On 26 June 1878, Alfonso XII’s wife María de las Mercedes de Orleans died of typhus two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was devastated and his consequent plunge into drink and sexual adventures did little for his own precarious health. Indeed, his wife’s death was merely one of a series of misfortunes. Efforts to quell rebellion in Cuba would eventually lead to the loss of 200,000 lives and an unsustainable drain on state resources. In August 1878, there was a minor republican uprising in Navalmoral de la Mata in Cáceres. It was easily suppressed, but the fact that it had happened at all hinted at underlying problems. On 15 October that same year, Alfonso XII was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Joan Oliva i Moncasí, an anarchist cooper from Labra in the province of Tarragona. Oliva fired twice with a double-barrelled pistol but missed. He was executed by garrote vil on 4 January 1879. Fourteen months later, on 30 December, there was a second assassination attempt. The King had remarried only a month before, on 29 November. He was returning from a walk in the Retiro with his new wife, Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena, when a twenty-year-old pastry chef from Galicia, Francisco Otero González, shot at them. Although he also missed, on 14 April 1880 Otero was similarly executed by garrote vil.37
For now, Arsenio Martínez Campos was achieving some success against the Cuban insurgents. By dint of a combination of energetic counter-guerrilla tactics, bribery and conciliatory negotiations, he had achieved the Peace of Zanjón. As Governor General, he urged thoroughgoing reform of education and the economy and especially of the Cuban tax burden and of Spanish tariffs on sugar, tobacco and coffee imports from the island. Cánovas was seriously alarmed because the proposed measures constituted a major threat to the Spanish economy. His solution was to invite Martínez Campos in June 1879 to form a government which he intended to control from the shadows. Cánovas’s electoral fixer, Francisco Romero Robledo, had friends among the Cuban plantation owners who were bitterly opposed to Martínez Campos’s proposed reforms and did everything possible to undermine the new Prime Minister. Deeply frustrated, Martínez Campos resigned a mere six months later on 7 December and was replaced by Cánovas. In the course of 1880 and 1881, only a few of Martínez Campos’s reforms were implemented, which guaranteed that the Cuban War would be reignited. On 7 February 1881, Alfonso XII exercised his royal prerogative by withdrawing confidence from Cánovas and effectively making Práxedes Mateo Sagasta Prime Minister by giving him a decree to dissolve the Cortes and call new elections.38 Little changed with the fall of Cánovas. Spain’s domestic economic problems ensured that Martínez Campos, who had become Sagasta’s Minister of War, remained unable to implement his proposed reforms. In addition to the plantation owners, wheat growers feared the loss of Cuban markets to North American producers. Catalan industrialists and the footwear manufacturers of Valencia and Alicante also relied on protected Cuban markets.
In many respects, the chaotic period 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order and establish a short-lived Republic, the liberal bourgeoisie was frightened out of its reforming ambitions by the spectre of proletarian disorder. When the army restored the monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, the middle classes abandoned their reformist ideals in return for social peace. The subsequent relation of forces between the landed oligarchy, the urban bourgeoisie and the remainder of the population was perfectly represented by the so-called Restoration political system created in 1876. Indeed, it would differ little in composition from what had gone before except that parties would alternate in power peacefully rather than by a combination of insurrections and military coups. A provisional government was established under the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who quickly set about drafting a new Constitution. After sixty years of civil wars, disastrous rule by generals and political corruption, he was convinced that what was necessary was a period of tranquillity in which industries might develop.
Cultured and widely read, Cánovas believed that the prosperity enjoyed by the dominant power of the day, Great Britain, was the result of the stability provided by its two-party system. His admiration of the British parliamentary system allegedly extended to learning by heart some of the speeches of Gladstone and Disraeli. In a bid to emulate British success, he had set out to copy, outwardly at least, what he believed to be its secret. He was determined both to exclude the army from political power and to run no risks of a radical electorate undermining his plan to consolidate the recently restored monarchy. Thus an apparent working model of the British system was elaborated whereby the Conservative Party under Cánovas and the Liberal Party under Sagasta would take turns in power. The tool necessary for this to function without interference by the electorate was electoral falsification.39 The system came to be known as the turno pacífico, that is to say the peaceful alternation in power of the two monarchist or ‘dynastic’ parties. Thus the turno, in the words of the liberal reformer Gumersindo de Azcárate, far from replicating the British system was merely ‘a ridiculous parody in which everything is a farce and a lie’.40 Salvador de Madariaga wrote that Cánovas ‘relied on force and fiction’ and described him as ‘personally honest and honourable’ but ‘the greatest corrupter of political life which modern Spain has known’.41
The micro-managing of elections ensured that, for the next half-century, power would remain in the hands of the same families that had held it before 1876. Entire dynasties, fathers, sons and sons-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law would monopolize parliamentary seats. Such would be the case of the family of Álvaro de Figueroa, the Conde de Romanones, in Guadalajara with tentacles in Baeza and Úbeda in Jaén, Castuera in Badajoz and Cartagena in Murcia. An equally striking example was the family of Eugenio Montero Ríos, the main cacique of the four provinces of Galicia, who was Minister of Development from 1885 to 1886, Minister of Justice between December 1892 and July 1893 and eventually Prime Minister in 1905. From his base in Lourizán in Pontevedra, he used his influence to promote the political careers of his sons and sons-in-law. Sagasta was equally watchful of the parliamentary welfare of his sons-in-law. Francisco Silvela y de Le Vielleuze, Cánovas’s eventual successor at the head of the Conservative Party, was the all-powerful cacique of Ávila. Although he criticized the electoral falsification of the turno pacífico, he placed members of his family in some of the most important government positions. Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, the omnipotent cacique of Murcia, similarly promoted his family. Indeed, it was not uncommon for parliamentary seats, senior government administrative posts and sometimes even government ministries to be virtually bequeathed from father to son.42
The two political parties did not have strongly defined ideologies or policies but were rather groups of notables representing the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy. The Conservatives looked mainly to the concerns of the wine and olive growers of the south while the Liberals protected the interests of the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were known as the ‘dynastic’ parties because they were both committed to the monarchy and were not divided on issues regarding the social order or the sanctity of property. As their name suggested, the Liberals were less authoritarian and, unlike the firmly Catholic Conservatives, inclined to be rather more critical of the Church. The main differences were to do with trade. The Conservatives favoured the free trade required by their constituency of export fruit growers and wine producers while the Liberals represented the needs of the inefficient wheat growers who wanted protection from the great international producers of Canada, Argentina and Australia. To give an example of the problem – in