, leader of the
Liberal-Fusionist Party. In April 1886, five months after forming the government and one month before the birth of the future Alfonso XIII, the liberals called
elections to provide themselves with a solid majority in the Cortes and thus be able to develop their government program, although they had already been able to begin to implement it thanks to the
benevolence of the conservatives. This period was called the
Long Government of Sagasta or also the
Long Parliament, since they were the longest lasting
Cortes of the Restoration and the only ones that were about to exhaust their legal life, but it was not easy for Sagasta to keep his party and his government united, since during those five years he had to overcome several crises. The second major reform was the
jury law, an old demand of progressive liberalism that had always been resisted by conservatism, and which was approved in April 1888.
Trial by jury was established for those crimes that had the greatest impact on the maintenance of social order or that affected individual rights, such as
freedom of the press. According to the law, the jury would be in charge of establishing the proven facts, while the legal qualification of the facts would correspond to the judges. , by
Joaquín Sorolla. The third major reform was the introduction of universal (male)
suffrage by means of a law passed on June 30, 1890. However, the law was not the result of popular pressure in favor of the extension of suffrage, but what Sagasta achieved with its approval was to ensure the unity of the party and the government, satisfying a historical demand of democratic liberalism at a time when the pressure of the "
gamacistas" was increasing in favor of approving a protectionist tariff for cereal production. A second reason was the strengthening of the liberal party —and of the Restoration regime— with the incorporation into it of
Emilio Castelar's "
posibilists" republicans, as they had promised if the extension of suffrage was approved. However, the approval of suffrage for all males over twenty-five years of age —some five million in 1890—, regardless of their income, as was the case with
census suffrage, did not mean the democratization of the political system, because
electoral fraud was maintained —thanks to the
caciquismo, as it was said at the time—, only that now the cacique networks were extended to the whole population, so that the governments continued to be formed before the elections, and not after, since the government of the day was manufactured with the
encasillado of a solid majority in the Parliament—during the Restoration no government ever lost an election—. According to Carlos Dardé, the ultimate reason for this "lack of mobilizing effects of universal suffrage in political life... was the social condition —economic and cultural— of the new voters, and their political horizon. The immense majority, male, to whom the right to vote had been given was not composed of middle and working classes of urban character, or independent peasants, involved in a political project of democratic character, but of rural masses, extremely poor and illiterate, completely alien to that project, with the hope of a
social revolution, in the southern half of the country, and of the triumph of
Carlism, in a good part of the north; masses which, in addition, had experienced either a strong police repression or the defeat in a
civil war". "The deputies remained, more or less, the same; no social group, with few exceptions, gained access to legislative power. Nor was there any transformation of the party structure, which continued to be
parties of notables; no base organization was promoted to attract the vote of the citizens whose electoral rights had just been recognized". On the other hand, the proof that the objective of the law was not the establishment of democracy was that no guarantees were adopted to ensure the transparency of the suffrage and thus avoid electoral fraud, such as the updating of the census by an independent body, the requirement of an accreditation to the person who was going to vote or the control of the whole process that remained in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, known as the "great elector", since he was the one who was in charge of ensuring that his government enjoyed a large majority in the Cortes. "The fact that in some urban centers the opposition was able to reverse this reality is almost a testimonial fact. Political control from above, the
practice of the turn by means of electoral fraud is what constitutes the essence of the political practices of Spain at the end of the century", concludes
Manuel Suárez Cortina. A point of view that is shared by Carlos Dardé: "In some cities —Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia...— things did indeed change, in favor of a
modern politics, based on public opinion; as proof of this, Republican representation was more numerous and constant, sometimes reaching the majority of deputies elected by these large population centers; with the passage of time, the
Socialists would also be elected; in Catalonia, the
Nationalists managed to send a significant representation to
Congress in Madrid; the same could be said of the Carlists in Navarre. But this representation of deputies was irremediably lost in the national assembly: of some 400 seats in Congress, the maximum number of Republican deputies was 36, in 1903, and that of Socialists, 7 in 1923". The
electoral districts, all of them uninominal, continued to be the majority —280 deputies—, while the urban ones were linked to large rural areas since they were plurinominal districts or constituencies —114 in total— in which between three and eight deputies were elected, depending on the population, in such a way that the votes of the rural areas "drowned" the urban votes less controllable by the caciquial networks. , engraving published in
La Ilustración Española y Americana. However, the government failed in its attempt to reform the Army, whose situation "was, as a whole, very deficient in comparison with other national armies" because "rather than as an institution designed for war, it was organized for garrison and
public order tasks, with poorly endowed troops, forced conscripts, with an excess of commanders and with an inadequate organizational structure". The ultimate cause of the failure was the autonomy enjoyed by the Army, which was the price that had to be paid for it to accept submission to civilian power, so that "any reform had to be approached with the acquiescence of the commanders. An extremely delicate task, since the situation of hypertrophy, the excess of officers, the poor equipment and the esprit de corps, based on a strong tradition of self-recruitment, had made the Armed Forces a reality that was not very permeable to external demands and controls". Thus, the bill presented by the Minister of War, General
Manuel Cassola, in June 1887 was not approved by the Cortes due to the strong opposition it encountered among conservatives, starting with Cánovas himself, and among both conservative and liberal military members of parliament. One of the most controversial issues was the proposal to establish
compulsory military service without redemptions or substitutions, which allowed the sons of wealthy families not to join the ranks if they paid a certain amount of money or sent a substitute in their place. In June 1888, General Cassola resigned and the government opted to impose by decree the less controversial parts of the law which had not been challenged by the Cortes: "it abolished honorary ranks, jobs higher than the effective one, mobility between arms with the exception of some special corps; it established promotion by seniority in peacetime and the possibility in wartime of voluntarily exchanging a promotion for merit with a medal".
The strengthening of the workers' movement: FTRE, UGT and the refoundation of the PSOE. Due to the slowness of the industrialization process, the industrial working class continued to constitute a minority within the urban working classes —and continued to be concentrated fundamentally in
Catalonia and in the mining areas of Vizcaya and Asturias—. In industry, or in the mines, work was hard and long. Around 1900 the average working day was 10–11 hours with an average wage of between 3 and 4 pesetas a day in factories and workshops, 3.25 to 5 pesetas in the mines, and 2.5 pesetas in construction. As for the agricultural working class —or "rural proletariat"— low wages continued to make the farms profitable, so the day laborers continued to constitute the sector of the rural classes that lived in the worst conditions. Their wages were well below those of industrial workers —around 1900 they were 1 to 1.5 pesetas a day— and they did not work all year round. The situation was especially scandalous in the case of the day laborers of Andalusia and Extremadura: "the earnings obtained by
piecework of all the members of the family, from sunrise to sunset, more than 16 hours a day [in summer], during the harvesting of the crops, the thinning of the olive trees and the harvesting of the olives; or the grape harvest, did not add up to enough to ensure even sufficient food for the whole year, when the work was only sporadic". , first president of the
General Union of Workers. For their part, the socialists, who in May 1879 had founded the
Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) —whose objective was, as its newspaper
El Socialista stated, "to procure the organization of the working class in a political party, distinct and opposed to all those of the bourgeoisie"-, called a Workers' Congress which was held in Barcelona in August 1888, from which the
Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) union was born, with
Antonio García Quejido as its first president. Ten days later, also in Barcelona, the
I Congress of the PSOE was held, which approved what would be known as the
maximum program of the party and ratified
Pablo Iglesias as its president. , by
Manuel Compañy. Integrated into the
Second International, the PSOE held its Labour Day on Sunday, May 4, 1890, to demand the eight-hour working day, in addition to the prohibition of work for children under 14 years of age, the reduction of the working day to 6 hours for young men and women between 14 and 18 years of age, the abolition of night work, and the prohibition of women's work in all branches of industry "which particularly affected the female organism". "The Socialist" published:Peacefully can today the workers make their strength felt... over the privileged class. Tomorrow, when the organization of the proletariat is complete, and the bourgeoisie does not want to yield to the reason that assists it and the power that accompanies it, the time will have come to proceed in a revolutionary manner.However, unlike the anarchist organizations, the growth of the PSOE and its union UGT was very slow and it never managed to take root in Andalusia or Catalonia. In the last decade of the 19th century they had only managed to establish themselves fully among the miners of Vizcaya, thanks to the work of
Facundo Perezagua, and Asturias. "Of the socialist weakness, the scarce number of votes obtained in the
elections of 1891 gives an idea: little more than 1,000 in Madrid; and about 5,000 in all of Spain. Until 1910, running alone, the PSOE never obtained more than 30,000 votes in the whole country; and it did not obtain any deputy". From the Catholic world an attempt was made to create a workers' movement with this confessional significance as a result of the publication in 1891 of the papal encyclical "
Rerum novarum" which encouraged initiatives in the social field. In Spain, the
Círculos Católicos de Obreros, promoted by the Jesuit
Antonio Vicent, arose, as well as the professional associations of mixed character, workers and employers.
Spanish nationalism and the expansion of "regionalisms" The weak process of "nation-building". After the failure of the
federal experience of the
First Spanish Republic and the
defeat of Carlism, during the Restoration the centralist State was consolidated, based on the iron control of the provincial and local administration by the government —including the Basque Country, whose
fueros were definitively abolished in 1876—. Likewise, during this period, the
process of construction of the
Spanish nation continued, but from its most conservative version, as the idea of Spain did not focus on the free will of its citizens —the
political nation— but on its "being", linked to its historical legacy —with Catholicism and the Castilian language as its main elements—. The leading exponents of this orquánico-historicist conception of the "
Spanish nation", which opposed the liberal and republican conception of the political nation, were
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo,
Juan Vázquez de Mella and the founder of the political regime of the Restoration himself,
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. According to this conception, Spain was "a historical organism of basically Castilian ethno-cultural substance, which was generated over the centuries and which is, therefore, an objective and irreversible reality". , president of the government when Alfonso XII died. However, despite the strengthening of centralism in the organization of the State, the Spanish
nation-building process was less intense than in other European countries, due to the weakness of the State itself. Thus, neither the school nor the
compulsory military service fulfilled the "nationalizing" function that they had, for example, in France, where the French identity eliminated "regional" and "local" identities. Thus, while in France French was imposed as the only language and the rest of the languages —contemptuously called "dialects"— ceased to be spoken or their use was considered a sign of "unculture", in Spain the languages different from Spanish —
Catalan,
Galician and
Basque— were maintained in their respective territories, especially among the popular classes. However, at least in the cities, Spanish nationalism did advance. This was demonstrated by the displays of nationalist exaltation in 1883 —as a show of support for King Alfonso XII on his return from a trip to France where he had received a hostile reception for his pro-German demonstrations—, 1885 —on the occasion of the conflict with Germany over the
Caroline Islands—, in 1890 —around Isaac Peral and his invention of the submarine with electric propulsion— or in 1893 —on the occasion of the
Margallo war in the vicinity of
Melilla—.
Catalonia built for the 1888 Exposition. In Catalonia, after the failure of the
Sexenio, a sector of federal republicanism headed by
Valentí Almirall, took a
Catalanist turn and broke with the bulk of the Federal Party, led by
Pi i Margall. In 1879 Almirall founded the
Diari Català, which although it had a short life —it closed in 1881— was the first newspaper written entirely in
Catalan. The following year he convened the
First Catalan Congress, which in 1882 gave rise to the
Centre Català, the first Catalanist organization that was clearly vindictive, although it was not conceived as a political party but as an organization for the dissemination of Catalan nationalism and to put pressure on the government. In 1885 a
Memorial de greuges was presented to King Alfonso XII, denouncing the commercial treaties that were to be signed and the proposals to unify the
Civil Code; in 1886 a campaign was organized against the commercial agreement that was being negotiated with Great Britain, which culminated in a rally in the Novedades theater in Barcelona that brought together more than four thousand people; and in 1888 another in defense of
Catalan civil law, a campaign that achieved its goal —"the first victory of Catalanism", as one chronicler called it—. , considered the founder of
Catalan nationalism. In 1886, Almirall published his fundamental work
Lo catalanisme, in which he defended Catalan "particularism" and the need to recognize "the personalities of the different regions into which history, geography and the character of the inhabitants have divided the peninsula". This book constituted the first coherent and comprehensive formulation of Catalan "regionalism" and had a notable impact —decades later Almirall was considered the founder of
Catalan nationalism—. According to Almirall, "the State was made up of two basic communities: the Catalan (positivist, analytical, egalitarian and democratic) and the Castilian (idealist, abstract, generalizing and dominating), so that "the only possibility of democratizing and modernizing Spain was to cede the political division of the stagnant center to the more developed periphery to form "a confederation or composite state", or a dual structure similar to that of
Austria-Hungary". In 1887 the Centre Català experienced a crisis as a result of the rupture between the two currents that were part of it, one more leftist and federalist led by Almirall, and the other more Catalanist and conservative, grouped around the newspaper
La Renaixença, founded in 1881. The members of this second current left the Centre Catalá in November to found the
Lliga de Catalunya, which was joined by the
Centre Escolar Catalanista, an association of university students that included the future leaders of Catalan nationalism:
Enric Prat de la Riba,
Francesc Cambó and
Josep Puig i Cadafalch. From that moment on, the Catalanist hegemony passed from the Centre Català to the Lliga, which during the
Jocs florals of 1888 presented a second
memorial de greuges to the Queen Regent in which, among other things, they asked "that the Catalan nation regain its free and independent general Courts", voluntary military service, "the official Catalan language in Catalonia", education in Catalan, a Catalan supreme court and that the king swear "in Catalonia his fundamental constitutions".
Basque Country , the most prominent figure of the foralist Euskara Association of Navarre. The opposition to the definitive abolition of the Basque
fueros in 1876, after the end of the
Third Carlist War, was the driving force behind the development of regionalism in the Basque Country. The president of the government Cánovas del Castillo had tried to reach an agreement on the "foral arrangement" with the liberal fueros that had been pending since the approval of the
law of Confirmation of the Fueros of 1839, but when he failed to do so, he ended up imposing it by means of a law that was approved by the Cortes on July 21, 1876, considered as the one which abolished the Basque fueros, but which in reality was limited to suppressing the fiscal and military exemptions which
Álava,
Guipuzkoa and
Biscay had enjoyed until then, as they were incompatible with the principle of "constitutional unity" —the new
Constitution of 1876 had just been approved—. However, Cánovas wanted to reach an agreement with the "compromising" fueristas, which would contribute to the complete pacification of the Basque Country, so he got the law to include the authorization to the government to carry out the reform of the rest of the old foral regime —with the support of the affected
provinces—, This was materialized two years later in the decrees of the
regime of Economic Agreements of 1878, which implied the fiscal autonomy of the Basque Country —the three Basque deputations would collect the taxes and deliver a part of them [the "quota"] to the central Treasury— which Navarre already enjoyed. The agreement reached with the "compromisers" was rejected by the "intransigent" fueristas who were not satisfied with the economic agreements. Thus arose the Euskara Association of Navarre, founded in Pamplona in 1877 and whose most prominent figure was
Arturo Campión, and the Euskalerria Society of Bilbao, founded in 1880 with
Fidel Sagarmínaga as president. The Navarrese
Euskaros advocated the formation of a Basque-Navarre fuerist bloc over and above the division between Carlists and liberals, and adopted as their motto
Dios y Fueros, the same as that of the Bilbao
Euskalerriacs, who like the
Euskaros also defended the Basque-Navarre union.
Galicia . In Galicia between 1885 and 1890 and in parallel with what was happening in Catalonia,
provincialism, which had been born in the decade of the 1840s in the ranks of
progressivism and which based the particularism of Galicia on the supposed Celtic origin of its population, to which were added its own language and culture —revalued with the
Rexurdimento-, was transformed into regionalism. Towards this position of defending the "general interests of Galicia" and a "Galician policy", people from different fields converged, which led to the existence of three tendencies in this incipient
Galicianism: a liberal one, direct heir of progressive
provincialism, and whose main ideologist was
Manuel Murguía; another federalist one, of lesser weight; and a third
traditionalist one headed by
Alfredo Brañas. These three tendencies would converge at the beginning of the following decade in the creation of the first organization of Galicianism, the
Galician Regionalist Association, which nevertheless developed little political activity during the few years it lasted (1890–1893) due mainly to the existing tension between traditionalists and liberals, especially acute in
Santiago de Compostela.
The "agrarian depression": free traders vs. protectionists at the age of two. In the mid-1880s the effects of the European "agrarian depression", which had begun in the middle of the previous decade and was characterized by a drop in production and falling prices due to the arrival of agricultural products from the "new countries" —
Argentina, the United States, Canada, Australia— with lower production costs and whose transportation costs had been considerably reduced thanks to advances in
steam navigation, were felt in Spain. The "agricultural depression" affected above all the cereal sector, concentrated in
Castile, since exports were reduced, although it also affected other sectors such as sugar beet or meat —for example, Galician livestock lost its foreign markets in Great Britain—. (ca. 1900) As a consequence of the agrarian crisis, the wages of day laborers stagnated —between 1870 and 1890, the average wage was one peseta a day for ordinary work and a little more during the harvesting of crops, well below European agricultural wages— and many small landowners and tenant farmers went bankrupt, many of them opting to emigrate. Thus, of the 725,000 people who emigrated between 1891 and 1900 to South America —predominantly to Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, as well as Cuba— 65% were farmers. The annual average of emigrants in the period 1882–1889 was 62,305 and 59,072 between 1890 and 1903. The Castilian cereal owners, especially the wheat growers, formed the
Agrarian League in 1887 to pressure the government to adopt
protectionist measures, which had already been agreed upon by other European countries, and to reserve the domestic market for native cereals, even at the expense of consumers who would have to bear higher prices and devote a greater part of their income to the purchase of food, which in the long run would put a brake on industrialization. The protectionist campaign was joined by the Catalan textile industrialists, who were very affected by the agrarian depression because it was causing a fall in their sales. Thus, a common Castilian-Catalan front was formed, which was formalized with the celebration in Barcelona in 1888 of the National Economic Congress —in the following decade the Basque metallurgical employers would join the same—. That same year a massive demonstration and assembly was held in
Valladolid, followed by others in
Seville,
Guadalajara,
Tarragona and
Borges Blanques (Lérida). And in January 1889 the Agrarian League held its II Assembly. and
Práxedes Mateo Sagasta. At the head of the Agrarian League was
Germán Gamazo, Minister of Overseas Territories in Sagasta's government, although his actions responded more to the interests of the faction of
political friends that he headed, than to the pressure of the agrarian landowners grouped in the League. This is what explains why the "gamacistas" did not support the protectionist movement until the summer of 1888 —despite the fact that it had begun much earlier— using it in the political operation of harassment of Sagasta by various liberal factions, and that they put a stop to it when in the summer of the following year they sought an agreement with Sagasta. Thus the protectionism-free trade struggle provoked tensions within Sagasta's government, because most of its members, headed by Segismundo Moret, Minister of State, were still loyal to the protectionist policy, remained faithful to the
free-trade policy that the liberals had traditionally maintained —in fact it had been the first Sagasta government that in 1881 had lifted the suspension of
Base Quinta of
Laureano Figuerola's tariff reform approved in 1869 during the
Sexenio Democrático, which established the progressive dismantling of all tariff barriers. However, the liberals gradually revised their free trade proposals, starting with Moret himself, until they adopted a "pragmatic third way" which consisted of not increasing tariffs and at the same time not applying the tariff reductions provided for in the Fifth Base of the Figuerola tariff. == The stabilization of the political regime of the Restoration (1890–1895) ==