The fallout from the disaster of 1898 eventually hit several parts of the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia, for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. The sectors most dependent on colonial trade were badly hit, although a diversification of export targets and technological change eventually eased the difficulties. Uprooted Spanish entrepreneurs came back home with business know-how and substantial capital. Nonetheless, Catalan industrialists were driven to campaign for political change and modernization to increase domestic consumption. Moreover, the disaster of 1898 intensified the pre-existing alienation of the Catalan middle classes from the Spanish state. Already a cauldron of social tension as anarchist labourers migrated from the estates of Andalusia, Murcia and the Catalan hinterland, Barcelona was the scene of strikes and terrorist atrocities by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Although the Spanish economy remained predominantly agrarian, in the early years of the century a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Cataluña, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias.2 Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than that from British mines. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the hesitant growth of these industries led to the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also fostered the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basque and Catalan industrialists paid a very high proportion of Spain’s tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy.
The notoriously corrupt elections of 19 May 1901 saw the machinery of caciquismo move from the exchange of favours for votes to outright purchase of them or the use of violence to force voting in one direction or another or simply to prevent voting altogether. Nevertheless, the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista, won its first electoral victory. It had been established only three weeks earlier by uniting the most conservative elements of Catalan nationalism with the express intention of working ‘by all legitimate means for the autonomy of the Catalan people within the Spanish State’. Its leader was the shrewd banker Francisco Cambó, the President of the industrialists’ association, the Fomento Nacional. Between 1901 and 1905, the Lliga and the republicans destroyed the turno system in Barcelona. In the elections of 1901, all four Lliga candidates and both republicans won their seats. Henceforth, elections would be fought on left–right lines, between the various left-wing republican groups and the conservative and Catalanist Lliga.3
Elsewhere, the corrupt system of the Restoration survived, with the increase in electoral competition being met by an intensification of corrupt practices. At the turn of the century, the accounts of the March Hermanos Company of Mallorca revealed substantial payments made in cash, cigars and even cakes (ensaimadas) to secure votes in elections and to bribe frontier guards (carabineros), to turn a blind eye to tobacco smuggling.4 In 1905, electors were abducted off the streets in Alicante. In Guadalajara and other provinces, in 1905 and in most elections of the period, the Conde de Romanones used his immense fortune to establish an arsenal of favours and threats that his agents could use to gain votes.5 The choice between the purchase of votes and the exercise of violence depended in part on the financial resources of the political group in question. Wealthy industrialists and mine owners in the Basque Country frequently resorted to purchase while the wheat growers of Old Castile were more often to be found using compulsion of one kind or another, especially the threat to foreclose mortgages or not to buy the wheat of the small producers. In order for any of this to happen, candidates had first to be authorized by the Ministry of the Interior. There, the encasillado (the list of candidates selected to win a seat) was drawn up according to the political needs of the day and the recommendations of influential figures.6 Thus electoral fraud signified that there would be wild swings of votes from one election to the next, especially in rural areas. In some poor regions, such as Andalusia or Galicia, the government of the day was able to maintain control of the elections. In Andalusia, between 1899 and 1923, some 49 per cent of Cortes seats went to members of the Liberal Party and 44 per cent to members of the Conservative Party. Only 7 per cent of seats were ‘won’ by members of opposition parties and, even then, only because the Ministry of the Interior had included them in the encasillado.7
The impact of 1898 among intellectuals of the right and the left saw unmitigated criticism of the deficiencies of the political system. One response came from the austere Conservative Antonio Maura, who tried to reform Spanish politics between 1900 and 1910 by means of the so-called ‘revolution from above’. Born in Palma de Mallorca in 1853, Maura had arrived in Madrid in 1868 to study law, barely able to speak Spanish. By the time he came to political prominence his eloquence in the language was legendary. He had long been committed to reform of Restoration politics, initially, as the brother-in-law of Germán Gamazo, in the Liberal Party. A rigidly austere Catholic, he would punish himself by renouncing smoking on any day on which an examination of his conscience revealed a sin.8 His scathing oratorical skills could crush opponents and rendered him a divisive figure. In fact, his arrogant and authoritarian manner belied his relatively liberal ideology. Nevertheless, his desire for reform of the political system was inhibited by a fear of the masses.9
Maura would be Prime Minister five times, the first from December 1903 to December 1904; the longest (with a brief one-month interruption in March 1907) from January 1907 to October 1909 and finally for three short periods during the death agony of the Restoration system: March to November 1918, April to July 1919 and August 1921 to March 1922. His successes, and even more his failures, illustrate the problems of the Restoration system. If he was the great white hope of the system in his first governments, by 1918 he would be called upon, in the words of his friend César Silio, to be ‘the fireman of the monarchy’.10 After the death of Gamazo, he had taken the remnants of his faction into Francisco Silvela’s Conservative Party in 1902. He had gradually come to believe that Silvela was more open to ideas of national regenerationism than the Liberals. In 1899, Silvela had underlined ‘the need for a real revolution carried out from above with a determination to change profoundly our political, administrative and social way of being’. In July 1901, Maura declared in the Cortes that there had to be a revolution imposed by the government in order to forestall a more catastrophic revolution from below.11
In April 1903, as Minister of the Interior in Silvela’s cabinet, Maura supervised ‘clean’ elections for the first time in the history of the Restoration. He undermined the networks of clientelism by appointing provincial civil governors without links to the local caciques. He also curtailed bribes to the press and refrained from using the encasillado, the imposition of governmental candidates on constituencies. His lifelong contempt for the press was reciprocated, which would always be a serious handicap. Since his speeches were often distorted, he declared that ‘the diary of parliamentary proceedings is my newspaper’. Although, thanks to the entrenched power of the caciques, the Conservatives achieved a healthy majority, with government intervention limited, in the 1903 elections, thirty-four republican candidates were returned in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. The Queen Regent was furious, convinced that Maura had endangered the monarchy with what she regarded as self-indulgent moralism. Still having enormous influence over her recently enthroned son, she mobilized him against Silvela. The young King told Silvela that he must either oblige Maura to use the full arsenal of electoral chicanery or sack him. He refused. In fact, suffering ill health, he was more than ready to resign and, ironically, his departure saw Maura become leader of the Conservative Party.12 This tension with the Royal Palace and Maura’s austere manner explain why he was the only minister whom Alfonso XIII did not address with the informal tú form, but rather with the more respectful usted and ‘Don Antonio’. This accounts for the underlying contradiction whereby, in the words of Maura’s protégé Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, ‘the King would regard him with profound respect and uncontrollable antipathy’.13
From the beginnings of their relationship, the young Alfonso XIII resented Maura’s attempts to