Chapter Fifteen

Spain causes a lot of trouble

Let’s back up a bit. During the Napoleonic occupation of Spain (1808-13), a renegade Spanish parliament fortified itself in Cadiz beyond reach of the French army and enacted a liberal constitution with a free press, popular sovereignty, universal male suffrage and the separation of church and state, all of which infuriated Spanish conservatives. They got their chance to assert themselves and turn the clock back to an old-style monarchy after the Napoleonic War was over. During the next few decades, the constitution was revised back and forth several times by competing factions of liberals and conservatives.

Caught in the middle was King Ferdinand VII (ruled 1813-33), who vaguely preferred being an absolute monarch but was too wishy-washy to get very far with it. Ferdinand had no sons, only a couple of daughters, so under Spain’s strictly masculine rules of inheritance, the throne should be going to his brother, Carlos, after he died. This prospect pleased Spanish conservatives who liked Carlos better than Ferdinand anyway, so you can imagine their anger when King Ferdinand VII dusted off an older, forgotten inheritance law and passed the throne to his baby daughter Isabel instead. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it; they ended up fighting three civil wars over it. The Carlist Wars ran intermittently from 1832 to 1876, and tempers were still raw enough to have Carlists fighting and staking out territory a hundred years later during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

Fiddling with the royal inheritance isn’t necessarily a problem if the throne goes to someone popular or strong, but the child Queen Isabel II was neither. Inheriting the throne at the age of three, for many years Isabel was under the thumb of her mother the regent, an Italian princess with modernist leanings. Isabel was married at sixteen to her double first cousin who was widely ridiculed as effeminate, probably gay and definitely not interested in her, so she took a string of lovers and produced many children of debatable parentage, although her husband/cousin accepted them all as his own. Eventually everyone got angry at Isabel for handing out important government posts to her lovers, so the army chased her out in 1868.

There are two reasons this concerns us. First, it’s important background to Spanish politics, which was about to start experimenting with democracy – so it might help to know what a Carlist is. Second, while scrounging up a replacement for the empty throne, the Spaniards accidentally provoked a war between Prussia and France, which would result in the Second German Reich and the Third French Republic, respectively.

Franco-Prussian War

Obviously with two alpha dogs facing each other across the Rhine River, trouble between France and Prussia was inevitable, but when a German prince became the prime candidate for the vacant Spanish throne, France vehemently objected. The last thing Emperor Napoleon III of France wanted was a dynastic link between his two biggest neighbors. Although the Prussians reluctantly agreed to pass up this opportunity to sit on the Spanish throne, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia noticed that hatred of France was the one thing that all the little countries of Germany could agree on. He was still trying to unify Germany under Prussian rule, so he picked a fight with Emperor Napoleon III, hoping to draw the lesser German states into a union on a wave of patriotism. The details are all densely diplomatic and formal, full of honor and subtext; they don’t really sound (to us) like a good reason to start killing people by the trainload, but just as negotiations over the Spanish throne were winding down without war, Bismarck rewrote and released an internal Prussian telegram that made it sound like the Prussian king had insulted the French ambassador. Bismarck’s fictionalized version of events outraged Napoleon III into declaring war.

The Prussians and their German allies easily won the opening battles, scattered the French front line and moved forward. In September 1870, they captured Napoleon III and half the French army at the battle of Sedan. This gave French ministers, deputies and opposition leaders back in Paris the opportunity to form a transitional democratic government and declare Napoleon out.

The new French government tried to negotiate a cease-fire with the Germans so diplomats wrangled while the armies fought. The Germans made it clear they were fighting France, not Napoleon III, so cutting him loose did nothing to help the French. Ultimately, the German price for peace was too costly, so the war continued. As the Germans closed in on Paris, the government and remaining French army, badly depleted by repeated defeats, pulled back toward the Loire River and left defense of Paris to the city’s militia. Parisians drove livestock and wagonloads of food into the city and fortified their perimeter with trenches and hundreds of cannon. Handing out rifles to all the remaining men, they braced for the arrival of the Germans, who surrounded the city and waited. The Parisians were so isolated they could only get messages out of the city by pigeon or balloon. As the siege dragged on, across fall and into winter, the Parisians became increasingly desperate.

“I had a slice of a spaniel the other day, it was by no means bad, something like lamb, but I felt like a cannibal,” one Parisian wrote in his diary. “I had a slice of Pollux for dinner” he wrote another day. “Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants, which have been killed. It was tough, coarse, and oily.”Ⓐ

Eventually, the Germans moved up heavy artillery and began bombarding the city; however, by this time, the remaining French armies had been defeated in the field. The French government gave up and surrendered in January 1871.

As part of the surrender terms, the national government agreed to let the Germans parade triumphantly through Paris, which infuriated the Parisians. The city had held out against the invaders and suffered horribly for it. They had eaten their pets and popular circus attractions, and now, through no fault of their own, they had to suffer the humiliation of welcoming a conquering army. In the end, the Germans quickly marched through Paris without incident, but no one was happy about it.

With Parisian tempers on the boil, the French national government didn’t dare move back into the city. Instead they settled into Versailles to wait for Paris to calm down, but after a while, it occurred to them that maybe it was not a good idea to leave 400 cannon in the hands of angry city militia, so on March 18, 1871 they sent federal troops into Paris to collect the cannon. The militia stood in their way, insisting that the city had paid for these guns. The rank and file federal troops, frankly, were much more sympathetic to the Parisians than to the government in this dispute. When their general ordered them to shoot the Parisians, the federal troops joined the Parisians and shot their general instead.

As more soldiers in Paris joined the rebellion, the national government ordered all remaining loyal troops to evacuate the city before they got infected and decided to change sides too. Meanwhile, the leaders of the rebellion held elections all across the city for a ruling council of the Commune of Paris on March 26, which soon started passing an extreme and wide-ranging socialist agenda, the first of its kind in Europe.

Outside of Paris, national elections all across France in April produced a very conservative government, which set up a ring of troops around Paris to contain the socialist uprising. Scattered fighting broke out along the perimeter in April until finally the federal government broke through the outer defenses on May 21. For the next week, federal troops fought block by block through the Paris Commune, unleashing the full fury of modern warfare on the Communards. Whenever a pocket of resistance surrendered, the rebels were lined up and summarily executed. When it was all done, as many as 7,000 Parisians were dead in the rubble.

The federal government meanwhile was trying to distance itself from a generation of Bonapartist rule. The French national elections in April 1871 had returned a solid parliamentary majority for supporters of a return to the monarchy. This made sense. The last two republics had not worked well for the French and had degraded into dictatorships.

The crown was duly offered to Count Henry of Chambord, the grandson of King Charles X and the heir to the French throne, now in exile in Austria. He was willing to take the crown, but he absolutely refused to rule under the French tricolor flag that had been waved by the mobs who had overthrown his ancestors. Instead, he wanted to return to the royal white flag with golden fleur-de-lis that had flown over previous kings. The French people, on the other hand, would not give up their beloved tricolor. Luckily, Chambord was an old man, so the monarchists in parliament agreed to a temporary republic while everyone waited for Henry to die and for a younger, more cooperative member of the royal family to move up on the list; however, Chambord stubbornly lived for many more years, and by the time he died in 1883, France had gotten used to being a republic again.  Adolphe Thiers, who served as interim president of France for a few of those years, described Chambord ironically as “the founder of the Republic in France… the French Washington".Ⓑ

Still, it was not entirely certain if republican sentiments would take root in France this time, so one French activist and intellectual, Édouard de Laboulaye, was busily trying to stoke the French people’s commitment to liberty by proposing a joint project with the Americans. Ever since the end of the American Civil War, Laboulaye had been traveling around France, encouraging the French people to give the people of the United States a magnificent statue to commemorate America’s abolition of slavery – a way of saying “Welcome to the Civilized World!”

A French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, liked the idea of building an updated Colossus of Rhodes, so he signed onto Laboulaye’s nutty scheme. The two of them began fund-raising in American and France, and gradually their intent shifted from commemorating the end of slavery to celebrating freedom in general. Designs began to coalesce into a glorious statue of the goddess Liberty lifting a torch to guide travelers to the land of freedom. The team built pieces of the statue whenever they got enough money, and then displayed those pieces to help raise money for the rest. French fund-raising for the statue inspired and enthused French republicans, and gave them fresh opportunities to rally in favor of democracy. American fundraisers commissioned the American poet Emma Lazarus to write a sonnet in celebration, which was carved into the pedestal and solidified the meaning of statue as a welcome to a bright new land of liberty. Finally, in 1886 the completed Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York harbor.

Spanish-American War

Meanwhile, Spain had finally chosen a new king in November 1870. They restored the monarchy in January, but King Amadeo I was in over his head. Within a year he decided that Spain was ungovernable, so he quit and went home to Savoy. A brief republic flared up until the army put a stop to it and installed King Alfonso XII, a son of Queen Isabel II and someone. Alfonso’s sudden death of tuberculosis at age 27 in 1885 left behind a pregnant widow and several months of anxious uncertainty as Spain waited to see if the succession would go forward with a son or be thrown into chaos with a daughter. The next year, a son arrived and became King Alfonso XIII the moment he drew breath. His mother Queen Regent Maria Christina of Austria ran Spain until Alfonso’s 16th birthday.

For obvious ideological reasons, the restored monarchy was not popular on the right among the Carlists who had their own candidate for the throne, nor on the left among republicans. On the other hand, the constitutional monarchy had the solid support of the moderate center. To try to quell the Spanish tendency toward civil war, the two principle parties, Liberals and Conservatives, agreed to take turns, each one running the country for a year or so before giving it back to their rivals, a system they called the turno pacifico (peaceful turn). To keep the country calm, they made sure that every major interest group had a fair slice of the pie. Universal male suffrage was instituted in Spain in 1890, although that probably didn’t matter since the turno pacifico meant that real power was allocated before the elections.①

Among the problems looming over Spain was growing discontent in their colonies; however, all Spaniards -- liberal or conservative, monarchist or democratic -- agreed on this issue: the empire must stay intact. Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were the last crumbs of the previously great Spanish empire, the last link to a glorious past. Any Spanish politician who lost them would never survive the full blast of blame. If Spain surrendered its empire without a fight, the army would rise up in anger; the monarchy would fall and the party in power would crumble into dust, never to be elected again. For their own preservation, the Queen Regent and her prime ministers had to keep the Cubans under control. The last Cuban rebellion (which ran from 1868 to 1878) had been beaten down with an appalling loss of life.

Spaniards were not the only players pulling strings in Cuba. American investment in Cuban sugar dominated the island’s economy. Back when slavery was legal in both the United States (until 1865) and Cuba (until 1886), the southern states and the Democratic Party considered Cuba to be an excellent potential addition to the republic, which could boost the slave state voting bloc in Congress with agreeable plantation owners. Now that slavery was abolished in both lands, the southerners wanted nothing to do with Cuba; they felt that the US didn’t need several hundred thousand more troublesome ex-slaves to deal with; however, as Southerners lost interest, Northerners didn’t.  Capitalists, imperialists and globalists quickly picked up the banner for American annexation of the neighboring island.

Then in 1893, American settlers and sugar planters in Hawaii overthrew the native queen and requested annexation by the United States. As it turned out, President Grover Cleveland considered this a dirty deal and refused to take over Hawaii, but Cuban nationalists considered Hawaii a dangerous omen and wanted to firmly establish their own sovereignty before American imperialists could get around to conquering Cuba for themselves. Cuban exiles in New York declared their island’s independence and returned to fight the Spanish in 1895. The Spanish army tried to crush the rebellion with ineffective and increasingly brutal tactics.

Very few of the people in charge of America or Spain actually wanted to fight each other over Cuba, but politics happened. Although American leaders suspected that no good could come from getting dragged into a Cuban war, the American public clearly sympathized with the feisty Cuban rebels, and the American press pumped up their newspaper circulations by luridly splashing every new Spanish atrocity in Cuba on the front page, whether it was true or not, stoking the fires of war fever. Even though most Spanish leaders knew they could never beat the US in a fight, they also figured that politically it would be better to lose the colonies honorably in a war rather than just surrendering them outright like cowards.

When Grover Cleveland (Democrat) handed the presidency to William McKinley (Republican) in March 1897, American foreign policy shifted from isolationist to interventionist. McKinley annexed Hawaii and began looking around for more places to take over.

In August 1897 Conservative Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas was vacationing at a spa when he stepped out on the veranda and was shot dead by a deceptively polite anarchist② in retaliation for the government’s arrest and execution of several Spanish anarchists. Cánovas’ Liberal alternate in the turno pacifico, Práxedes Sagasta, took over as prime minister, and being of a typical left-wing disposition, he began easing up on the Cubans. He fired General Weyler, the pitiless commander of Spanish troops who had been brutalizing the Cubans. Prime Minister Sagasta then granted limited autonomy to the Cubans.

Plenty of Cubans, mostly urbanites, landowners and Spanish immigrants, still preferred being run from Spain rather than by the leaders of the rebels, so riots broke out on the streets of Havana against appeasing the rebels. Knowing that the US generally sympathized with the rebels, the rioters directed a lot of their rage at Americans, so the US sent their battleship U.S.S. Maine to Havana to be on hand to protect American residents and interests.

This was the exact wrong time for anything to go wrong, so naturally on the night of February 15, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine suddenly and mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor, killing 260 crewmen. Historians go back and forth over how this happened. The most recent investigations have concluded that an accidental fire in the coal bunker set off munitions, but the first American investigation immediately after the explosion claimed it was a Spanish mine. American anger then exploded as well. War was declared, and within a few months, the war was won.

The easy defeat of the Spanish forces by the Americans shocked the Spanish system. Prime Minister Sagasta resigned, and national leadership passed to his parliamentary opponents. The two parties began to break apart, loosening the political system, and national elections became competitive again.Ⓒ

Meanwhile, the United States took over the Spanish colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, which created an ethical dilemma. Can a country dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal have colonies? Luckily for the imperialists, the Supreme Court that would decide this issue in 1901 was pretty much the same court that had decided the 1893 case of Plessy v. Ferguson in favor of racially segregated facilities in the South. The so-called Insular Cases of 1901 began as commercial disputes: Would imports from the new territories be taxed like foreign imports or untaxed like trade between states? Soon enough, the question turned to whether the natives were Americans entitled to all their rights and privileges. Eventually, most of the issues were settled in favor of American commercial interests, and colonial self-government was limited so the natives couldn’t change that. ③

The British imperial poet Rudyard Kipling pleaded with the Americans to “Take up the white man’s burden” and to lead the childlike natives into civilization. Of course, not everyone agreed with creating a lesser category of Americans. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan had dissented from the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson in favor of equality under the law, and he did so again in the Insular Cases, as did his younger colleague, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The usual collection of celebrity liberals like Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington also railed against the hypocrisy.

Most of all, however, the Filipino people objected. Even before the Americans replaced the Spanish as masters of the Philippines, a well-established Filipino independence movement had taken over much of the backcountry. The Spaniards only held Manila, so that was all they could realistically surrender to the United States. American troops moved into the city in August 1898 while the rebel army of the Philippine Republic had to camp outside sulking. At first the Americans and Filipinos tried to work out an agreeable relationship, but then everything went wrong. The Filipinos wanted immediate independence. The Americans wanted a naval base in the Far East and were afraid some other world power would take the Philippines if the Americans didn’t. The Filipinos turned impatient. The Americans turned arrogant. Diplomatic subtleties got poorly translated. Important documents passing back and forth were edited badly, misdirected or released prematurely. Soldiers from both sides made menacing movements. American sentries turned twitchy and fired on Filipinos approaching too closely in February 1899. When the American general on the scene heard gunfire, he quickly retaliated in full force instead of investigating, so that was that. It took three years of war and a quarter million deaths until the Americans finally had control of the place.

-Matthew White