Spain's First Carlist War, 1833-40

M. Lawrence

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137401755
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Spain's First Carlist War was an unlikely agent of modernity. It pitted town against country, subalterns against elites, and Europe's Liberal powers against Absolute Monarchies. This book traces the individual, collective and international experience of this conflict, giving equal attention to battle fronts and home fronts.

1

Introduction, History and Sources

Tragedy invites study, and wars, especially civil wars, are tragic by their very nature. National, imperial and civil wars dominated Spain during the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary turbulence of 1808–48, pitting Patriots against Frenchmen, americanos against peninsulares, and Liberals against Carlists. These interminable conflicts have shaped works of fiction. Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales serialised calamities from the Battle of Trafalgar to the Carlist War and beyond, weaving fictional characters into real historical events in a didactic construction of national truth. Political elites contested the legitimate nature of the state but generally had no interest in social change. Instead, they relied upon a surfeit of army veterans who ‘pronounced’ against governments in return for pay and promotion, precious commodities in a bankrupt economy. The predominantly rural masses were integrated into political programmes as a last resort. Yet the inability of elites to rescue Spain from its post-imperial crisis condemned their people to two generations of upheaval and war, to the extent that upheaval has been seen as the normal, if problematic, functioning of politics. The longest nineteenth-century Spanish conflict, the First Carlist War (1833–40), began with a dynastic dispute. But it developed into an unlikely agent of modernity on account of the unequal demands it imposed on the people who, in response, and for the first time in modern Spanish history, found their own voice, agendas and solutions.

It is surprising that Spain’s First Carlist War remains Europe’s most neglected nineteenth-century civil war in the English scholarship. This lacuna is unworthy of the conflict’s importance. It was both the last great European conflict of the pre-industrial age and, before the nineteenth-century military revolution, an iconic moment in the pan-European struggle between liberalism and absolutism, and a key stage in the history of modern Spain. Yet, unlike the Peninsular War (1808–14), the First Carlist War is something of a Cinderella for monographs and transnational histories alike.¹ The conflict’s Spanish historiography is far better, thanks to such scholars as Jordi Canal, Josep Clemente, Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza, Ramón Urquijo Goitia, Pedro Rújula and the late Julio Aróstegui, to say nothing of the wealth of local and regional studies. But it is surprising that even the Spanish historiography was late in applying modern historical methods to the conflict; rather, until the 1970s, the war, like the broader issues of Carlism and Liberalism in general, was the battleground of ideologically committed panegyrists and detractors. Antonio Pirala’s exhaustive six-volume study, written between the 1850s and 1870s, remained authoritative for more than a century as a consequence. But the Spanish innovation has not yet led to a monograph of the conflict in English. In principle, then, there is a need for a new study in English which will examine the whole of the war and integrate the military narrative into wider questions concerning politics and society. This monograph shows how the First Carlist War created a radical movement within the ranks of Spanish liberalism which thereafter never ceased to exert pressure on its more moderate (and distinctly elitist) movement.

Spain’s Carlist Wars make interesting and exciting reading, especially the first and most prolonged of these civil wars, the First Carlist War of 1833–40. The background to this conflict is extremely complex, but, in brief, as a result of the Peninsular War (1808–14) Spain had been plunged into a far-reaching political, social and economic crisis. The only way forward from this situation was a comprehensive programme of reform that extended and deepened the changes already made in the reigns of Charles III (1759–88) and Charles IV (1788–08). Initiated by the progressive group of liberales that had dominated the Cortes of Cádiz (1810–14), and picked up in more timid fashion by the counsellors of Ferdinand VII after 1814, this programme of reform was challenged by elements in the Church and the nobility who had hoped rather to ‘colonise’ Ferdinand VII and to make him not only turn back the clock in respect of the changes made in the period of 1808–14, but reverse those made in the period of enlightened absolutism as well. For a long time it seemed that they would ultimately reverse the tide of reform – the heir to the throne, Ferdinand’s younger brother, Prince Charles (‘Don Carlos’: hence the word ‘Carlist’) was very much under their thumb – but the last months of Ferdinand’s life saw a complicated series of events threaten their dominance, and no sooner had he died than they staged an armed revolt aimed at ensuring their triumph by force. This civil war has attracted nothing like the critical attention lavished upon its iconic successor a century later. In some ways this situation is surprising, as, for a start, the enduring stereotype of the ‘Two Spains’ – which for so long was deemed central to understanding modern Spain – might have seemed an equally compelling paradigm for the First Carlist War: whereas the Spanish Civil War saw Nationalists and Republicans fighting for their respectively hegemonic visions of Spain, the First Carlist War offers a comparable struggle between legitimist Carlists and modernising Liberals which took twice as long to resolve as its successor, exacted relatively more casualties and even anticipated the International Brigades (some 18,000 French, British, Belgian and Portuguese volunteers for liberty). One major difference lay in the reversal of the term ‘national’. Whereas in the 1830s it was the progressive Liberal side which was ‘national’, in the 1930s the Francoist coalition, heirs of the vanquished Carlists, claimed this title. Spanish nationalism had evolved from Left to Right, from a civic force of nation-building into a conservative force of National Catholicism.²

It was a dynastic dispute about who should succeed to the throne in 1833 that provided the trigger for war, but the latter’s roots in reality stretched far wider. The first root was contested legitimacy, which was no arcane matter but an issue that shaped all sorts of popular militancy. Spaniards had traditionally held their monarchy in great reverence: unlike the French and English, they have never killed their king. The illegitimacy of Napoleon’s seizure of their throne in 1808 in the name of his brother, Joseph, had been the formal casus belli for the Peninsular War. But to the question of legitimacy needs to be added the question of absolutist royal will. In 1789 Ferdinand’s father, Charles IV, had used a secret session of the Spanish Cortes to issue a decree opening up the royal succession to female as well as male heirs. This broke with the Salic Law which the Bourbon victor of the 1701–13 War of the Spanish Succession, Philip V, had conferred on his new dynasty and which effectively excluded female heirs from the succession by exhausting all legitimate male bloodlines to the throne. Any doubts surrounding the validity of the Salic Law had long remained moot: Ferdinand’s first three marriages bore him either no children or resulted in miscarriages and infant mortalities, which could only mean that the King’s younger brother, Don Carlos, would succeed him. But the healthy birth of the royal daughter, Isabella, born in October 1830, revived the question of the succession. Don Carlos did not challenge his brother openly, and much of the running was made by Ferdinand’s wife, María Francisca, who was at odds with his sister-in-law, Luisa Carlota. Bourbon women had always dominated when their menfolk were weak. But now this tradition was given new form, as the dynastic triumph of the women, María Cristina and her young daughter Isabella, was countered by the Carlist faction in sexist propaganda.³ As a leading Carlist propagandist pronounced, ‘Phillip V knew how nature demands that a man should command and a woman obey, and that there is barely one out of a million of the fairer sex fit for something greater than homespinning.’⁴ Despite this sexism, the war would place women into roles ‘naturally’ reserved for men. Pre-war court politics foreshadowed this. From 1830, after the birth of Isabella and then a second daughter, it became possible for the Cristino faction to win the succession. Under pressure from María Cristina, whom events would throw into the arms of the Liberal reformists, Ferdinand timidly reissued the 1789 decree, now termed the Pragmatic Sanction, thereby announcing Isabella’s succession to the throne in the event of his death. Pro-Carlist court pressure succeeded in prevailing upon Ferdinand briefly to revoke the Sanction.⁵ But the Carlist recovery was by no means assured. In 1832 the King lapsed into what was thought to be terminally poor health, and his powers were passed to the regency of his wife who presided over a purge of Carlists from the army and administration. During a brief Indian summer in the King’s health, three months before his death, the Cristino faction again secured the King’s approval for the re-abolition of the Salic Law. Thus, Carlist hopes of a smooth transition were dashed: the royal will was that the infant Isabella’s minority reign would be exercised by her mother’s regency when the King’s death finally came in September 1833.

Don Carlos, devout and tenacious, refused to recognise the Isabeline succession: the recent legitimist rising known as the Agraviados had taught him the wisdom of awaiting events. But he also refused openly to challenge the King whilst the monarch still lived. This legitimist propriety did not have to matter as such. Early nineteenth century Spain had been littered with examples of pronunciamientos, or military coups, being mounted in order to change politics and, in the case of young Prince Ferdinand and his elderly father, Charles IV, in 1808, even to force a royal abdication. And Don Carlos suffered no lack of proxies prepared to do his bidding, including several in some of the highest positions of authority in the Bourbon state. The purge of these Carlists during the last months of Ferdinand’s life was explained by Liberal historians with references to the ‘illegitimacy’ of the Carlist dynastic claim. The dual issue of the secret decree of 1789 and the definitive expression of royal will of 1833 supported their case. According to the Liberal historian, Antonio Pirala, the Cristino case may have been impolitic but was by no means illegitimate. Not only had the Cortes effectively legitimised a female succession as early as 1789, but the Salic Law in any case was the worst example of ‘foreign despotism’ to contravene centuries of Spanish tradition, and which had been instigated by the Bourbons in 1713 solely in order to settle European fears of a formally integrated Franco-Spanish monarchy.⁶ One of the ironies of the dynastic dispute was that modernising Liberals invoked medieval Spanish tradition whereas medievalist Carlists invoked the eighteenth-century Bourbons, the very dynasty whose enlightened absolutism created the conditions for nineteenth-century liberalism to emerge.

Certainly, nineteenth-century Liberals used Spanish tradition in other contexts for political ends. Most markedly, the 1820s radical-liberals named their secret society the Comuneros in honour of the 1520s Comuneros revolt of Castile, the founding myth for Spanish Liberals who viewed it as the first modern defence of popular sovereignty. Historicism came easily to nineteenth-century Spanish Liberals, many of whom (Count Toreno, Agustín de Argüelles and Alcalá Galiano, to name a few) were themselves historians. But despite their erudition, their works are unhelpfully partisan and self-exculpatory with regard to the early nineteenth-century crisis that unleashed the Carlist War.⁷ This is not only because an equally strong case could be – and was – made by Carlist historians for Don Carlos’s claim,⁸ but also because most nineteenth-century histories lacked the analytical and contextual rigour demanded by modern scholarship. An adequate understanding of the background to the First Carlist War needs to integrate archival research with the advances made in Spanish social history since the mid-twentieth century.

The First Carlist War: history and sources

Whereas most publications relating to the First Carlist War appeared during the conflict itself and its immediate aftermath, the highest quality of publications has appeared since the 1970s.⁹ That said, the most important single body of work remains Antonio Pirala y Criado’s six volumes, written over two decades from the 1850s. Pirala was a positivist progresista (Spanish ‘Whig’) and sometime fiction writer who, in his youth, flirted with democracy in response to failure of the 1848 revolution in Spain. His politics moved to the Right in proportion to his advancing age and career. But he remained a Liberal, thinking the Carlists were wrong even though he was objective and unusually knowledgeable about them. His even-handedness was commended by the Carlist side. He was bequeathed private Carlist correspondence by the Carlist commander-in-chief who, in 1839 made peace, Rafael Maroto.¹⁰ When Pirala, in the 1870s, began his five-volume Historia Contemporánea, dealing with the Second Carlist War (1872–76), he was granted privileged access to Carlist papers.¹¹ Yet Pirala’s prolix narrative means that he was often cited but seldom read. As a positivist he expressed immutable moral norms and was constrained to give meaning to the political and social radicalisation unleashed by the war. In committing details of massacres, violence and riots to paper, Pirala conforms to a peculiarly nineteenth-century humanitarian literary model designed to make readers feel part of national suffering.¹² Pirala was not the first to use this technique. As the historian of Aragonese Carlism, Pedro Rújula, has pointed out, three Radical-Liberals who had exercised public roles in Aragón during the war (Francisco Cabello, Francisco Santa Cruz and Ramón María Temprado) were quick to write a leftist history of the conflict which amassed details of heroism and massacres in order to cast the Liberal militia as the martyred vanguards of a civil society whose memory must be avenged not just against any resurgent Carlists, but also against the conservatives (moderados) who brutally disbanded the militia whilst these authors were writing in 1843.¹³ But Pirala, less radical in his liberalism, provided the classic nineteenth-century expression of the humanitarian narrative. Yet he was not without his shortcomings. In particular, he neglected the Cristino ‘home front’, especially Andalucía where Carlism was admittedly at its weakest, but where so much of the social and political radicalism was nonetheless produced by the war.

Pirala’s failure to integrate the Cristino experience of civil war into the Liberal revolution has still not been fully addressed. At the turn of the current century Jordi Canal lamented that there was still no reliable synthesis of the First Carlist War.¹⁴ Certainly, no adequate attempt has been made to undertake this in the English language, but it is interesting to reflect upon how even the more sophisticated Spanish scholarship presents challenges and controversies. The Spanish historiography may be divided into five broad categories. The first comprised nineteenth-century dynastic and classical military histories, contemporary (and generally inferior in quality) to Pirala’s volumes.¹⁵ The second comprised the panegyrics from Franco-era traditionalists who depicted Carlism as an organic Christian good resisting the onslaught of godless and artificial Spanish liberalism.¹⁶ The First Carlist War was but one protracted episode in the wider war between Christianity and the Anti-Spain that was joined in 1808 and won by the crusaders only in 1939. The most impressive work in this vein was the 30-volume history of traditionalism edited by Melchor Ferrer from the 1940s, which was meant to be the Carlist answer to the Liberal Pirala, but which in fact lacked the latter’s balance and command of primary sources.¹⁷ The third category comprised the ‘Navarra School’ of Pamplona-based neo-traditionalists, led by Federico Suárez Verdeguer. These scholars sustained a far more sophisticated right-wing analysis based on modern empirical research.¹⁸ Their contention that Spain remained royalist, or apolitical, throughout this period rendered Liberalism an artificial and arrogant innovation. As the best neo-traditionalist scholar of the First Carlist War, Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza, put it, the Cristino Liberals were waging war against their own people.¹⁹

Even though both the traditionalists and neo-traditionalists sympathised with historical Carlism, they were alienated by the leftward shift of ‘Carlism 1968’, which inspired a new generation of neo-Carlist scholarship. The neo-Carlists are the fourth category, and their revisionism is impossible to understand without reference to the socialist ‘self-management’ (autogestión) doctrine advocated from the late 1960s by the Carlist ‘Prince’ Carlos Hugo de Borbón Parma and his followers. The neo-Carlists resented how the Francoist ‘families’ of neo-traditionalists a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction, History and Sources
• 2. The First Carlist War: Origins
• 3. The First Carlist War: Context
• 4. The Basque Phase, 1833–35
• 5. The War Radicalises Cristino Spain, 1835–36
• 6. Deep War Feeds Revolution, 1836–37
• 7. Carlist Failure, 1837–39
• 8. Stalemate and Cristino Victory, 1838–40
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index