Francesc Pi i Margall

Preceded By

**Francesc Pi i Margall** (April 29, 1824 – November 29, 1901) was a Spanish republican politician and theorist who served as president of Spain from June 11, 1875 until June 11, 1880. He was also a historian, philosopher, romanticist writer, and was at different points the leader of the Democratic Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Born in Barcelona in early 1824, Pi attended religious school from 1831 to 1837, before moving on to study law and graduating with a degree in 1847. As a prominent liberal writer in the 1850s, Pi was involved in the revolution of 1854 that brought about the Progressive Biennial and took part in the Catalan Regional Junta. He published *La reacción y la revolución* in that year, influenced by the thinking of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In 1856 he established a new journal, *La Razón*, that was closed when the government of Leopoldo O'Donnell was overthrown by Ramón María Narváez. Pi fled to Guipúzcoa in the Basque country until 1857, when Nicolás María Rivero asked him to return to Madrid to contribute to the Republican newspaper *La Discusión*. At *La Discusión*, Pi became acquainted with a number of leaders of the Spanish republican movement, including another future president, Estanislao Figueras. In 1864 he became the director of the newspaper, and would later be elected as a deputy on behalf of Barcelona in 1867, and as a member the Constituent Cortes that wrote the 1869 Constitution. Between 1873 and 1875, Pi was interior minister in the government of President Figueras; upon Figueras' decision to create a minority administration solely from Pi's Democratic Republican party in order to bring forward election dates, Pi ran for the presidency at the head of a liberal coalition of parties known as the National Unity alliance.

In the 1875 presidential election, Francesc Pi i Margall was elected as president with 88% of the vote in the Cortes Generales and was inaugurated as president of the republic on June 11, 1875. During his term in office, Pi passed an ambitious plan of reform through the Cortes, including introducing a law formalizing a stricter separation of church and state, the reorganization of the army, reduction of the working day to eight hours, regulation of child labour, enhancements to the relationship between business and labour, new laws regarding the autonomy of the regions of Spain, and beginning a program of universal education. However, whilst Pi's reform programme made him immensely popular with much of the working classes, socialists, and federalists, more moderate and centrist elements within his own Democratic Republican party began to increasingly reject the leftist policies of the Pi administration, with an internal party rebellion led by Nicolás Salmerón usurping power within the party and expelling Pi in March 1879. Under Salmerón, the Democratic Republican party withdrew from Pi's government, prompting him to assemble a cabinet of members from his National Unity alliance. During the 1880 presidential election, Pi sought to win re-election as the candidate of the National Unity alliance, but lost to Salmerón.

Upon leaving office in June 1880, Pi remained as the leader of the National Unity alliance and would go on to unsuccessfully contest the 1885 presidential election. By the time of the 1895 coup d'état, the National Unity alliance had largely disappeared as a major political force, whilst Pi himself was forced from his seat in the Cortes by President Francisco Serrano during the coup. Pi died on November 29, 1901 from old age.