Paul Preston

A People Betrayed


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1836 by the Liberal Prime Minister Juan de Dios Álvarez Mendizábal. He had changed his name from Álvarez Méndez to hide the fact that he came from a Jewish family that sold second-hand clothes in Cadiz. He was a self-made businessman who had acquired a reputation as a financial genius as a result of having made a fortune in London. He saw the expropriation, and sale, of the lands of religious orders as a way of resolving royal financial problems created by the Carlist Wars of the 1830s. Mendizábal believed that he was thereby laying the basis for the future prosperity of Spain by creating a self-sustaining smallholding peasantry, ‘a copious family of property owners’.29 However, in the interests of the crown, the confiscated properties were sold at auction in large blocks, which meant that they were far beyond the means of even existing smallholders. Moreover, the fact that the lots were sold well below their market price, and often on credit which could be obtained only by the wealthy, ensured that one of the consequences was the consolidation of great estates. The other was that the privatization of property brought into cultivation land that had previously been idle or poorly cultivated. However, this was not enough to meet the needs of a steadily growing population, especially in the south.30

      In 1868, growing working-class discontent linked with middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy as well as financial and sexual scandals involving Queen Isabel II. In September 1868, a number of pronunciamientos culminating in one by General Juan Prim coincided with urban riots. This led to the overthrow and exile of the Queen. The two forces driving the so-called glorious revolution were ultimately inimical. The liberal middle classes and army officers had aimed to amend the constitutional structure of the country. Now, they were alarmed to find that they had awakened a mass revolutionary movement for social change and opened the way to the six years of instability known as the sexenio revolucionario. To add to the instability, between 1868 and 1878 Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba, was riven by a rebellion against the metropolis. In November 1870, Prim finally offered the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Amadeo had neither the political nor even the linguistic skills to cope with the problems that he faced. On 30 December, the very day of the new King’s arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated. From the beginning, Amadeo faced opposition from republicans, from supporters of Isabel II’s thirteen-year-old son Alfonso and from the Carlists. In 1872, there began the third Carlist War. A successful rebellion across the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the establishment of a kind of Carlist state, disorganized and based on religiously inspired banditry.

      Faced with civil war, a colonial revolt and a deeply divided political establishment, Amadeo abdicated in despair on 11 February 1873. With the establishment divided, elections in May saw a republican victory and the proclamation of the First Republic on 1 June. Under the presidency of the Catalan Federalist Francesc Pi y Margall, a decentralized structure was adopted and Spain was divided into eleven autonomous cantons. A series of bold reforms were proposed, including the abolition of conscription, the separation of Church and state, the provision of free compulsory education for all, the eight-hour day, the regulation of female and child labour, the expropriation of uncultivated estates and the establishment of peasant collectives. The combination of rapidly