First Republic of Spain

The **Republic of Spain** (Spanish: **República de España**), historically known as the **First Republic of Spain** or the **First Spanish Republic**, was a nation state in western Europe which existed for 48 years between February 1873 and January 1921. The state controlled the majority of the Iberian peninsula, alongside the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in Africa. Additionally, the Republic of Spain shared boarders with Dunsteen and the British Empire, via Gibraltar. It was the first Isgardian republican state and the precursor of the modern State of Spain.

Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other local pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the invasion into Iberia of tribes from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centred in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre; made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as *Reconquista*, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. The dynastic union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon in 1479, often considered the formation of Spain as a country, was followed by the annexation of Navarre and the incorporation of Portugal during the Iberian Union. The Crown of Spain, through the Spanish Inquisition, forced the Jewish and Muslim minorities to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually most of the converts were expelled from Iberia through different royal decrees.

A major country of the Age of Discovery, Spain began the conquest of the New World in 1492, giving rise to the Spanish Empire. Centralisation and further state-building in mainland Spain ensued in the 18th century with the Bourbon reforms, but gave way to political instability with the Glorious Revolution in 1868 and the successive abdications of Isabella II and Amadeo I. Consequently, the legislative Cortes Generales proclaimed the formation of a provisional republican government in 1873 under the leadership of Estanislao Figueras, who oversaw the formation of most major governmental institutions. Between 1873 and 1890, the republic was dominated by the Democratic Republican party. In 1890, former regent Francisco Serrano was elected president and began to strip away major democratic safeguards in the constitution, before conducting a self coup in 1895 after loosing re-election to his predecessor. As a result of tensions between Serrano and Spain's colonial governors, both Cuba and the Philippines declared independence during the Spanish-American war. Following Serrano's death in December 1920, his successor Eduardo Dato implemented an interim constitution and dismantled many dictatorial elements of the first republic.

As the second longest lasting system of Spanish republican governance, the first Republic of Spain is remembered for the early liberal and left wing policies of the Democratic Republican party, and for the harsh authoritarian conservative policies of the Nationalist Party under Francisco Serrano. In response to the failures of the first republic, Eduardo Dato's new constitution established a federal republic with a prime minister as the constitutional head of government; however, with the major Conservative and Nationalist parties both heavily connected to the legacy of the Serrano era, the federal republic suffered from several major institutional issues and would similarly succumb to dictatorship under the Nationalist party in 1940.

## History

### Provisional Republican Government

In February 1873, after the abdication of King Amadeo I and the nullification of the 1869 constitution of Spain, Estanilao Figueras was elected as the president of the Cortes Generales, making him in effect the *de-facto* leader of the country in absence of a government or monarch. The following day, Figueras was elected as chairman of the Provisional Republican Government and president of the Executive Power by the republican dominated National Assembly; with his appointment to the joint titles, the National Assembly voted to establish the Republic of Spain on February 12, 1873, marking the end of the centuries-old Kingdom of Spain. In order to assume his positions, Figueras renounced his political party membership and became an independent member of the Cortes.

During his presidency, Estanilao Figueras presided over the creation of several key republican institutions. Between February and August 1873, Figueras was the presiding officer of a constitutional convention within the Cortes Generales and sought to moderate between the federalist Democratic Republicans and the conservative Centrist Party; the final constitutional draft was agreed upon by the Cortes on August 19, 1873 and was enacted the same day. Under the new constitution, the role of president of the Executive Power became separated from the legislative branch and instead assumed the role of leader of the Council of Ministers. Similarly, a singular five year presidential term limit was imposed, though this was increased to two five year terms in 1874, and sovereignty was granted to the constitution. The Figueras administration was also marked by a considerable amount of internal reorganisation, with the new constitution granting significant degrees of autonomy to each of the 19 regions of Spain. Despite his role as the founding president of the Spanish republic, Figueras' government faced significant internal disunity due to the ideological coalition required to retain the support of the Cortes; consequently, following the failure of the government to pass a budget, Figueras dismissed the Provisional Republican Government in February 1875 and established a minority government with the backing of the Democratic Republican party, which in turn carried out Figueras' will and set the date for early presidential elections as being June 1, 1875. Before retiring from office, in a session of the Council of Ministers, Figueras was reported to have snapped: "Gentlemen, I can't take it anymore. I'm going to be frank: I'm fed up with all of us!".

### Democratic Republican rule

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.

During his presidency, Salmerón sought to reverse many of the progressive reforms implemented by his predecessor; on October 18, 1880, the Salmerón administration enacted legislation to withdraw the autonomous devolved power of the regions and instead opened a constitutional convention with the intent of creating a new constitution. In March 1881, the government repealed Pi's universal education policy and removed many of the legal protections of worker's rights that had also been introduced under Pi. Although the Democratic Republican Party possessed a majority in the Cortes Generales, elements of the conservative Nationalist party and the radical National Unity alliance sought to impeach Salmerón for his alleged governmental misdeeds, including allegations of corruption after Salmerón granted the Madrid Metro Bank permission to open chains of banks in other regions following a significant donation to the PRD. In early 1883, a significant outbreak of typhus in central Spain led to thousands of deaths as the government struggled to contain the outbreak; in June 1883, President Salmerón himself contracted typhus and his health deteriorated rapidly. In response to Salmerón's illness, the Cortes Generales passed an amendment to the 1873 constitution to allow the leader of the president's party to assume the presidency for the rest of a scheduled term in the case of a presidential vacancy, and Salmerón duly resigned as leader of the Democratic Republican Party in favour of Emilio Castelar y Ripoll. On September 7, 1883, Salmerón became the first president of Spain to die in office and was succeeded by Castelar, who afforded Salmerón a state funeral.

On September 7, 1883, Emilio Castelar y Ripoll ascended to the presidency following the death of his predecessor, Nicolás Salmerón y Alonso, becoming the first Spanish president to assume office through a non-election constitutional succession of power. As president, Castelar sought to continue the classical liberal economic and social policies of his predecessor, and indeed supported Salmerón's initiative for the creation of a new constitution to codify the liberal notions of their governments; a new constitution was implemented in August 1884 and changed the line of succession to the presidency to make the interior minister first in line for the presidency. Though domestically liberal, President Castelar favoured authoritarian measures to keep order in Spanish colonial possessions, and implemented several paternalistic reforms in colonies to force assimilation into Spanish ways of life. In 1885, Castelar was re-elected as president, and became the first president to serve for more than a single term. Having been elected to a full term in office, Castelar sought to consolidate the popularity of the Democratic Republican Party by cutting taxes drastically, but saw his party lose its legislative majority in 1888 due to the rise of the Nationalist Party, and ultimately failed to win re-election in 1890.

### Serrano era

    During the 1890 presidential election, Francisco Serrano created a coalition of right-wing parties to contest the election and was elected as the fifth president of Spain. After being elected president, Serrano formed a coalition government with the Conservative party to give his administration a majority in the Cortes Generales. As president, Serrano began to roll out a series of conservative reforms to government; in March 1891, Serrano overturned a law enforcing the separation of church and state, and would later go on to proclaim Catholicism as the state religion. In 1893, Serrano's Nationalist Party won 104 seats in the Cortes Generales, prompting Serrano to retain a coalition agreement with the Conservative party. In 1894, the coalition government introduced a new electoral system to include a 300 member upper chamber for the 1898 elections.

In 1895, Serrano attempted to run for re-election against his predecessor Emilio Castelar y Ripoll, but was defeated by a narrow margin after several coalition members either declined to vote or were unable to vote; Serrano refused to concede the election, and instead demanded a new ballot to be held, which was rejected by congressional leaders. In a bid to retain his power, President Francisco Serrano reshuffled his government on June 2, 1895 to appoint the Serrano-loyalist Antonio Cánovas del Castillo as minister of defence, whilst replacing several senior generals within the armed forces on the same day. On June 5, 1895, President Serrano announced that he would remain in office with the backing of the armed forces until the holding of a new election, before using his presidential power to force a dissolution of the Cortes Generales; in the ensuing election, the Nationalist party gained a majority of seats with the loyalist Conservative party in second position, and the two parties used their majority to delay the scheduled presidential election. In the aftermath of the coup d'état, former presidents Francesc Pi i Margall and Emilio Castelar y Ripoll were both forced out of the Cortes, whilst their National Unity Alliance and Democratic Republican Party respectively were banned.

As news of Serrano's coup d'état spread across the Spanish colonies, nationalist movements arose in the Philippines and the Caribbean, which in turn led to the eruption of the Cuban War of Independence in 1895 and the Philippine Revolution in 1896. American involvement in funding rebellious groups prompted President Serrano to declare war on the United States; however, poor military planning during the Spanish–American War led to the loss of Spanish colonies outside of North Africa. Despite the loss of colonies and their vast wealth, Serrano's ties with the armed forces allowed him to retain their loyalty and the Serrano administration was successful in putting down rebellions in Portugal and norther Africa. On December 19, 1920, Francisco Serrano died in office and was succeeded as president by interior minister Eduardo Dato the following day. Within a month, Dato dissolved the authoritarian Serranist constitution and formed a federal republic in its place. Serrano was succeeded as leader of the Nationalist party by his protégé Francisco Franco, who would go on to be dictator of the country from 1940 to 1975.