solution for all", which would explain why the new government only lasted ten months. In fact, General Martínez Campos refused to be relieved at the head of the Ministry of War and also demanded that Vega de Armijo continue as Minister of State —he was to be replaced by the Marquis of Sardoal, another politician who like Romero Girón came from the Dynastic Left— and Sagasta had no choice but to compromise.
The main achievement of the new government was probably the approval of the Printing Police Law of July 26, 1883, also known as the Gullón Law, after the name of the Minister of the Interior, Pío Gullón Iglesias, who promoted it. It was a law that would remain in force for a long time. Its main novelty was that it freed the press from any special legislation and returned it to the common jurisdiction, in addition to putting a definitive end to prior censorship. The restrictive 1879 press law passed during the first government of Cánovas was thus overcome, since it put an end to the control and interventionism of newspapers by governments. Another novelty of the law was that it provided guarantees to the newspaper companies by making the director and not the owner legally responsible for the newspaper, which meant that on numerous occasions the director was a mere straw man who, in the event of a lawsuit being filed for what was published by the newspaper, was the one who had to face the courts and go to jail if convicted.
The new government had to face three critical situations that finally, especially the last two, would provoke its downfall. The first occurred in May–June on the occasion of the trial of La Mano Negra held in Jerez de la Frontera. It was an alleged secret anarchist organization that intended to associate itself with the Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (FTRE), founded in September 1881, taking advantage of the climate of freedom brought about by the new liberal government of Sagasta, and which by the end of 1882 already had 60,000 members, most of them in Andalusia and Catalonia. La Mano Negra had been created in a context of strong social tension in Andalusia increased by the crisis of subsistence which began in the summer of 1882 and served as a pretext for the indiscriminate repression of the anarchist movement, even though the FTRE claimed to have nothing to do with it. The court handed down eight death sentences and seven sentences of hard labor.
The next crisis took place at the beginning of August on the occasion of the failed pronunciamiento of 1883 in Spain. On the 5th there was a Republican uprising in Badajoz followed by another on the 8th in Santo Domingo de la Calzada and a third on the 10th in La Seo de Urgel. They were part of a larger military movement that did not succeed and had been planned by the Republican Military Association (ARM), a clandestine military organization promoted and financed from Paris by the exiled Republican leader Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla. None of the three uprisings found any popular support and the conspirators fled abroad. Ruiz Zorrilla, under pressure from the Spanish government to the French government, was forced to move his residence from Paris to London.
The third (and final) crisis was the diplomatic incident between Spain and France provoked by the trip in September of King Alfonso XII to the German Empire, during which he had worn the uniform of colonel of a regiment of Hulans, of which Kaiser Wilhelm I had conferred on him the honorary command, and that was stationed in Alsace (taken by Germany from France after its victory in the Franco-Prussian war). In addition, at the banquet held in Homburg, Alfonso XII made a very enthusiastic toast in which "in perfect German" he toasted "to the glorious emperor of Germany, so beloved of his people, and to the admirable German Army". He also offered Spain's support to Germany in a future war, which exceeded his constitutional powers, since it was a personal initiative not backed by the government. Carlos Dardé has clarified that "that personal initiative of the monarch, of which he did not even inform his Minister of State present in Germany nor, already in Madrid, Sagasta, Posada Herrera or Cánovas, constitutes the only important exception of the monarch's respect for the Constitution".
In the afternoon of September 29, when Alfonso XII arrived in Paris, in his return trip to Spain, he found a great popular demonstration of rejection in front of the station of the North where he had been received in a cold way by the president of the Republic Jules Grévy. Protests and riots continued in front of the Spanish embassy where the king was staying. The apologies of the President of the Republic Grévy, who personally went to the Spanish embassy, made it possible for the king to participate in the official banquet offered in his honor at the Elysée Palace and not to anticipate the return trip to Spain as he had initially decided. The king returned to Madrid on October 3, being received by a crowd that showed its support and at the same time its rejection of France. The Minister of State, the Marquis de la Vega de Armijo, went so far as to propose the rupture of relations with the French Republic, but neither Sagasta nor the rest of the ministers approved.
The Republican uprising of August and the diplomatic crisis with France in September weakened the government, especially the two main ministers involved, Arsenio Martínez Campos in War, and the Marquis de la Vega de Armijo, in State, which was taken advantage of by the Conservative Party and the Dynastic Left to pressure Sagasta and get him to resign. In declarations to the French newspaper Le Figaro, published in mid-September, Cánovas accused the government of negligence for what happened in Badajoz and denounced the fact that the Republican newspapers were allowed to open subscriptions in support of the military rebels. In addition, the conservative press used the episode of La Mano Negra as "proof" of the alleged inability of the government to ensure public order.
Sagasta proposed to form a new government more to the left, taking advantage of the departure of Martínez Campos and Vega de Armijo, the two most right-wing ministers of his cabinet, and tried, as he had already done in January, to attract some prominent member of the Dynastic Left. But this time he did not succeed and had to accept the offer made by Cristino Martos to form a government of liberal "conciliation" (with half fusionist ministers and half leftists) presided over by José Posada Herrera, with Sagasta going on to preside over the Congress of Deputies. José Varela Ortega explains why Sagasta compromised with the proposal of the Dynastic Left: "Sagasta was cornered, and he did not feel strong enough to counteract the attack of the united Left in the Chambers.... If he entrenched himself in the government he risked that the oppositions would ask for, and the King would grant, the decree of dissolution to Posada Herrera, or any other Liberal leader, as the only way to put an end to the divisions among Liberals. In other words, the leadership was at stake. Sagasta decided on a strategic retreat. Since they did not want to let him demonstrate that unity with him was possible, he would demonstrate that it was impossible without him".
After Sagasta's resignation on October 11, the king, without any consultations, offered the presidency of the government, as had been agreed between the liberals and the Dynastic Left, to José Posada de Herrera, who had joined the leftists a few months earlier. The cabinet he formed, of liberal "conciliation", was formed in equal parts by liberals and leftists, among which were the most prominent members of the new party, with Segismundo Moret in Government; the Marquis of Sardoal in Development; and Cristino Martos, acting as "a kind of head of government in the shadow". The king imposed General José López Domínguez, also of the Dynastic Left, as Minister of War. In accordance with the agreement Sagasta occupied the presidency of the Congress of Deputies, a post from which "he did not hesitate to confuse his rivals [of the Dynastic Left] with vague promises of being willing to assume their democratic program...". The presidency of the Senate went to General Serrano.
The government put forward a very ambitious reformist political program, which included the creation of the Commission of Social Reforms, at the initiative of the Minister of the Interior Segismundo Moret, and the prohibition of corporal punishment of the "patrocinados" (the former slaves who in Cuba continued to work compulsorily for their masters for eight years, after the abolition of slavery in Cuba had been approved in 1880). However, the government was unable to move forward with most of its proposals —such as the law for the regionalization of the country— because, not having the decree of dissolution of the Cortes that would have allowed it to "fabricate" a majority in the Chamber, it had to be at the expense of the benevolence of Sagasta's party, which was the one that had it. Sagasta himself defined the situation with the phrase: "what we have here is a Government without a majority and a majority without a government".
The collision between fusionists and leftists took place when the Government in the speech of the Crown proposed the recovery of universal suffrage (male) and the reform of the Constitution of 1876. In the debate that followed, Sagasta made a fierce defense, "to the great delight of Cánovas", of the principle of shared sovereignty between King and Cortes, the fundamental pillar of the political regime of the Restoration, thus definitively abandoning the principle of national sovereignty, one of the hallmarks of progressive liberalism. As José Varela Ortega has pointed out, at that time the liberal party became canovista and in this way, according to Feliciano Montero, "the political regime was consolidated". Furthermore, as Carlos Dardé has pointed out, Sagasta wanted to demonstrate that the unity of the liberals without him was impossible. An assessment shared by Manuel Suárez Cortina.
Two fusionist deputies then presented a motion proposing the postponement of the implementation of universal suffrage and the government lost the vote, as it only managed to get 126 deputies to reject the proposal, while 221 deputies, all of them fusionists, supported it. Posada Herrera had to resign. "Sagasta was radiant". Then King Alfonso XII called the leader of the Conservative Party, Cánovas de Castillo, to form a government "as punishment for the disunity" of the liberal families. "The liberals learned the lesson: to govern they had to unite".
Almost all the members of the Izquierda Dinástica would end up joining Sagasta's party. The elections of 1884 were key, since the fusionists obtained more than forty deputies and the Izquierda Dinástica twelve less. "The electoral disaster precipitated the outcome. One after another, the factions of the Left paid obeisance to the Sagastine leadership", José Varela Ortega pointed out. In June 1885, a year and a half after the end of his very brief government ―it had lasted 90 days―, majority of the Dynastic Left was integrated into Sagasta's Liberal Party, due to the approval of a so-called "law of guarantees" drawn up by Manuel Alonso Martínez and Eugenio Montero Ríos. The "law of guarantees" was the new program of the liberal party that included the protection of the rights and liberties recognized in the Constitution, the extension of the suffrage to all the male population and the trial by jury. However, the most important aspect of the "law of guarantees" consisted in the resignation of the principle of national sovereignty, which the "revolutionaries of 1868" had always defended, and in the acceptance of the shared sovereignty "of the Cortes with the King", a doctrinal principle upon which the political regime of the Restoration was based. A minority of the Dynastic Left, headed by General José López Domínguez, did not join Sagasta's party because they did not succeed in getting the proposals of the "law of guarantees" included in the Constitution. But, "the united Liberal Party was again in a position to demand power".
In January 1884 Cánovas del Castillo ―who did not manage to get the presidency from Romero Robledo or any other conservative leader so that he could temporarily retire from politics, due to the opposition of his party and the monarch himself― formed a government. Romero Robledo would again occupy the Ministry of the Interior, while his "enemy" Francisco Silvela took charge of the Ministry of Grace and Justice.
The new government formed by Cánovas presented a very important novelty: the presence in it of the neo-Catholic Alejandro Pidal y Mon, as Minister of Development, apparently "at the express wish of the king". Pidal y Mon had stood out during the debate on the Constitution of 1876 for his fierce defense of Catholic unity, but in 1880 he had accepted the legality in force and made a resounding appeal to "the honest masses who, thrown into the countryside by the excesses of the revolution, formed the Carlist party" to join the conservative camp. To achieve this objective, Pidal y Mon had founded in 1881 the Catholic Union party, which followed the more pro-possibility position regarding the Liberal State of the new Pope Leo XIII ―the latter had advised the Spanish neo-Catholics to submit "respectfully to the constituted powers... to work together... for reform in the Catholic sense" and to "swell the most similar party"―. For its part, the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy was divided between the bishops who continued to condemn liberalism ―"Liberalism is sin", was the title of the booklet by the priest Félix Sardá y Salvany― and continued to align themselves with Carlism, and those who accepted the new pontifical orientation and followed the directives of the recently appointed papal nuncio in Spain, Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro.
Among the liberals and republicans, the entry of Pidal and Mon into the Government caused deep concern because they feared a restrictive application of article 11 of the Constitution. The truth was that Pidal y Mon approved in 1885 a royal decree that officially recognized the teachings given by the private religious schools (qualified as "assimilated" if they fulfilled some minimum conditions), which caused that from then on these schools gained an enormous impulse, while the State continued without investing in public education. For their part, the Carlists and the fundamentalists of El Siglo Futuro were indignant: "There you have what the Catholic Union has ended up with! Pidal, in order to become a minister, has surrendered himself to Canovist liberalism!".
Feliciano Montero pointed out that for Cánovas the entry into the government of Pidal y Mon "meant the enlargement of the base of the [conservative] party on the right and the integration into the regime of a part of the Carlist electorate" and "for a part of the Catholics it meant putting into practice the possibilist tactic of the lesser evil".
On April 27, 1884 ―that day the serious railway accident known as the catastrophe of the Alcudia Bridge in which 53 people died took place― elections were held, again by census suffrage, which predictably gave a large majority to the Liberal-Conservative Party (318 deputies) due to the "good work" of Romero Robledo from the Ministry of the Interior. The Progressive Republican Party of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, exiled in London, opted for withdrawal and did not run in the elections, foreseeing the "maneuvers" of Romero Robledo. On the other hand, the republican possibilists of Emilio Castelar did run and were rewarded with five seats. Romero Robledo's arbitrary electoral policy in favor of the Conservatives, which even forced Cánovas himself to intervene, would provoke his departure from the Government the following year. In fact, his electoral "maneuvers" had provoked the liberals, who had been joined by the factions of the Izquierda Dinástica headed by Moret and by Montero Ríos, to unite with the Republicans to form joint candidacies for the municipal elections of May 1885, in which the government was defeated in Madrid and in 27 other cities. Sagasta had described the Cortes that emerged from the April 1884 elections as "dishonored before they were born". The immediate reason for Romero Robledo's forced resignation was his controversial action in the face of the cholera epidemic of the summer of 1885.
The alliance of the conservatives with the Catholics, sealed with the entry into the government of Pidal y Mon, was not free of tensions. In the summer of 1884 some parliamentary declarations of the latter on the Kingdom of Italy, not recognized by the Holy See, and were exploited by the liberals, provoked a serious diplomatic problem of difficult solution, because a denial to the Italian government would cause great indignation in the Vatican and the mobilization of the Catholics against the Government. A few months later, on October 1, a new incident took place on the occasion of the inaugural speech of the academic year 84-85 at the Central University of Madrid, delivered by the Masonic and Republican professor Miguel Morayta in the presence of Minister Pidal y Mon, who presided over the event. Morayta's speech dealt with Ancient Egypt, but in it he questioned the historical reliability of the Bible and made an impassioned defense of academic freedom. Pidal y Mon replied in his closing speech that academic freedom should be exercised "within the laws and the orbit that the Constitution of the Catholic and constitutional monarchy indicates to teaching".
The reaction of the most ultramontane Catholic hierarchy to Morayta's speech was immediate and several bishops published pastorals condemning liberalism, Freemasonry and secular schools. For its part, the fundamentalist Catholic press called for the departure of Pidal y Mon from the government. El Siglo Futuro accused him of having authorized and applauded an anti-Christian discourse. Who went further in his attack was the bishop of Palencia, since in a pastoral made public in January 1885 he went so far as to question the legitimacy of the constitutional regime, which provoked the Government to present a formal protest before the Vatican, getting the latter to rectify the criteria defended by the prelate. Most of the students of the Central University sided with Professor Morayta and their protests were harshly repressed by the forces of public order.
The crisis provoked by Morayta's speech accentuated the division of Spanish Catholics to the point that the fundamentalist sector came to discuss the authority of Nuncio Rampolla, who had intervened in the conflict supporting the possibilist positions. As Feliciano Montero has pointed out, "the fundamentalist offensive, by questioning the authority of the nuncio over the bishops, attacked the foundations of the conciliatory policy that the Government of Canovas and the Holy See were developing through diplomatic channels. An urgent and forceful reaction on the part of the latter was therefore necessary. On April 15, the Secretary of State, Jacobini, expressly disavowed an article of the fundamentalist organ El Siglo Futuro (of March 9, 1885), and demanded a public rectification".
At Christmas 1884, an earthquake with epicenter in Granada devastated this province and the province of Malaga and also, although to a lesser extent, the provinces of Jaen, Cordoba and Seville. Hundreds were killed, thousands of people were affected and there were scenes of panic after the aftershocks of the earthquake ―on December 31 some 10,000 fled the city of Granada―, all all aggravated by an intense cold wave and inclement weather. The king visited the area in January 1885, in spite of his precarious state of health ―in the autumn of 1883 he had suffered from "intermittent fevers" which had recurred twelve months later―. On January 10 he arrived in Granada. From the letters he wrote to his sister Paz it is known the harsh conditions of his stay there. After his return to Madrid from Malaga on January 22, Alfonso XII commented: "the administration of those regions is even worse than the earthquakes".
In March 1885 a new front was opened to the government in Catalonia. On the 15th of that month a Memorial de greuges ('Memorial of grievances') was presented directly to King Alfonso XII directly ―not considering the Parliament and the Government― denouncing the commercial treaties that were to be signed ―especially the one with Great Britain, which threatened the Catalan industry— and the proposals to unify the Civil Code, which endangered the existence of Catalan civil law. The first step towards its elaboration had been the celebration in January at the Llotja de Mar in Barcelona of a great meeting called by the Centre Catalá, the first clearly vindicative Catalanist entity that had emerged in 1882 after the celebration the previous year of the First Catalanist Congress. Its promoter was Valentí Almirall, a former federal republican who, after the failure of the First Republic, had made a "Catalanist turn" and had broken with the majority of the Federal Party, led by Pi y Margall. In fact, Almirall had participated in the drafting of the Memorial (the following year he would publish Lo catalanisme, a key work in the history of political Catalanism).
Although the king was cordial and receptive to the Catalan delegation that had traveled to Madrid to deliver the manifesto, chaired by Mariano Maspons y Labrós, the reception in the capital by the political class and the press was quite hostile. The opposite of what happened on their return to Barcelona, where the members of the delegation were acclaimed and thousands of copies of the Memorial were printed, which helped to spread Catalanist ideas among the population. In the conclusion of the document it was declared:
In addition to the problems with the Catholics and the "Catalanists", there was the crisis in the Carolinas in the summer of 1885. Within the framework of the Berlin Conference, which sealed the colonial division of Africa by the European powers, the German Empire contested on August 11 the Spanish sovereignty over the Caroline Islands, located in the Pacific, applying one of the criteria agreed upon in Berlin: that Spain had not occupied the archipelago. In fact, no Spanish authority resided in the archipelago. Its affairs were handled by the Spanish consul in Hong Kong, located thousands of kilometers away. The response of the Canovas government was to establish on the island of Yap a political-military government headed by Lieutenant Enrique Capriles, who arrived on the island on August 21. But only six days later a German gunboat appeared in Yap with landing forces that raised there the flag of the empire. The Spanish government presented an energetic protest accompanied by a memorandum in which it referred to "the titles and reasons of all kinds that support and sustain the sovereignty of Spain".
The German action provoked a strong popular reaction and there were protest demonstrations in several cities ―in Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Granada― culminating on September 4 with a large rally in front of the German embassy in Madrid, which was in danger of being assaulted ―the coat of arms and the flagpole were torn from the façade and burned in the Puerta del Sol, very close to the diplomatic headquarters―. Some generals and colonialist societies asked for the rupture of diplomatic relations with the German Empire, which endangered the negotiations that Cánovas had already initiated ―with the full support of the king who ratified his confidence― with the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The latter, aware of the seriousness of the king's illness, whose death could destabilize Spain, proposed on October 2 that Pope Leo XIII act as mediator in the conflict, which the Spanish government accepted. On October 22 his resolution was made public, recognizing Spanish sovereignty over the archipelago provided that it proceeded to its military and administrative occupation and recognized the freedom of trade and agricultural exploitation for Germany.
Coinciding with the crisis in the Carolinas, a cholera epidemic spread, which arrived through France and initially affected the east of the country and then spread to the rest. It would end up causing the forced resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Francisco Romero Robledo, due to the mistaken policy he applied to control the epidemic based almost exclusively on isolation and quarantine, resisting the use of Dr. Ferrán's vaccine. The trigger was his hasty official declaration of cholera in Madrid when there had only been five cases, which caused general alarm and the absence of customers in the stores.
Despite the fact that his state of health was worsening ―"as a courageous man, he resists well and hides the progress of the ailment from the Queen and the doctors, but he loses strength every day", commented Cánovas del Castillo privately―, the king made an incognito trip to Aranjuez to visit the local cholera patients, which caused a constitutional crisis, since he did so against the express prohibition of the government. The king was aware of what he was doing, since before taking the train at the Estación del Mediodía at dawn on July 2, he had written a letter to Cánovas ―another to the queen― in which he said: "Forgive me, dear Don Antonio, if for once I fail in the consideration I owe you...". However, upon hearing the news, popular enthusiasm overflowed and even the Congress of Deputies and the Senate adjourned their sessions, cheering the king so that the members of the two chambers could come to receive him upon his return that same afternoon.
The cholera epidemic revealed Spain's sanitary and hygienic deficiencies ―many cities still lacked sewage systems and drinking water supply―, its low scientific level ―as demonstrated by the resistance shown to apply the Ferrán vaccine―, the enormous social inequalities that existed in the country, ―the mortality rate was much higher among the lower classes than among the upper classes, since the latter, among other things, were able to flee to the north where there was no epidemic― and the weight maintained by Catholicism in Spain ―in a negative sense, because of the preaching that presented the epidemic as a moral punishment; in a positive sense, because of the performance of Catholic charitable institutions that made up for the deficiencies of the public ones, which were practically nonexistent―.
From August 1885 onwards, the king's health was a recurring topic of conversation in all circles of the capital. Alfonso XII suffered from tuberculosis ―"with a focus of infection in his childhood, with ephemeral manifestations and in a latent state until his youth", which would not manifest itself clearly until the end of 1883― and he was becoming weaker and weaker. His "hectic night life ―coupled with intense daytime work"― had aggravated his illness.
On September 28, 1885, Laureano García Camisón, the monarch's family doctor, informed the president of the government, Cánovas del Castillo, that the king had only a few weeks to live and that he advised him to move to the Palace of El Pardo in the hope that he would get better there. However, the king continued to fulfill his obligations and did not leave for El Pardo until October 31. On November 23, he was visited there by the German ambassador who found him with his face "completely white and without blood, his lips blue, his mouth half closed and his eyes without any life, the same as his voice and all his appearance". The king told him, "I thought you were physically very strong... I have burned the candle at both ends. I have discovered too late that it is not possible to work all day and have fun all night. I will not do it again in the future". That same day he had an attack of dyspnea. The next day, November 24, the doctors diagnosed him as suffering from "acute tuberculosis, which puts the patient in grave danger". At a quarter to nine in the morning of November 25, he died. Queen Maria Cristina, the ex-queen Isabella II, who had traveled from Paris as soon as she knew the seriousness of her son's illness, and his sisters Isabel and Eulalia were with him. Dr. García Camisón specified the immediate cause of death in an article published in El Liberal: Don Alfonso "died of an acute capillary bronchitis, developed in the course of a slow tuberculosis; the king has not died, therefore, of tuberculosis; this developed slowly and could have prolonged the life of the monarch still many months, and perhaps years".
The death of King Alfonso XII caused a deep commotion in the country. "The streets [of Madrid] were impassable... Thousands of carriages crossed in all directions taking the road to El Pardo", a contemporary chronicle recounted. The coffin was taken to the Royal Palace where the funeral chapel was installed and visited by thousands of people. On the 29th it was taken to the Monastery of El Escorial, "again in the midst of a great crowd", where he was buried.
The king's death caused great concern —"an apocalyptic terror," according to José Varela Ortega— among the political elites at the prospect of the regency of the king's young and inexperienced wife María Cristina de Habsburgo, who was pregnant (their child, a son, would be born in May 1886). "The death of the king has produced here a singular stupor and uncertainty. No one can guess what will happen", Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo wrote to Juan Valera, then Spanish ambassador to the United States. The government feared a republican pronunciamiento or a Carlist uprising, or both at the same time, so the troops were put on alert. The stock market plummeted.
Faced with this situation, Cánovas, who spoke of the need for a "second Restoration" which would be "more difficult than the first" and fearing that the liberals would join the Republicans if they did not accede to power (the crisis of fear, as the conservative Francisco Silvela called it), decided to resign and advised the regent to call Sagasta to the government. Cánovas communicated his decision to the liberal leader and the latter accepted in a meeting that they held in the Presidency of the Government through the mediation of General Martínez Campos and which would be mistakenly known as the "Pact of El Pardo". On the evening of November 27 in the Royal Palace, the regent María Cristina received the oath of the new government presided over by Sagasta and before him she swore the Constitution. This is how Cánovas would explain his decision in the Congress of Deputies, some time later:
As Ramón Villares has pointed out, "the death of King Alfonso XII and the agreement or pact of 1885 (improperly called the Pacto del Pardo) definitively marked the consolidation of the regime" of the Restoration. For his part, Feliciano Montero has pointed out that "the political vacuum caused by the death of Alfonso XII put the solidity of the Canovist structure to test. The access to power of the liberal party, definitively constituted, and its long governmental management ("the long Parliament") contributed to consolidate the political system".
A good part of the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the nuncio Rampolla at the head, also played an important role in the consolidation of the regime by making public on December 14, 1855, a declaration of support for the Regency, applying the principles of the encyclical Immortale Dei on the relations between Church and State that Pope Leo XIII had just published. The declaration defended a certain political relativism ("on the best kind of government, on this or that form of constituting States, there can be an honest diversity of opinions") and a certain freedom of expression ("honest freedom to write with the amplitude that suits the respective aims and purposes"), which was a clear disqualification of fundamentalist postulates.
Ángeles Lario has pointed out that the political agreement reached after the death of the king "turned the two great parties into the true directors of political life, controlling the royal prerogative upwards and the construction of the necessary parliamentary majorities downwards, thus defining the life of this important period of our liberalism and at the same time being the origin of its most serious limitations. It is possible to diagnose ―allow me to use this expression― that the political system of the Restoration suffered from the disease produced by its own success".
For the political system to work, the two great parties (the Liberal-Conservative Party, headed by Cánovas himself; and the Liberal-Fusionist Party, headed by Sagasta) needed to gather all the political tendencies that existed in society, being "self-excluded" those that did not accept the form of State of the Constitutional Monarchy (Carlists and Republicans) and those that also rejected the principles of freedom and property on which the "bourgeois society" was based (socialists and anarchists).
As for the Carlists, the pretender Carlos VII, in exile after his defeat in the war like many other leaders, decided in 1878 to abandon the insurrectionary path and named Cándido Nocedal his representative in Spain ―his press organ would be El Siglo Futuro―, who imposed the identification between Carlism and Catholicism. Soon, internal confrontations arose between supporters and opponents of integration into the system of the Restoration, which also affected the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as could be seen in the pilgrimage to Rome in 1882. In this sense the Vatican dissociated itself from Carlism, because, as a cardinal wrote in January 1882 to the nuncio in Spain, "the interest of Religion in Spain demands that the fate of the Church not be identified with that of any party", also pointing out that Carlism had been characterized by "exploiting the national Catholic sentiment for the benefit of its political cause". Although Nocedal encountered growing opposition from the sector of Carlism headed by the Marquis of Cerralbo, the pretender maintained his support until his death in July 1885. Three years later, Cándido Nocedal's son, Ramón Nocedal, who succeeded his father as director of El Siglo Futuro, headed the fundamentalist split by founding the party of the same name. The Marquis of Cerralbo became the pretender's representative in Spain.
For their part, the republicans were divided into three political parties that disagreed not only on the republican regime (federal or unitary), but also on how to achieve the return of the Republic. These were the Federal Republican Party with Francisco Pi y Margall and Estanislao Figueras at the head (the latter died in 1882); the Progressive Republican Party of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, which was initially joined by Nicolás Salmerón; and the Posibilist Republican Party of Emilio Castelar. As for the strategy to follow against the Restoration regime, the greatest divergences were between Emilio Castelar, who was in favor of collaborating with Sagasta's Liberal-Fusionist Party if it assumed the democratic postulates (trial by jury, universal suffrage,...), a position close to that of Nicolás Salmerón who defended the legal procedures and the strengthening of the parliamentary regime (and would end up founding the Centralist Republican Party which would run in the elections), and Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, the main advocate, from his exile in Paris, of the electoral withdrawal and the insurrectional path, for which he promoted the clandestine Republican Military Association.
Between 1875 and 1881 there were numerous republican conspiracies, but none of them achieved their objectives. All of them ended with the arrest of the civilians and military personnel involved, most of whom were deported to African islands or abroad. After the arrival to power of Sagasta's liberals in 1881, republican activism changed course, and some of its most prominent politicians were integrated into the Canovist regime, so that the prominence of the military increased. Thus, in the summer of 1883 the most important attempt to gain power by insurrection took place with the uprising of the garrisons of Badajoz, Santo Domingo de la Calzada and La Seo de Urgel, which did not prosper due to the lack of military support among the rest of the army.
As for the anarchists, until the political opening that brought with it the arrival to power of Sagasta's liberals in 1881, the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA developed clandestinely. In that year it was replaced by the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (FTRE) founded in the Workers' Congress of Barcelona in 1881 and prepared to act legally. The FTRE reached 60,000 members, with the vast majority of them concentrated in Andalusia and, to a lesser extent, in Catalonia. Its decline began after the trial of the clandestine, and presumably anarchist, La Mano Negra, dissolving in 1888 (being replaced by the Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region).
For its part, the reduced Spanish Marxist socialist nucleus expelled from the IWA had founded in May 1879, in a Madrid tavern, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, but after coming out of hiding in 1881 —then the first Central Committee of the party was constituted— its first Congress would not be held until August 23–25, 1888 in Barcelona. A few days earlier, the Workers' Congress of Barcelona of 1888 had met, from which the related trade union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) was formed. At the Congress it was agreed that "the ideal of the Socialist Workers Party is the complete emancipation of the working class; that is, the abolition of all social classes and their conversion into a single class of workers, owners of the fruits of their labor, free, equal, honest and intelligent". However, the socialist movement was still very much in the minority. At the time of its foundation, the UGT had only 3355 members.