Spanish Political System: Late 19th Century
System Operation: Oligarchy and Political Bosses
The system failed because the elections were a fraud. The results were forged under the leadership of the major parties. In Spain, there were two main types of constituencies: urban and rural areas. In the city, what prevailed was abstention. In the countryside, the results were controlled by warlords. The chiefs were the people of the towns that had power. This scam was undermining the credibility of the system. The electoral system of the Restoration began to collapse after 1909 when the Republicans and the Socialists got their first seats.
Political Opposition to the System of the Restoration
The defeat of the Carlist Wars in 1876 produced two consequences:
- First, the Carlist division into two branches, one led by Vázquez de Mella and another led by Nocedal. Vázquez de Mella chose to participate in the political game. Even so, they maintained an armed militia, the Requetés, that lasted until the Civil War. Nocedal resigned instead to support the descendant of Carlos María Isidro, i.e., accepting the Bourbon monarchy and establishing a fundamentalist Catholic party.
- Second, the government abolished the self-governing institutions in the Basque Country and Navarre, thus increasing centralism.
The Republicans started the Restoration with reduced influence due to the failure of the First Republic. There was the Republican Party of Castelar and the Republican and Federal Party of Pi y Margall. However, from 1909, a party called the Republican Union was created. It was the fusion of several small parties and involved the departure of the Republican choice for Spain. The Republicans were taking more importance in urban middle-class and intellectual circles. The labor movement was composed mainly of Socialists and Anarchists.
Nationalism
The nationalist movements arose principally in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia in the late 19th century. One reason that explains their birth is in the Constitution of 1876 of the Restoration. This Constitution established a definition of Spain as a nation that is determined by the monarchy, Catholicism, a common language (Castilian), and centralism. This idea of Spain, which was a conservative idea of liberalism, was seen as exclusionary. Other causes that explain the emergence of nationalism are economical reasons; these are particularly important in Catalonia. Spain at the end of the 19th century was scarcely an industrialized nation; it was a backward nation compared to Europe. The only industrial region was Catalonia. Catalan nationalism emerged as a movement of the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie demanding the restoration of its institutions of government to administer (which had been abolished by Philip V), while the Catalan bourgeoisie required greater participation in the government of Spain.
Catalan Nationalism
The Catalan movement began as a literary and cultural movement to reclaim Catalan culture, literature, and language. This movement became known as Renaixença, which means rebirth. Outstanding poets and writers include Verdaguer and Maragall. At the end of the 19th century, Catalanism became a political movement. The manifesto Bases de Manresa considered Catalonia as a nation and posed the establishment of autonomous institutions. The first major success of the Catalans occurred in 1907 when a group called Solidaritat Catalana won elections in Catalonia, and this was the first step to the creation of the first nationalist party in Catalonia: the Lliga Regionalista. Its leaders were Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó, considered the fathers of political nationalism. The party represented the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie in Catalonia, but the program was not independence but autonomy.