The Cánovas System: Restoration and Political Opposition in Spain
The Cánovas System
After the coup of General Pavía and the dissolution of the courts in 1874, a military regime was established under the presidency of General Serrano. During his personal dictatorship, he eliminated the last remnants of Republican opposition and confronted Carlism, while the middle class and bourgeois groups were incorporated into the Alfonsine cause, officially represented by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.
In October 1874, Alfonso XII signed the Sandhurst Manifesto, drafted by Cánovas, who wanted to present a liberal country with a constitutional monarchy ensuring dialogue, constitutionalism, and Catholicism. But General Martínez Campos and Jovellar pronounced on December 29 in Sagunto in favor of the Bourbons, hastening the arrival of the new king.
Alfonso XII of Spain arrived on January 9 and reaffirmed his confidence in Cánovas. The government initiated a labor of seeking to achieve several objectives: to adapt the system to political reality, the creation of a new constitution, and addressing the problems of the northern Carlist (end the Third Carlist War, 1876) and the war in Cuba (Zanjón Peace, 1878).
The December elections to the Constituent Cortes were convened by universal suffrage, but there was a large abstention. These Cortes produced the 1876 Constitution, to the liking of Cánovas.
This constitution is characterized by: shared sovereignty between the king and the Cortes; division of powers (legislative-Cortes and king; executive-king; judicial independence is reinforced); declaration of fundamental rights; census suffrage elections until 1890 and universal law from that date; bicameral courts (Congress and Senate); a constitutional and hereditary monarchy; a confessional state (official Catholicism); and a centralized local government, with the government interfering in legislatures and cities.
The Restoration Cánovas system was based on the constitution of 1876 and bipartisanship, where the Conservative Party and Liberal Party peacefully alternated in power.
- The Conservative Party (Cánovas del Castillo) attracted moderates and even some liberal unionists.
- The Liberal Party (Sagasta) greeted the progressives, Democrats, and moderate Republicans.
Six of the ten elections between 1876 and 1898 were won by the Conservatives, while four were won by the Liberal-Fusionists.
The alternation process was marked by electoral manipulation and fraud. The Minister of the Government elaborated the list of deputies to be elected in each constituency. The rigging or fraud could be initiated from the census. The Chiefs, the other cornerstone, were individuals or families who controlled a particular power constituency; much of the population was subject to their interests. These electoral practices rested on another widespread phenomenon: abstention.
Cánovas kept the following outside of the political opposition: Republicanism, Carlism, Unionism, and workers’ parties.
Emerging Political Opposition to the System
The Restoration system marginalized large political and social sectors because of their diversity; they were unable to propose an alternative to the regime.
One of these sectors was Carlism. Its military defeat in 1876 sparked major disorganization and internal divisions.
After the failure of the First Republic, Spanish Republicanism took a long time to recover and form a new political alternative. It was characterized by fragmentation, which followed personal and ideological reasons. Each of the major Democratic Republican leaders of the Sexenio led his own party: Pi i Maragall, the Federal Party (federal); Ruiz Zorrilla, the Progressive Party (radical); Castelar, the Historic Party (chance); and Salmerón, the Centralized Party (unitary). Despite repeated attempts, unification did not occur until the emergence of the Republican Union (1903).
The potential for action of the labor movement during the Restoration was small, due to their limited freedoms. They were not integrated into the political system and there was a strong internal division of the movement, whose main strands in the last third of the nineteenth century were socialism and anarchism.
Anarchism was reorganized in 1881 through the establishment of the Federation of Workers in the Spanish Region (FTRE). Anarchism focused on violent acts, industrial action (strikes and protests), and cultural production. A purported clandestine organization of Cádiz and Jerez caused a repression of anarchism in Andalusia.
In 1879, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) was founded in Madrid, whose first secretary was Pablo Iglesias. With the formation of the Republican Socialist in 1910, they won the first act of a deputy, and in 1888 the socialist union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) was established in Barcelona.
In the late nineteenth century, nationalism emerged because of its critical stance regarding the political system of the Restoration, especially in its central conception of the state.
- Regarding Catalan nationalism, in 1885, Valentí Almirall promoted the presentation to Alfonso XII of the Memorial de Greuges, defending industrial protectionism and the law of Catalonia against Spanish law uniformity. In 1891, the Unió Catalanista was created, publicizing the first program of Catalanism, of course conservative and nationalistic content based on order, tradition, religion, and property. With the emergence of the Regionalist League in 1901, the Catalan bourgeoisie rose to defend moderate Catalanism.
- Basque nationalism became a political charter in 1895 with the founding of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) by Sabino Arana, whose ideology was based on defending the independence and integrity of the cultural, ethnic, and political aspects of the Basque people.
- Galician regionalism in the eighties integrated a traditionalist tendency, represented by Alfredo Brañas. Internal divisions and a weak social base limited their ability.
- Valencian regionalism was a late and minority phenomenon. It started with the cultural renaissance of the seventies, with the creation in 1878 of Lo Rat Penat society, the cultural heart of Valencia.
Liquidation of the Colonial Empire: Crisis, 1898
Perhaps it was in the area of the remains of the Spanish empire where the politics of nineteenth-century liberal conservatism had higher inadequacies and blunders, without ever having a good solution, coming to have a traumatic end.
Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and some Pacific islands were the remains of the old Spanish empire, and the Constitution of 1837 (progressive) denied the presence of MPs in Parliament and assigned them special laws. The exploitation of these territories continued to respond to the old model of plunder and a colonial plantation economy based on slave labor, since the agreements that prohibited the slave trade were not respected by Spain.
By 1868, things had changed a lot in Cuba. Trade relations with the U.S. were increasing, and among the Creoles, the idea of independence made its way. So a month after the Glorious Revolution broke out, an independence movement started with the “Cry of Yara” by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.
After abolishing slavery and establishing a system of autonomy and recognition of rights to the colonies, and after attempts by Prim and Republicans, lobbyists, with Serrano in the lead, relied only on military force to resolve the rebellion. The Ten Years’ War lasted until the Zanjón Convention in 1878, which only postponed the problems.
In the 1880s, Mahan’s doctrine (which established the plan of U.S. influence and control) was translated into a revival of independence. Only Sagasta, from 1893 to 1895, tried to access some reforms, but it was too late. In 1895, the “Grito de Baire” relaunched the fight.
The same thing happened in the Philippines with an independence movement led by José Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo.
When Cánovas was assassinated in August 1897, Sagasta could not act in time to the U.S. decision to resolve the problem, and in 1898, despite the granting of autonomy, the war continued. After the bombing of the U.S. battleship “Maine” in Havana harbor on April 20, the U.S. presented an ultimatum to Spain to relinquish sovereignty and withdraw military forces from the island. The Spanish fleets were destroyed by the Americans in the Philippines, at the Battle of Cavite, on May 1st, and in Cuba, in Santiago, two months later. The Spanish government requested the mediation of France to reach the Paris Peace Treaty with the U.S., by which Spain agreed to all conditions of the victors. Thus Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were taken over by the U.S.
Although the most important consequences were ideological, they were accompanied by a bad moment for the economy.
The defeat and the loss of the last colonies accounted for the manifestation of society’s inability to consolidate a modern and effective state and provided an incentive to a number of intellectuals, the Generation of 1898, which was characterized by deep pessimism and a tongued critic of the delay of Spain.
Politically, the crisis gave birth to a current of regenerationism, which denounced the vices of the Restoration system. The moralistic zeal and regenerating the country came to define this trend, which spread to all social classes and had an impact on most political forces.
Despite the events of 1898 that toppled the foundation of the Restoration, it was able to resist. The conviction that it was necessary to maintain the alternation between conservatives and liberals in the minority of Alfonso XIII ensured the survival of the regime when there was talk of a crisis state.