A Prussian on the Spanish Throne (my first TL)
- Thread starter Tocomocho
- Start date
Max Sinister
Banned
Mosel/Moselle is a river in France and Germany. It flows through Lorraine and later meets the Rhine. It's also the name of a French departement.
For Whom the Guns Shoot
Madrid. June 14, 1871. Morning.
There were a few hours before the military parade presided by the new king and the provisional government would take place, but the “festival” feeling was deep in the city’s heart. National pennants and flags (with the old Bourbon coat of arms removed, of course) waved over street lamps and building façades, while a growing crowd of bystanders were forming along the streets that would be crossed by the troops. Shops and taverns were still opened, making business before the great event. And, among all the people, more and more agents of the security forces, on foot or on horseback, were patrolling. The soldiers of the barracks outside of the capital had been recalled, as were some units of the Guardia Civil, but the majority of the security was still carried out by the members of the Cuerpo de Vigilancia Pública, the embryo of the future National Police Corps. Even on foot its agents were impressive, with their dark uniforms, salacof hats, sabers and pistols.
Three of these agents were walking among the crowd grouped on the edge of the Paseo del Prado, though only two were talking. The third was one of the un-experienced cadets called simply in order to increase numbers, and was mostly ignored by the two old buddies whose him was assigned to assist. As in the previous hours the exercise had been a boring routine, but when they passed near the mouth of a narrower subsidiary street one of the veterans noticed a certain group getting out of a café. At first, the officer though that they would be nothing important, but he soon realized that something was not right. He noticed that the group, now in some type of discussion, was comprised by seven or eight men in heavy coats, and every of them were in big hats as well. Even a newbie would realized that they were planning something. June in Madrid was hot as hell, even in the morning; his agent uniform and salacof were making him to sweat, though he wasn’t bearing the cloak of other seasons… and now all this guys were planning to salute the King in the middle of the day carrying winter dresses? Oh, God. The King. That might be the whole issue.
He threw a furtive look over his partner and realized that he had noticed the men and made the same suspicions. Then, he covertly threw a nudge on the cadet:
-Call reinforcements, boy.
-What?
-Call reinforcements now and don’t discuss. Don’t make racket either.
The cadet returned over his steps towards another group of agents who were resting near some tens of meters down. As soon as he disappeared behind the street’s corner, the two veterans continued their steps towards the suspect group.
They were still arguing, and didn’t pay attention to anything in the distance. At least three of them were more or less “happy” and one visibly drunk and angry. He was the noisiest of all by far, and apparently was trying to keep the leading role despite his pathetic state. His drunkenness, combined with a strong Andalusian accent, made impossible to understand him, but apparently the second in command was trying to convince him to stay inside the café with no success.
-Any problem, Gentlem… ?
Out of any wisdom, the drunken took a shotgun from behind his coat and opened fire at the same time that he exclaimed something about people, freedom or whatever. The agents could avoid the shot and the bullets made their way to a parked carriage, leaving dozens of splinters to the air. The people fell in panic and soon the street was in chaos. From the little that the two agents could see in the mess of legs, arms and screaming heads, the partners of the drunken were as surprised as themselves by this action. After some seconds some opted to flee among the crowd and others used their hidden shotguns. The agents, hidden behind street lights and carriages, shot their pistols as well, and one of the guys behind the drunk fell after receiving a bullet in the forehead. The shooting lasted for some eternal seconds more before more agents, alerted by the newbie or by the own shoots, reached the place. When they arrived the drunk, two of his partners and a woman were dead over the pavements, two bystanders more were asking for help and the street was covered with blood, powder and every type of fallen things. The two policemen involved had only minor wounds, due to occasional shrapnel. The rest of the shooters had fled, though two more were localized some streets away and killed after refusing to surrender.
The celebrations were delayed for some hours and therefore shortened, but not suspended. After the security was revised and reinforced, Leopold made his devout in the capital in an open carriage accompanied by President Juan Prim and Regent Francisco Serrano, while members of the Cavalry and Guardia Real were marching around them. The military parade stopped for a moment in the Alcalá Gate, where the would-be King personally awarded the two agents involved in the firing and pronounced his first speech in the capital. Despite his strong accent, the people liked the fact that he was speaking to them in Spanish, the language that he had learned while the Prussians were invading. They didn’t know, however, that this speech, and the one that Prim did after, were roughly the same words that they had said ten days before, when Leopold was received by the provisional government in Santander. Prim’ speech was full of comparisons between Leopold and HRE Charles V, the German-born king of Spain that became the Emperor of Europe and the Americas. In Prim’s words, Leopold’s crowning would be the start of a new era in the History of Spain and the world, like the one of Charles was.
After the parade the suite arrived to the Royal Palace, where it spent the night, and the next day Leopold was formally crowned King of Spain under the name of Leopoldo I. His elder son Wilhelm was crowned Prince of Asturias and heir to the throne under the name of Guillermo.
The investigations about the Prado shootings continued in the following weeks. The drunken leader of the group, killed in the crossfire, was surprisingly identified as José Paul y Angulo, a radical-Republican journalist and parliamentary and declared enemy of Prim. The other shooters killed were younger and had not known involvement in politics. The investigation continued among pro-Republican circles, though any evidence of bigger ramifications was never found. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the would-be assassination party fled to the French border.
Madrid. June 14, 1871. Morning.
There were a few hours before the military parade presided by the new king and the provisional government would take place, but the “festival” feeling was deep in the city’s heart. National pennants and flags (with the old Bourbon coat of arms removed, of course) waved over street lamps and building façades, while a growing crowd of bystanders were forming along the streets that would be crossed by the troops. Shops and taverns were still opened, making business before the great event. And, among all the people, more and more agents of the security forces, on foot or on horseback, were patrolling. The soldiers of the barracks outside of the capital had been recalled, as were some units of the Guardia Civil, but the majority of the security was still carried out by the members of the Cuerpo de Vigilancia Pública, the embryo of the future National Police Corps. Even on foot its agents were impressive, with their dark uniforms, salacof hats, sabers and pistols.
Three of these agents were walking among the crowd grouped on the edge of the Paseo del Prado, though only two were talking. The third was one of the un-experienced cadets called simply in order to increase numbers, and was mostly ignored by the two old buddies whose him was assigned to assist. As in the previous hours the exercise had been a boring routine, but when they passed near the mouth of a narrower subsidiary street one of the veterans noticed a certain group getting out of a café. At first, the officer though that they would be nothing important, but he soon realized that something was not right. He noticed that the group, now in some type of discussion, was comprised by seven or eight men in heavy coats, and every of them were in big hats as well. Even a newbie would realized that they were planning something. June in Madrid was hot as hell, even in the morning; his agent uniform and salacof were making him to sweat, though he wasn’t bearing the cloak of other seasons… and now all this guys were planning to salute the King in the middle of the day carrying winter dresses? Oh, God. The King. That might be the whole issue.
He threw a furtive look over his partner and realized that he had noticed the men and made the same suspicions. Then, he covertly threw a nudge on the cadet:
-Call reinforcements, boy.
-What?
-Call reinforcements now and don’t discuss. Don’t make racket either.
The cadet returned over his steps towards another group of agents who were resting near some tens of meters down. As soon as he disappeared behind the street’s corner, the two veterans continued their steps towards the suspect group.
They were still arguing, and didn’t pay attention to anything in the distance. At least three of them were more or less “happy” and one visibly drunk and angry. He was the noisiest of all by far, and apparently was trying to keep the leading role despite his pathetic state. His drunkenness, combined with a strong Andalusian accent, made impossible to understand him, but apparently the second in command was trying to convince him to stay inside the café with no success.
-Any problem, Gentlem… ?
Out of any wisdom, the drunken took a shotgun from behind his coat and opened fire at the same time that he exclaimed something about people, freedom or whatever. The agents could avoid the shot and the bullets made their way to a parked carriage, leaving dozens of splinters to the air. The people fell in panic and soon the street was in chaos. From the little that the two agents could see in the mess of legs, arms and screaming heads, the partners of the drunken were as surprised as themselves by this action. After some seconds some opted to flee among the crowd and others used their hidden shotguns. The agents, hidden behind street lights and carriages, shot their pistols as well, and one of the guys behind the drunk fell after receiving a bullet in the forehead. The shooting lasted for some eternal seconds more before more agents, alerted by the newbie or by the own shoots, reached the place. When they arrived the drunk, two of his partners and a woman were dead over the pavements, two bystanders more were asking for help and the street was covered with blood, powder and every type of fallen things. The two policemen involved had only minor wounds, due to occasional shrapnel. The rest of the shooters had fled, though two more were localized some streets away and killed after refusing to surrender.
The celebrations were delayed for some hours and therefore shortened, but not suspended. After the security was revised and reinforced, Leopold made his devout in the capital in an open carriage accompanied by President Juan Prim and Regent Francisco Serrano, while members of the Cavalry and Guardia Real were marching around them. The military parade stopped for a moment in the Alcalá Gate, where the would-be King personally awarded the two agents involved in the firing and pronounced his first speech in the capital. Despite his strong accent, the people liked the fact that he was speaking to them in Spanish, the language that he had learned while the Prussians were invading. They didn’t know, however, that this speech, and the one that Prim did after, were roughly the same words that they had said ten days before, when Leopold was received by the provisional government in Santander. Prim’ speech was full of comparisons between Leopold and HRE Charles V, the German-born king of Spain that became the Emperor of Europe and the Americas. In Prim’s words, Leopold’s crowning would be the start of a new era in the History of Spain and the world, like the one of Charles was.
After the parade the suite arrived to the Royal Palace, where it spent the night, and the next day Leopold was formally crowned King of Spain under the name of Leopoldo I. His elder son Wilhelm was crowned Prince of Asturias and heir to the throne under the name of Guillermo.
The investigations about the Prado shootings continued in the following weeks. The drunken leader of the group, killed in the crossfire, was surprisingly identified as José Paul y Angulo, a radical-Republican journalist and parliamentary and declared enemy of Prim. The other shooters killed were younger and had not known involvement in politics. The investigation continued among pro-Republican circles, though any evidence of bigger ramifications was never found. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the would-be assassination party fled to the French border.
Old causes, new consequences (I)
The War of the Six Weeks
Some people might like the idea of another German on the Spanish throne, but others certainly didn’t.
1871 and the first half of 1872 were the calm that precedes the storm. Prim achieved most of the reforms that he wanted and the Hacienda Minister Laureano Figuerola was glad about the fact that the economy growing had not been affected by the 1868 Revolution – It was growing faster than in the previous years thanks to his liberal policies, actually. The harder Bourbon legitimist (except the ones that chose exile in Paris, of course) and the different Republican factions (a bit discredited by the Prado incident, though they claimed to have no relation at all with that) were being more “tamed” and less noisy each day. Yet there was another faction that didn’t abandon their wishes to rise to power.
In April, 1872, a Carlist battalion leaded by the pretender Carlos María of Bourbon and Austria-Este (or “Carlos VIII” as he was called by his supporters) crossed the Franco-Spanish border at Viella and committed the Spanish people to fight against “the foreign usurper of the Crown”[1] who had been crowned by the “parvenus” and “destroyers of Spain”. However, Carlos found that, despite the long-time plans and the permanent boycott of Prim’s Government by the Carlist deputies in the Cortes during the last year, his old fashioned Dios-Patria-Rey wasn’t heard by many people. Like in the two previous Carlist Wars, his “Crusade” found its main support in the traditionalist peasants and fanatic priests of the rural regions in the Basque Country and Navarre, while in the rest of Spain, excluding some parties in the Maestrazgo[2] and northern Catalonia, the support to the rebellion was zero. The Carlists also failed to gain support in the bigger cities of their core regions, which were controlled by an industrial and commercial elite that didn’t have any sympathy for the protectionists fueros[3] defended by the rebels. This general lack of support made easy the reaction of the central government and the army. In May 4, less than a month after the rebellion started, the Army of the North headed by the former regent Francisco Serrano attacked the rebel camp base at Oroquieta, smashing the rebel forces and forcing the ashamed Carlos to flee to France. The “I’ll be back” that he pronounced before crossing the Franco-Spanish border would never became a reality. 20 days after the battle, the heads of the Carlist rebellion in Biscay (Fausto de Urquizu, Juan Orúe and Antonio Arguinzóniz) subscribed an agreement with Serrano at Amorebieta in which they surrendered their arms and accepted the legitimacy of the current Spanish Government in exchange for a general amnesty and the respect to the traditional Fueros. The agreement, though criticized by some parties, was accepted in Madrid due to the votes of President Prim, the Progressits, the Unionists and the Democrats. The early success in the Basque Country and the fleeing of the pretender weakened decisively the rebellion and in the following days almost all the remaining rebel spots deposed the arms and accepted the Amorebieta Accords.
It was evident then that the uprising had been a total failure. And it would be just a small note in History books if a man had accepted this idea.
The Irún Crisis.
Despite the defeat of the major armies, some die-hard Carlists refused to surrender and started a guerrilla war in the woods and mountains of the Basque Country and northern Navarre. Among these parties, the biggest and bloodiest was the one leaded by the “Mad Priest” Manuel Santa Cruz, who would unite the Carlist remnants under his personal banner[4] in the end. At first, the Central Government underestimated Santa Cruz and though that he would be controlled in a matter of days, but this didn’t happened. Oppositely, his actions became bolder and more dangerous each day. From his secret bases in the deep Basque woods, Santa Cruz attacked police patrols, killed postmen, traders and tax collectors, looted farms and villages and set on fire entire populations after executing their civilian authorities. More and more troops were sent to the north in order to capture or kill him, and an important reward was announced for his head, but he always was able to escape. It was then when the Irún incident happened.
In late October, a military patrol had corralled some dozens of Santa Cruz’s followers in the deep mountain forests near Irún, not far from the French border. The Mad Priest’s men, as usual, refused to surrender and a hard battle in the creepy leave-less woods followed. In the middle of the fight, a rain of artillery projectiles fell over the combatants killing many of the members on both sides. Some of the Government soldiers were able to escape to the next military post and informed about the incident. How in hell could Santa Cruz get heavy artillery? When a new detachment reinforced with canyons departed to the site of the battle, the men discovered the answer: those bombs didn’t belong to the Mad Priest. The people that they found there were in pantaloon rouge and blue jackets. And as soon as the French soldiers saw them, they opened fire.
The conditions surrounding the Irún incident are debated even today. It’s obvious that following the Franco-Prussian War and Leopold’s ascension to the throne the relations between Spain and France were bad. Really bad, actually. Many French, especially in the conservative circles, interpreted the whole sequence of events as the result of a Spanish “treason” to France. Some bunch of plotters had seized control of the country in convenience with Bismarck and expelled Queen Isabella, who had been a clear friend and ally of France during her 30 years reign. Then, as a later popular sentence would say, The Spaniards put the trap and the Germans activated it. Spain was, evidently, the true reason behind France’s utter humiliation in the war and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the German barbarians. This hard situation became worse with the Carlist uprising: Prim’s government denounced the flow of supplies to the rebels through the French border, and the execution of French volunteers captured while serving in the Carlist lines was a scandal in France. Even the Spanish ambassador to Paris was recalled in May after the influential French politician Léon Gambetta defined the Carlist monarchy as “legitimate” in some speeches. The situation turned slowly into an undeclared war. For Madrid, the French attacks over Spanish military patrols was the drop that filled the glass, the last (and bloodiest) action in a succession of French provocations; for Paris, it was the natural response of the Hendaye garrison against an armed contingent entering French soil without permission. Needless to say, the Spanish Government claimed that its troops had been in Spanish soil all the time. True or not, the fact is that the French troops smashed the second patrol and occupied Irún in October 30, and two days later they entered San Sebastián and Tolosa without a hard resistance. The form in which the city garrisons were forced to surrender and cede their weapons was described as “particularly humiliating”.
Both Isabella and Carlos Luis met the provisional President of the III Republic in Paris during the week that lasted the crisis, hoping that the French forces would continue all the way to Madrid a place the “correct King” (Prince Alfonso for the first, the Carlist pretender for the second) on the throne. However, Patrice de Mac-Mahon wasn’t in a position to intervene in an undeclared war that had took him and the rest of the French government by surprise, at a time when France had not yet entirely recover from the chaos following the Franco-Prussian War and the repression of the Paris Commune. The crisis turned international when both Britain and Germany intervened demanding the French withdrawal from the occupied cities and the return to the previous statu quo. The German Empire was particularly aggressive and threatened the French Government with military intervention, as it saw the French movements as incompatible with the recognition of Leopold’s monarchy that France had accepted at the Treaty of Frankfurt. Obviously, Mac-Mahon didn’t have any intention to get his personal Vouziers and follow the steps of Napoleon III. On November 7 the French forces left Spanish soil but neither the Spanish nor French governments made any apology for their role in the incident.
[1] Ironically, Carlos wasn't less foreigner than Leopold. He had been born in modern Liubliana and never set a foot on Spanish soil before.
[2] Comarca in SE Province of Teruel.
[3] See Wikipedia article for further information.
[4] A black flag with a white skull and the legend Guerra sin Cuartel ("War without Mercy" could be a translation). Interesting character, isn't it?
The War of the Six Weeks
Some people might like the idea of another German on the Spanish throne, but others certainly didn’t.
1871 and the first half of 1872 were the calm that precedes the storm. Prim achieved most of the reforms that he wanted and the Hacienda Minister Laureano Figuerola was glad about the fact that the economy growing had not been affected by the 1868 Revolution – It was growing faster than in the previous years thanks to his liberal policies, actually. The harder Bourbon legitimist (except the ones that chose exile in Paris, of course) and the different Republican factions (a bit discredited by the Prado incident, though they claimed to have no relation at all with that) were being more “tamed” and less noisy each day. Yet there was another faction that didn’t abandon their wishes to rise to power.
In April, 1872, a Carlist battalion leaded by the pretender Carlos María of Bourbon and Austria-Este (or “Carlos VIII” as he was called by his supporters) crossed the Franco-Spanish border at Viella and committed the Spanish people to fight against “the foreign usurper of the Crown”[1] who had been crowned by the “parvenus” and “destroyers of Spain”. However, Carlos found that, despite the long-time plans and the permanent boycott of Prim’s Government by the Carlist deputies in the Cortes during the last year, his old fashioned Dios-Patria-Rey wasn’t heard by many people. Like in the two previous Carlist Wars, his “Crusade” found its main support in the traditionalist peasants and fanatic priests of the rural regions in the Basque Country and Navarre, while in the rest of Spain, excluding some parties in the Maestrazgo[2] and northern Catalonia, the support to the rebellion was zero. The Carlists also failed to gain support in the bigger cities of their core regions, which were controlled by an industrial and commercial elite that didn’t have any sympathy for the protectionists fueros[3] defended by the rebels. This general lack of support made easy the reaction of the central government and the army. In May 4, less than a month after the rebellion started, the Army of the North headed by the former regent Francisco Serrano attacked the rebel camp base at Oroquieta, smashing the rebel forces and forcing the ashamed Carlos to flee to France. The “I’ll be back” that he pronounced before crossing the Franco-Spanish border would never became a reality. 20 days after the battle, the heads of the Carlist rebellion in Biscay (Fausto de Urquizu, Juan Orúe and Antonio Arguinzóniz) subscribed an agreement with Serrano at Amorebieta in which they surrendered their arms and accepted the legitimacy of the current Spanish Government in exchange for a general amnesty and the respect to the traditional Fueros. The agreement, though criticized by some parties, was accepted in Madrid due to the votes of President Prim, the Progressits, the Unionists and the Democrats. The early success in the Basque Country and the fleeing of the pretender weakened decisively the rebellion and in the following days almost all the remaining rebel spots deposed the arms and accepted the Amorebieta Accords.
It was evident then that the uprising had been a total failure. And it would be just a small note in History books if a man had accepted this idea.
The Irún Crisis.
Despite the defeat of the major armies, some die-hard Carlists refused to surrender and started a guerrilla war in the woods and mountains of the Basque Country and northern Navarre. Among these parties, the biggest and bloodiest was the one leaded by the “Mad Priest” Manuel Santa Cruz, who would unite the Carlist remnants under his personal banner[4] in the end. At first, the Central Government underestimated Santa Cruz and though that he would be controlled in a matter of days, but this didn’t happened. Oppositely, his actions became bolder and more dangerous each day. From his secret bases in the deep Basque woods, Santa Cruz attacked police patrols, killed postmen, traders and tax collectors, looted farms and villages and set on fire entire populations after executing their civilian authorities. More and more troops were sent to the north in order to capture or kill him, and an important reward was announced for his head, but he always was able to escape. It was then when the Irún incident happened.
In late October, a military patrol had corralled some dozens of Santa Cruz’s followers in the deep mountain forests near Irún, not far from the French border. The Mad Priest’s men, as usual, refused to surrender and a hard battle in the creepy leave-less woods followed. In the middle of the fight, a rain of artillery projectiles fell over the combatants killing many of the members on both sides. Some of the Government soldiers were able to escape to the next military post and informed about the incident. How in hell could Santa Cruz get heavy artillery? When a new detachment reinforced with canyons departed to the site of the battle, the men discovered the answer: those bombs didn’t belong to the Mad Priest. The people that they found there were in pantaloon rouge and blue jackets. And as soon as the French soldiers saw them, they opened fire.
The conditions surrounding the Irún incident are debated even today. It’s obvious that following the Franco-Prussian War and Leopold’s ascension to the throne the relations between Spain and France were bad. Really bad, actually. Many French, especially in the conservative circles, interpreted the whole sequence of events as the result of a Spanish “treason” to France. Some bunch of plotters had seized control of the country in convenience with Bismarck and expelled Queen Isabella, who had been a clear friend and ally of France during her 30 years reign. Then, as a later popular sentence would say, The Spaniards put the trap and the Germans activated it. Spain was, evidently, the true reason behind France’s utter humiliation in the war and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the German barbarians. This hard situation became worse with the Carlist uprising: Prim’s government denounced the flow of supplies to the rebels through the French border, and the execution of French volunteers captured while serving in the Carlist lines was a scandal in France. Even the Spanish ambassador to Paris was recalled in May after the influential French politician Léon Gambetta defined the Carlist monarchy as “legitimate” in some speeches. The situation turned slowly into an undeclared war. For Madrid, the French attacks over Spanish military patrols was the drop that filled the glass, the last (and bloodiest) action in a succession of French provocations; for Paris, it was the natural response of the Hendaye garrison against an armed contingent entering French soil without permission. Needless to say, the Spanish Government claimed that its troops had been in Spanish soil all the time. True or not, the fact is that the French troops smashed the second patrol and occupied Irún in October 30, and two days later they entered San Sebastián and Tolosa without a hard resistance. The form in which the city garrisons were forced to surrender and cede their weapons was described as “particularly humiliating”.
Both Isabella and Carlos Luis met the provisional President of the III Republic in Paris during the week that lasted the crisis, hoping that the French forces would continue all the way to Madrid a place the “correct King” (Prince Alfonso for the first, the Carlist pretender for the second) on the throne. However, Patrice de Mac-Mahon wasn’t in a position to intervene in an undeclared war that had took him and the rest of the French government by surprise, at a time when France had not yet entirely recover from the chaos following the Franco-Prussian War and the repression of the Paris Commune. The crisis turned international when both Britain and Germany intervened demanding the French withdrawal from the occupied cities and the return to the previous statu quo. The German Empire was particularly aggressive and threatened the French Government with military intervention, as it saw the French movements as incompatible with the recognition of Leopold’s monarchy that France had accepted at the Treaty of Frankfurt. Obviously, Mac-Mahon didn’t have any intention to get his personal Vouziers and follow the steps of Napoleon III. On November 7 the French forces left Spanish soil but neither the Spanish nor French governments made any apology for their role in the incident.
[1] Ironically, Carlos wasn't less foreigner than Leopold. He had been born in modern Liubliana and never set a foot on Spanish soil before.
[2] Comarca in SE Province of Teruel.
[3] See Wikipedia article for further information.
[4] A black flag with a white skull and the legend Guerra sin Cuartel ("War without Mercy" could be a translation). Interesting character, isn't it?
Old Causes, New Consequences (II)
And after a disastrous exam season, here I return...
A New Country
From a foreign point of view the German-British intervention and Mac-Mahon’s non interest in enlarging the crisis had returned Europe to the previous situation. This could be true for other countries but certainly not for Spain.
The first victim of the crisis was the Alliance of 1834, in which Britain, France, Spain and Portugal signed the mutual friendship between the four nations. In its origins, the agreement was mostly one between Britain and France to maintain the statu quo on the Iberian Peninsula, but the last events leaded to the originally unthinkable event of Spain rejecting it. Prim’s government accused France of not honouring the treaty and considered it a death letter, offering alternative treaties of friendship to the British and Portuguese governments and contributing to the political isolation of France following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
This didn’t save the Progressist Coalition’s government to be the principal victim of the incident, however. From the beginning, Prim had been seen more as a transitional President than anything else, and the succession of international crisis during his mandate didn’t help him to have the best public image before the general elections of 1873[1], nor to have firm control inside his own coalition government. Meanwhile, Serrano decided to return to politics, taking advantage of his decisive role in the surrender of the Carlist “regular” army. After his election as head of the moderate-conservative Unionists, Serrano starred an aggressive electoral campaign full of nationalistic slogans in which the words “stability” and “security” were the protagonists, and was able to convince the majority of the voters that his combination of military pressure and negotiation was the only way to end definitively the so called “troubles” in the Basque Country and Cuba. As a result, the General Elections of June 1873 were a disaster for the Progressist Party, who lost more of the 60% of its previous votes, and the control of the Parliament and the Senate. Serrano and the Unionist Party, on the other hand, gained a small majority of the votes and seats, and seized the Government after reaching an agreement with the Democrats and the Moderate Liberals to form a moderate-conservative coalition government, that in the end would merge in a single party. The Progressists, on the other hand, faced atomization after the bad electoral results and especially after Prim’s demission as head of the party in August. The Progressist Party finally died in the spring of 1874, and its members formed two separate parties: the more leftist Radical Progressist Party leaded by Manuel Zorrilla, which came closer to the Republicans, and the more right wing Liberal Party of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.
The election of Serrano as President was the starting point of a succession of slow but constant changes in the Spanish government and society, roughly like a snowflake rolling over a snowy slope causes a giant avalanche. As he had promised, he focused immediately in the Army. It was evident that the Army needed serious reformations after the poor performance against the terrorist campaign in the Basque Country and especially against the French forces (where it almost non-existent), even to the most conservative part of the military. Under Serrano, growing numbers of German military advisors arrived at the country and remodelled the organization and financing of the army under Prussian lines. The number of officials, which had grown to exaggerate dimensions under Isabella’s reign, was severally shortened, and the unpopular system of recruitment known as Quintas was abolished. Even the uniforms, which in many cases mirrored the blue and red ones of the French Army, were substituted by new combinations of white and blue or simple navy blue ones, and the fabrication or importation of modern weapons was stimulated. Naturally, these changes didn’t come from nothing and demanded as well a stimulation of the industrial expansion in the country, and the necessities of specialised workers stimulated the reformation and expansion of the public school. New laws attracted investors from Britain and especially Germany who contributed to build many of the new factories, mines and rail-roads. In order to secure Spain, it was necessary to strength Spain. It was believed to be a good idea, also, to gain some good friends for Spain if the French Boot decided to show again in the future. The Spanish-British negotiations didn’t go far from the “Treaty of Peace and Honourable Friendship” that maintained the status quo sanctioned by the Alliance of 1834, but the German ones resulted in the signing of a military alliance in 1875. Unlike the 1834 Alliance, the so called Dual Alliance, which became the Triple Alliance when Austria-Hungary joined it in 1879 following the end of the League of the Three Emperors between Germany, Austria and Russia, contemplated obligatory military aid if one of the countries was attacked by a third one. Spain was, in this way, one of the makers of the web of alliances that extended over Europe in the last decades of the 19th Century.
The ‘French Boot’
The Irún Crisis also sparked a great anti-French sentiment among the Spanish people, which became deeper and deeper as France and Spain inevitably clashed in the following decades due to their opposed positions in the European system of alliances and the frequent confrontations during the colonial race. Neither the King nor the different governments tried to reduce these feelings; instead they often stimulated them. For Leopold, France was the only menace to his position on a throne that he had finally got used to, and for the Government it was an easy form to distract the people from other issues.
One of the most characteristic figures of this period and direct result of the bad sentiments between the two countries that followed the Irún Crisis is the ‘French Boot’ theme among Spanish writers and historians. The intellectual elite had assumed that the country was in a deep crisis since the beginning of the century and the only way to escape this decadent state was through not just reforms, but a true reborn of the nation. The French were identified soon as the conspirators behind the decline of the once great Spanish Empire: this each day more distorted version of History claimed that it was France, for example, who boycotted the Spanish dominance over the continent; the one who conspired to established her royal dynasty on the Spanish throne, causing civil war on a peaceful nation, the division of the Habsburg inheritance, and subjecting Spain to French interests without reward through the 18th Century; and it was France, most importantly, who betrayed Spain in the early 1800s invading it when it was an ally, destroying its economy, people and early achievements in industrialization, and giving an opportunity to the American colonies to rise up and cut any ties with the Spanish homeland; it was France, as well, who invaded Spain destroying the most liberal regime in the Europe of 1823 and putting Spain under the absolutist boot of the worst king that Spain had once, Ferdinand VII, and the three civil wars that followed Ferdinand’s death and delayed modernization were just the effects of the previous French interventions. The Irún Crisis, was, so, the last drop on a glass full of French insults and coward stabs on the back. In order to recover the former glory, it was necessary to return Spain to the old days when the Tercios smashed the French armies from all fronts and the Spanish Galleons ruled the waves. The easiest way to achieve this was through a close relation with the German Empire on land and with the British on the sea; this combination, plus the creation of a powerful Spanish military, would knock France and return it to her correct place.
So, needless to say, the coming Silver Age of Spanish literature was deeply nationalistic and militaristic [unlike in OTL] and the statues honouring the heroes of the Peninsular War or the 16th Century generals and conquistadors multiplied on the Spanish streets. Children were taught on the reformed school system about the historical French conspiracy, and the literary and political reborn of the peripheral languages in the 1880s (Catalan, Galician, Basque) defended the establishment of a federalist system mirroring the pre-Bourbon one. “United on Diversity” was the motto of these movements. Even a new style of monumental architecture that imitated the one of the reign of Philippe II, the Neoherrerian[1], emerged on the last years of the 19th Century. It isn’t a surprise that the new flag adopted in 1874 featured the Toledan Eagle that was the symbol of Charles V.
[1] A parliamentary session that never took place in OTL (due to the assassination of Prim and the abdication of Amadeo I, among other things; both events didn’t happen in this timeline) established in 1872 that there would be elections each 5 years (Current OTL Spain presidential terms last 4 years). Prim’s term formally started after the 1869 elections, though he had been provisional president the year before.
[2] The closest thing in OTL could be the Escorialism appeared in the first years of the Francoist regime.
And after a disastrous exam season, here I return...
A New Country
From a foreign point of view the German-British intervention and Mac-Mahon’s non interest in enlarging the crisis had returned Europe to the previous situation. This could be true for other countries but certainly not for Spain.
The first victim of the crisis was the Alliance of 1834, in which Britain, France, Spain and Portugal signed the mutual friendship between the four nations. In its origins, the agreement was mostly one between Britain and France to maintain the statu quo on the Iberian Peninsula, but the last events leaded to the originally unthinkable event of Spain rejecting it. Prim’s government accused France of not honouring the treaty and considered it a death letter, offering alternative treaties of friendship to the British and Portuguese governments and contributing to the political isolation of France following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
This didn’t save the Progressist Coalition’s government to be the principal victim of the incident, however. From the beginning, Prim had been seen more as a transitional President than anything else, and the succession of international crisis during his mandate didn’t help him to have the best public image before the general elections of 1873[1], nor to have firm control inside his own coalition government. Meanwhile, Serrano decided to return to politics, taking advantage of his decisive role in the surrender of the Carlist “regular” army. After his election as head of the moderate-conservative Unionists, Serrano starred an aggressive electoral campaign full of nationalistic slogans in which the words “stability” and “security” were the protagonists, and was able to convince the majority of the voters that his combination of military pressure and negotiation was the only way to end definitively the so called “troubles” in the Basque Country and Cuba. As a result, the General Elections of June 1873 were a disaster for the Progressist Party, who lost more of the 60% of its previous votes, and the control of the Parliament and the Senate. Serrano and the Unionist Party, on the other hand, gained a small majority of the votes and seats, and seized the Government after reaching an agreement with the Democrats and the Moderate Liberals to form a moderate-conservative coalition government, that in the end would merge in a single party. The Progressists, on the other hand, faced atomization after the bad electoral results and especially after Prim’s demission as head of the party in August. The Progressist Party finally died in the spring of 1874, and its members formed two separate parties: the more leftist Radical Progressist Party leaded by Manuel Zorrilla, which came closer to the Republicans, and the more right wing Liberal Party of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.
The election of Serrano as President was the starting point of a succession of slow but constant changes in the Spanish government and society, roughly like a snowflake rolling over a snowy slope causes a giant avalanche. As he had promised, he focused immediately in the Army. It was evident that the Army needed serious reformations after the poor performance against the terrorist campaign in the Basque Country and especially against the French forces (where it almost non-existent), even to the most conservative part of the military. Under Serrano, growing numbers of German military advisors arrived at the country and remodelled the organization and financing of the army under Prussian lines. The number of officials, which had grown to exaggerate dimensions under Isabella’s reign, was severally shortened, and the unpopular system of recruitment known as Quintas was abolished. Even the uniforms, which in many cases mirrored the blue and red ones of the French Army, were substituted by new combinations of white and blue or simple navy blue ones, and the fabrication or importation of modern weapons was stimulated. Naturally, these changes didn’t come from nothing and demanded as well a stimulation of the industrial expansion in the country, and the necessities of specialised workers stimulated the reformation and expansion of the public school. New laws attracted investors from Britain and especially Germany who contributed to build many of the new factories, mines and rail-roads. In order to secure Spain, it was necessary to strength Spain. It was believed to be a good idea, also, to gain some good friends for Spain if the French Boot decided to show again in the future. The Spanish-British negotiations didn’t go far from the “Treaty of Peace and Honourable Friendship” that maintained the status quo sanctioned by the Alliance of 1834, but the German ones resulted in the signing of a military alliance in 1875. Unlike the 1834 Alliance, the so called Dual Alliance, which became the Triple Alliance when Austria-Hungary joined it in 1879 following the end of the League of the Three Emperors between Germany, Austria and Russia, contemplated obligatory military aid if one of the countries was attacked by a third one. Spain was, in this way, one of the makers of the web of alliances that extended over Europe in the last decades of the 19th Century.
The ‘French Boot’
The Irún Crisis also sparked a great anti-French sentiment among the Spanish people, which became deeper and deeper as France and Spain inevitably clashed in the following decades due to their opposed positions in the European system of alliances and the frequent confrontations during the colonial race. Neither the King nor the different governments tried to reduce these feelings; instead they often stimulated them. For Leopold, France was the only menace to his position on a throne that he had finally got used to, and for the Government it was an easy form to distract the people from other issues.
One of the most characteristic figures of this period and direct result of the bad sentiments between the two countries that followed the Irún Crisis is the ‘French Boot’ theme among Spanish writers and historians. The intellectual elite had assumed that the country was in a deep crisis since the beginning of the century and the only way to escape this decadent state was through not just reforms, but a true reborn of the nation. The French were identified soon as the conspirators behind the decline of the once great Spanish Empire: this each day more distorted version of History claimed that it was France, for example, who boycotted the Spanish dominance over the continent; the one who conspired to established her royal dynasty on the Spanish throne, causing civil war on a peaceful nation, the division of the Habsburg inheritance, and subjecting Spain to French interests without reward through the 18th Century; and it was France, most importantly, who betrayed Spain in the early 1800s invading it when it was an ally, destroying its economy, people and early achievements in industrialization, and giving an opportunity to the American colonies to rise up and cut any ties with the Spanish homeland; it was France, as well, who invaded Spain destroying the most liberal regime in the Europe of 1823 and putting Spain under the absolutist boot of the worst king that Spain had once, Ferdinand VII, and the three civil wars that followed Ferdinand’s death and delayed modernization were just the effects of the previous French interventions. The Irún Crisis, was, so, the last drop on a glass full of French insults and coward stabs on the back. In order to recover the former glory, it was necessary to return Spain to the old days when the Tercios smashed the French armies from all fronts and the Spanish Galleons ruled the waves. The easiest way to achieve this was through a close relation with the German Empire on land and with the British on the sea; this combination, plus the creation of a powerful Spanish military, would knock France and return it to her correct place.
So, needless to say, the coming Silver Age of Spanish literature was deeply nationalistic and militaristic [unlike in OTL] and the statues honouring the heroes of the Peninsular War or the 16th Century generals and conquistadors multiplied on the Spanish streets. Children were taught on the reformed school system about the historical French conspiracy, and the literary and political reborn of the peripheral languages in the 1880s (Catalan, Galician, Basque) defended the establishment of a federalist system mirroring the pre-Bourbon one. “United on Diversity” was the motto of these movements. Even a new style of monumental architecture that imitated the one of the reign of Philippe II, the Neoherrerian[1], emerged on the last years of the 19th Century. It isn’t a surprise that the new flag adopted in 1874 featured the Toledan Eagle that was the symbol of Charles V.
[1] A parliamentary session that never took place in OTL (due to the assassination of Prim and the abdication of Amadeo I, among other things; both events didn’t happen in this timeline) established in 1872 that there would be elections each 5 years (Current OTL Spain presidential terms last 4 years). Prim’s term formally started after the 1869 elections, though he had been provisional president the year before.
[2] The closest thing in OTL could be the Escorialism appeared in the first years of the Francoist regime.
Five lucky shots for five lucky years
Five incredibly lucky shots happened around Francisco Serrano’s accession to the seat of President of the Ministers Council:
- The first was the first one of the French artillery falling during the Irún Crisis. The resultant flying shrapnel badly injured the Mad Priest Manuel Santa Cruz, forcing him to retire. He survived hidden in a cave for some months but ultimately died little before the elections of 1873. His death weakened the movement of die-hard Carlists, who were also under pressure from the majority of more moderate Carlists who feared that their actions would lead Serrano to suppressing definitively the provisionally suspended Basque Fueros, and was a decisive turning point in the development of the late stage of the rebellion. So, despite destroying the last remnants of the Franco-Spanish relations and causing the fall of Prim’s government, France had contributed involuntarily to resolve Spain’s principal problem of the time. The Fueros were restored finally in early 1878 though considerably altered, shortened in some ways and enlarged in others. Actually, instead of Fueros we should talk about Fuero, because the four foral Basque provinces (Vizcaya, Álava, Guipúzcoa, plus Navarre) were combined into only one Foral region, generally known as “Provincias Vascongadas” or simply Vascongadas. Note not just that the restoration took place in an electoral year (1878), but also that, uniting all the Basque provinces into one only autonomous region its capacity to defend their most individualist positions was weakened. The chosen capital of the united Vascongadas was San Sebastián, whose population was in an intermediate position between the very liberal Bilbao and the extremely conservative Pamplona, and could be seen also as defiance to the recent French occupation of the city.
- The second shot, during an apparently minor skirmish, killed the Cuban aristocrat Ignacio Agramonte in May 1873, preventing a Cuban independentist offensive over Las Villas, damaging the financing of the Cuban rebels and collapsing the independentist positions in the central region of the island.
- The third killed in battle the general Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in February 1874, who had been the leader of the Grito de Yara that started the Cuban insurrection in October 1868 and had had the supreme commander of the Cuban independentist forces till some months before.
- The fourth was the one that made the general Calixto García on his own head when he tried suicide in September 1874 in order to not be captured alive by the surrounding Spanish forces. He failed and was taken alive to a military hospital in Havana before being exiled to Spain.
- And the fifth went out of one of the first modern Mauser Model 1871 which were introduced in Cuba by the German advisors of the Karabische Mission, which in 1875 cut the throat of the Dominican-born Cuban general Máximo Gómez during a cavalry charge. Gómez had been the commander in chief of the Cuban rebels since Céspedes’ demission and the inventor of the bloody machete charges that had been the worst nightmare of the Spanish recruits sent to the Caribbean island.
Whith the most radical elements like Agramonte, Céspedes, García and Gómez out of picture, the Cuban rebellion fell into the hands of more moderate commanders like the mulatto brothers Antonio and José Maceo. This, united with the fact that since late 1873 the freed divisions previously destined to the Northern Campaign could be sent to reinforce the Cuban garrisons, encouraged the Cuban leadership to accept peace negotiations. Many of the Cuban demands weren’t much different to the ones demanded by the 1868 revolution in the Iberian Peninsula, after all…
The final product of these negotiations was the so-called Compromise of Baragua, signed by the generals Antonio Maceo for the Cuban part and Arsenio Martínez-Campos as the Government representaive in 1875, not much later than Gómez’s death. The main lines of this agreement were the following:
-The rebels depose the arms, refuse to armed fight and accept the Spanish Government as the superior and rightful government on the island. All people born in Cuba or from Cuban parents is a rightful citizen of the Kingdom of Spain and has the same rights than any other Spaniard.
-Former slaves serving on the rebel armies are free men, and the rest of the slaves on the island will be gradually freed in the following three years.[1]
-Cubans can join the Spanish armed forces and be promoted like their Iberian counterparts, regardless of their race.
-Cubans can freely reunite, vote in elections, have representation in the Cortes of Madrid as any other Spanish province, form their own political parties (if those parties don’t call to war against the government, of course) and be elected for political offices in the island.[2]
-Freedom of press is proclaimed, and Cubans are able to form their own newspapers under the same rules than the ones published in the Iberian Peninsula.
-Cuba would be a Foral Region with political autonomy and some control over its economy from 1880, after a transitional government of five years presided by a person designed by the Spanish Crown, but including also Cubans.
After knowing about this last part, Juan Prim broke his short retirement from politics and presented volunteer for the position. Some politicians considered it a scandal and remembered that some years ago, Prim had suggested even to abandon Cuba without a fight. Serrano didn’t like the idea at first, either, but in the end he realised that Prim still was his main rival in national politics and that taking him far away from the political centre at Madrid wasn’t a bad choice at all. On the other hand, this position would retain him in the island till 1881, two years after the General Elections of 1878 in which the opposition had not yet a strong presidential candidate except, perhaps, a returned Prim in the last moment. So… Why not? He could play his card of successful transitional president in Cuba as well as he had do in mainland Spain, and after 10 years of political absence Prim would have many difficulties to run for a presidential term. So Serrano convinced his group, the Unión Liberal (Unión Democrática after its fussion with the Democrat Party) to support Prim’s candidature during the voting in the Congress, and the decision achieved the support of almost the 90% of the deputies including most of the Unionists, Radical-Progressists, Liberals and some Republicans. King Leopold signed the agreement shortly after and Prim departed to Cuba in January 1, 1876.
Even Serrano didn’t expect a series of successes like the one of his first presidential term. The problems in Cuba and the Basque Country, who seemed so difficult to resolve in the early 1870s, almost resolved themselves without his intervention, though, of course, this didn’t stop Serrano for using those successes in the re-election campaign. This victories, plus the lack of the foreign crisis that had been constant in Prim’s term (another blessing of the Goddess Fortune, for sure) and the division of the former Progressists coalition, brought him the victory in the General Elections of 1878 without any problem.
[1] This decision wasn’t well received by the slave owning elite in the western part of the island, but they had little more to do than sterile protests.
[2] This had been more or less foreseen in the Constitution of 1869, though it didn’t come into action while the war was ongoing on the island. ITTL, both Cuba and Puerto Rico sent deputies to the Spanish Congress after the General Elections of 1878.
Five incredibly lucky shots happened around Francisco Serrano’s accession to the seat of President of the Ministers Council:
- The first was the first one of the French artillery falling during the Irún Crisis. The resultant flying shrapnel badly injured the Mad Priest Manuel Santa Cruz, forcing him to retire. He survived hidden in a cave for some months but ultimately died little before the elections of 1873. His death weakened the movement of die-hard Carlists, who were also under pressure from the majority of more moderate Carlists who feared that their actions would lead Serrano to suppressing definitively the provisionally suspended Basque Fueros, and was a decisive turning point in the development of the late stage of the rebellion. So, despite destroying the last remnants of the Franco-Spanish relations and causing the fall of Prim’s government, France had contributed involuntarily to resolve Spain’s principal problem of the time. The Fueros were restored finally in early 1878 though considerably altered, shortened in some ways and enlarged in others. Actually, instead of Fueros we should talk about Fuero, because the four foral Basque provinces (Vizcaya, Álava, Guipúzcoa, plus Navarre) were combined into only one Foral region, generally known as “Provincias Vascongadas” or simply Vascongadas. Note not just that the restoration took place in an electoral year (1878), but also that, uniting all the Basque provinces into one only autonomous region its capacity to defend their most individualist positions was weakened. The chosen capital of the united Vascongadas was San Sebastián, whose population was in an intermediate position between the very liberal Bilbao and the extremely conservative Pamplona, and could be seen also as defiance to the recent French occupation of the city.
- The second shot, during an apparently minor skirmish, killed the Cuban aristocrat Ignacio Agramonte in May 1873, preventing a Cuban independentist offensive over Las Villas, damaging the financing of the Cuban rebels and collapsing the independentist positions in the central region of the island.
- The third killed in battle the general Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in February 1874, who had been the leader of the Grito de Yara that started the Cuban insurrection in October 1868 and had had the supreme commander of the Cuban independentist forces till some months before.
- The fourth was the one that made the general Calixto García on his own head when he tried suicide in September 1874 in order to not be captured alive by the surrounding Spanish forces. He failed and was taken alive to a military hospital in Havana before being exiled to Spain.
- And the fifth went out of one of the first modern Mauser Model 1871 which were introduced in Cuba by the German advisors of the Karabische Mission, which in 1875 cut the throat of the Dominican-born Cuban general Máximo Gómez during a cavalry charge. Gómez had been the commander in chief of the Cuban rebels since Céspedes’ demission and the inventor of the bloody machete charges that had been the worst nightmare of the Spanish recruits sent to the Caribbean island.
Whith the most radical elements like Agramonte, Céspedes, García and Gómez out of picture, the Cuban rebellion fell into the hands of more moderate commanders like the mulatto brothers Antonio and José Maceo. This, united with the fact that since late 1873 the freed divisions previously destined to the Northern Campaign could be sent to reinforce the Cuban garrisons, encouraged the Cuban leadership to accept peace negotiations. Many of the Cuban demands weren’t much different to the ones demanded by the 1868 revolution in the Iberian Peninsula, after all…
The final product of these negotiations was the so-called Compromise of Baragua, signed by the generals Antonio Maceo for the Cuban part and Arsenio Martínez-Campos as the Government representaive in 1875, not much later than Gómez’s death. The main lines of this agreement were the following:
-The rebels depose the arms, refuse to armed fight and accept the Spanish Government as the superior and rightful government on the island. All people born in Cuba or from Cuban parents is a rightful citizen of the Kingdom of Spain and has the same rights than any other Spaniard.
-Former slaves serving on the rebel armies are free men, and the rest of the slaves on the island will be gradually freed in the following three years.[1]
-Cubans can join the Spanish armed forces and be promoted like their Iberian counterparts, regardless of their race.
-Cubans can freely reunite, vote in elections, have representation in the Cortes of Madrid as any other Spanish province, form their own political parties (if those parties don’t call to war against the government, of course) and be elected for political offices in the island.[2]
-Freedom of press is proclaimed, and Cubans are able to form their own newspapers under the same rules than the ones published in the Iberian Peninsula.
-Cuba would be a Foral Region with political autonomy and some control over its economy from 1880, after a transitional government of five years presided by a person designed by the Spanish Crown, but including also Cubans.
After knowing about this last part, Juan Prim broke his short retirement from politics and presented volunteer for the position. Some politicians considered it a scandal and remembered that some years ago, Prim had suggested even to abandon Cuba without a fight. Serrano didn’t like the idea at first, either, but in the end he realised that Prim still was his main rival in national politics and that taking him far away from the political centre at Madrid wasn’t a bad choice at all. On the other hand, this position would retain him in the island till 1881, two years after the General Elections of 1878 in which the opposition had not yet a strong presidential candidate except, perhaps, a returned Prim in the last moment. So… Why not? He could play his card of successful transitional president in Cuba as well as he had do in mainland Spain, and after 10 years of political absence Prim would have many difficulties to run for a presidential term. So Serrano convinced his group, the Unión Liberal (Unión Democrática after its fussion with the Democrat Party) to support Prim’s candidature during the voting in the Congress, and the decision achieved the support of almost the 90% of the deputies including most of the Unionists, Radical-Progressists, Liberals and some Republicans. King Leopold signed the agreement shortly after and Prim departed to Cuba in January 1, 1876.
Even Serrano didn’t expect a series of successes like the one of his first presidential term. The problems in Cuba and the Basque Country, who seemed so difficult to resolve in the early 1870s, almost resolved themselves without his intervention, though, of course, this didn’t stop Serrano for using those successes in the re-election campaign. This victories, plus the lack of the foreign crisis that had been constant in Prim’s term (another blessing of the Goddess Fortune, for sure) and the division of the former Progressists coalition, brought him the victory in the General Elections of 1878 without any problem.
[1] This decision wasn’t well received by the slave owning elite in the western part of the island, but they had little more to do than sterile protests.
[2] This had been more or less foreseen in the Constitution of 1869, though it didn’t come into action while the war was ongoing on the island. ITTL, both Cuba and Puerto Rico sent deputies to the Spanish Congress after the General Elections of 1878.
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Some more few notes to end the 1870s
¡Independencia!
Preparatives for one of the numerous military parades that took place in the commemoration of the 70th Aniversary of the May 2 Uprisings. This one is from San Sebastián.
The second major celebration of Leopold’s reign took place in May 2, 1878. It was the 70th anniversary of the major popular uprising in the streets of Madrid against the occupation forces of Napoleon that set the beginning of the Spanish War of Independence[1], and, as expected, it was a celebration deeply impregnated of nationalistic attitudes. However, the celebration was partially dulled because some of the events planned to take place at Madrid were diverted to Logroño, in the province of La Rioja. Determined to bring them a proper homage, the government had made a hard work trying to find the last veterans of the war still alive (a titanic work, bearing in mind that those had survived the war, 70 years, 5 civil wars more and the extensive purges of Ferdinand VII’s reign) and the principal of them was, by far, the retired 85-years-old general Baldomero Fernández Espartero, who had no intention at all of leaving his home city after the weakening of his last forces following his beloved wife’s death. In fact, Espartero died less than a year after the celebrations, but before then he had the opportunity to see the biggest military parade ever held in Logroño and the official proclamation of May 2 as Spain’s National Day under the name Día de la Libertad Nacional. He also had the opportunity of meeting some distinguished foreign guests like Arthur Wellesley II (the son of the 1st Duke of Wellington), the King Luis I of Portugal and the Prince Carol I of Romania. No Frenchman attended the events.
The great voyage of King Leopold.
Europe after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.
The Romanian monarch (whose birth name was Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and was in fact the younger brother of Leopold) had been invited and personally congratulated by the king of Spain due to the recent proclamation of the total independence of Romania, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Despite not being involved at all in the war, Spain was one of the first Western European nations to recognize the independence of Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. This wasn’t just because the dynastical connection between Romania and Spain (which would grant a close relationship between these two distant countries in the future decades) but also due to Spain’s desire to find support in Eastern Europe to the post-1868 state, once it was secured in the western part of the continent. In late 1878 and 1879 Leopold himself visited these three countries plus Greece, Constantinople and the Crimea for the same reasons; in the last case the visit definitively formalised the relations between Spain and the Russian Empire, which had not been very close as the far traditionalist tsars had condemned Isabella’s overthrowing and also supported diplomatically the Carlist rebellions. The tour ended at Budapest in early 1879, just in time to welcome Austria-Hungary into the Triple Alliance. A popular legend claims that when the exhausted royal suite finally arrived at Madrid, the first thing that Leopold I did was to sent a letter to the ex-President Juan Prim which only contained the following sentence: “I understand now how you suffered in order to crown me”.
The Second War of the Pacific [2].
Naval engagement between the Peruvian monitor Huáscar and a Chilean ship during the Second War of the Pacific (1879-1880). Most of the naval battles that took place in the war where limited fightings between two or three ships.
The Spanish governments of the 1870s claimed that one of their primary aims was to restore the so called “legitimate role” of Spain regarding its former American colonies. This concept was vague and its application was extremely variable from a country to another; in some cases it was just the establishment of proper diplomatic relations, though they where not always as friendly as it was whished; in others, it took a more interventionist aspect.
The most important American issue that was screaming for a resolution (apart of the war in Cuba, ended in 1875) was the unresolved War of the Pacific against the South-American alliance of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. The Spanish navy withdrew from the region in 1866 but apparently all the following governments of Isabella forgot to sign any peace treaty, and as a result the war was technically still alive. The provisional armistice was signed at Washington in 1871, and the first movements to settle proper relations started in 1875, right after the end of the Cuban insurrection. The loose South-American alliance broke apart during these years due to the continued frictions between the traditional Peru-Bolivian alliance and the emergent Chile, which whished to become the leading country in the region. This opportune rupture gave Spain an advantage to achieve her national interests and in 1876[3] she finally reached an agreement with Peru in which Spain recognized Peruvian independence and renounced to the economic concessions demanded in the 1860s; in return, the country was opened to Spanish commerce and investment again, with the newly constructed Casa de España in Lima as the core of the Peruvian-Spanish trade. The refusal of Chile to sign a similar agreement (as the Chilean government feared a Spanish intervention in the recently founded Copper Trust in the Atacama Desert) drove Spain and Peru even more closely. Finally, the disputes originated about the exploitation of these riches led to the outbreak of a new war in the Pacific in 1879, and the weapons soon became the main Spanish item sold to Peru.
The mineral and guano sites of the Atacama desert were mostly in Bolivian territory, but exploited by Chilean and British corporations. Facing a deep economic crisis, Bolivia tried to charge the Chilean corporations with heavier taxes, something that the Chileans refused and led to the Chilean occupation of Antofagasta. The following declaration of wars drove immediately Peru to the conflict, as the country was ally of Bolivia and suspicious of the Chilean intentions. As the Atacama region was so arid, the Chileans opted for fortifying Antofagasta and taking control of the maritime theatre before trying further expansion by land. But though the Chileans had a bigger and more modern fleet (and the Bolivians had no war fleet at all), they failed to achieve supremacy against the more experienced Peruvian crews, even when the Peruvians lost the Independencia (their only armoured frigate) at the Battle of Punta Gruesa in May. The Peruvian fleet maintained the Chileans out of Iquique (where the famed Chilean captain Arturo Prat Chacón sunk with his flag ship, the Esmeralda, during an attempt to take the port in May 21) and the monitor Huáscar under the leadership of Miguel Grau Seminario alone was able to move around the whole Nazca Sea hitting the Chilean ships and escaping before receiving any damage. In July the Huáscar captured the Steamship Rímac with the complete regiment of the Carabineers of Yungay on board, leading to the fall of the Chilean Government and the complete changing of Chilean war plans. The time saved by the actions of the Huáscar was enough to permit the Peruvians to buy two armoured frigates to the Spaniards that reached the Pacific in late July; in order to avoid Chilean patrols, the ships (loaded with Spanish weapons) were escorted by 5 Spanish ships more and carried the Spanish naval ensign till its arrival to Lima, under the excuse that they were protecting the Spanish citizens in the city. Once the Peruvian fleet was reinforced, it defeated the Chilean squadrons one by one at the battles of Tocopilla (August), Mejillones (September) and Antofagasta (November). These victories gave the Peruvians the complete control of the seas and enabled the recovering of Antofagasta before the end of the year, though only after the loss of many Peruvian and Bolivian soldiers in two bloody assaults from the sea (the first attempt being repelled) and several “death marchs” against the Chilean fortresses in the dunes of Atacama. Meanwhile, Chilean ships misidentified and attacked a Spanish ship near the Chonos Archipielago. Fearing that the incident could lead to Spain joining the war and taking some big reward in the region, the United States and Britain pressed the three South American countries to start peace negotiations. With Antofagasta and most of its fleet lost and a hellish war of attrition in the Atacama desert ongoing, the exhausted Chilean Republic agreed.
The Treaty of Lima (1880) returned the borders to the status quo antebellum and established heavy war reparations to be paid by Chile, as it was considered the clear aggressor; it also ended the mutual “diplomatic ignorance” between Chile and Spain. The Chilean Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarriles de Antofagasta, whose refusal to pay had started the whole conflict, was disbanded and many of its possessions confiscated by the Bolivian government, yet other Chilean companies were able to do the same they where doing before the conflict started, but under the new tax of 10 centavos for Kg extracted that the Bolivian Government had demanded in 1879[4]. At sea, the defeated Chile lost most of its war and merchant fleets in the conflict and need to build them completely, leaving the position of leading power in the South-American Pacific to Peru. Another side effect of the conflict was the Spanish occupation of the empty island of Sala y Gómez, claiming historical rights due to its discovery by a Spanish sailor in 1793, and extending it to the near Pascua Island[5] after signing a protectorate treaty with the reduced native population in 1880. These islands were seen as valuable resting posts for the renewed route that connected the Philippines with the Caribbean and the Iberian Peninsula across the Straits of Magellan.
Spanish route to the Philippines across the Pacific in 1880, showing the strategic importance of the Sala y Gómez and Pascua Islands.
Flag of the Spanish protectorate of Pascua Island seen in the room dedicated to Spanish Polinesia in Barcelona's world fair of 1888.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Or, in other words, the Peninsular War.
[2] ITTL is the usual name for the Pacific conflict between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. The First War of the Pacific is the Spanish-South American War of 1865.
[3] In OTL it was delayed till 1879 (note that it is also one year after the end of the Cuban War, which in OTL lasted till 1878 instead of 1875).
[4] In the armistice the Bolivians wanted to increase the tax to 15 or 20 cents, but they were turned down by British pressure. This had an obvious relation with the fact that most of the Chilean companies involved had British investors at the time.
[5] Easter Island.
Additional Notes:
- The Huáscar wasn’t ever captured nor sunk by the Chileans in TTL. As a result its captain Grau Seminario survived and was ascended to the grade of Admiral, leading the Peruvian fleet in the later naval battles and the attacks on Antofagasta. He later reached the Peruvian presidency in 1890s and leaded a far more stable Peru than in OTL.
- My knowledge of Chile in this era is probably equal or more limited than my one of Peru. I think that Balmaceda’s presidency and the 1891 Chilean Civil War of OTL would probably happen as well in TTL, but probably following a different path as the severely weakened Chilean Navy (which was a decisive supporter of the Congress in its rebellion against Balmaceda in OTL) isn’t as powerful as in our world. Chile is clearly going to take some sort of revanchist sentiment in TTL (probably more than OTL Bolivia) that will have an influence in future events.
¡Independencia!
Preparatives for one of the numerous military parades that took place in the commemoration of the 70th Aniversary of the May 2 Uprisings. This one is from San Sebastián.
The second major celebration of Leopold’s reign took place in May 2, 1878. It was the 70th anniversary of the major popular uprising in the streets of Madrid against the occupation forces of Napoleon that set the beginning of the Spanish War of Independence[1], and, as expected, it was a celebration deeply impregnated of nationalistic attitudes. However, the celebration was partially dulled because some of the events planned to take place at Madrid were diverted to Logroño, in the province of La Rioja. Determined to bring them a proper homage, the government had made a hard work trying to find the last veterans of the war still alive (a titanic work, bearing in mind that those had survived the war, 70 years, 5 civil wars more and the extensive purges of Ferdinand VII’s reign) and the principal of them was, by far, the retired 85-years-old general Baldomero Fernández Espartero, who had no intention at all of leaving his home city after the weakening of his last forces following his beloved wife’s death. In fact, Espartero died less than a year after the celebrations, but before then he had the opportunity to see the biggest military parade ever held in Logroño and the official proclamation of May 2 as Spain’s National Day under the name Día de la Libertad Nacional. He also had the opportunity of meeting some distinguished foreign guests like Arthur Wellesley II (the son of the 1st Duke of Wellington), the King Luis I of Portugal and the Prince Carol I of Romania. No Frenchman attended the events.
The great voyage of King Leopold.
Europe after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.
The Romanian monarch (whose birth name was Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and was in fact the younger brother of Leopold) had been invited and personally congratulated by the king of Spain due to the recent proclamation of the total independence of Romania, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Despite not being involved at all in the war, Spain was one of the first Western European nations to recognize the independence of Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. This wasn’t just because the dynastical connection between Romania and Spain (which would grant a close relationship between these two distant countries in the future decades) but also due to Spain’s desire to find support in Eastern Europe to the post-1868 state, once it was secured in the western part of the continent. In late 1878 and 1879 Leopold himself visited these three countries plus Greece, Constantinople and the Crimea for the same reasons; in the last case the visit definitively formalised the relations between Spain and the Russian Empire, which had not been very close as the far traditionalist tsars had condemned Isabella’s overthrowing and also supported diplomatically the Carlist rebellions. The tour ended at Budapest in early 1879, just in time to welcome Austria-Hungary into the Triple Alliance. A popular legend claims that when the exhausted royal suite finally arrived at Madrid, the first thing that Leopold I did was to sent a letter to the ex-President Juan Prim which only contained the following sentence: “I understand now how you suffered in order to crown me”.
The Second War of the Pacific [2].
Naval engagement between the Peruvian monitor Huáscar and a Chilean ship during the Second War of the Pacific (1879-1880). Most of the naval battles that took place in the war where limited fightings between two or three ships.
The Spanish governments of the 1870s claimed that one of their primary aims was to restore the so called “legitimate role” of Spain regarding its former American colonies. This concept was vague and its application was extremely variable from a country to another; in some cases it was just the establishment of proper diplomatic relations, though they where not always as friendly as it was whished; in others, it took a more interventionist aspect.
The most important American issue that was screaming for a resolution (apart of the war in Cuba, ended in 1875) was the unresolved War of the Pacific against the South-American alliance of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. The Spanish navy withdrew from the region in 1866 but apparently all the following governments of Isabella forgot to sign any peace treaty, and as a result the war was technically still alive. The provisional armistice was signed at Washington in 1871, and the first movements to settle proper relations started in 1875, right after the end of the Cuban insurrection. The loose South-American alliance broke apart during these years due to the continued frictions between the traditional Peru-Bolivian alliance and the emergent Chile, which whished to become the leading country in the region. This opportune rupture gave Spain an advantage to achieve her national interests and in 1876[3] she finally reached an agreement with Peru in which Spain recognized Peruvian independence and renounced to the economic concessions demanded in the 1860s; in return, the country was opened to Spanish commerce and investment again, with the newly constructed Casa de España in Lima as the core of the Peruvian-Spanish trade. The refusal of Chile to sign a similar agreement (as the Chilean government feared a Spanish intervention in the recently founded Copper Trust in the Atacama Desert) drove Spain and Peru even more closely. Finally, the disputes originated about the exploitation of these riches led to the outbreak of a new war in the Pacific in 1879, and the weapons soon became the main Spanish item sold to Peru.
The mineral and guano sites of the Atacama desert were mostly in Bolivian territory, but exploited by Chilean and British corporations. Facing a deep economic crisis, Bolivia tried to charge the Chilean corporations with heavier taxes, something that the Chileans refused and led to the Chilean occupation of Antofagasta. The following declaration of wars drove immediately Peru to the conflict, as the country was ally of Bolivia and suspicious of the Chilean intentions. As the Atacama region was so arid, the Chileans opted for fortifying Antofagasta and taking control of the maritime theatre before trying further expansion by land. But though the Chileans had a bigger and more modern fleet (and the Bolivians had no war fleet at all), they failed to achieve supremacy against the more experienced Peruvian crews, even when the Peruvians lost the Independencia (their only armoured frigate) at the Battle of Punta Gruesa in May. The Peruvian fleet maintained the Chileans out of Iquique (where the famed Chilean captain Arturo Prat Chacón sunk with his flag ship, the Esmeralda, during an attempt to take the port in May 21) and the monitor Huáscar under the leadership of Miguel Grau Seminario alone was able to move around the whole Nazca Sea hitting the Chilean ships and escaping before receiving any damage. In July the Huáscar captured the Steamship Rímac with the complete regiment of the Carabineers of Yungay on board, leading to the fall of the Chilean Government and the complete changing of Chilean war plans. The time saved by the actions of the Huáscar was enough to permit the Peruvians to buy two armoured frigates to the Spaniards that reached the Pacific in late July; in order to avoid Chilean patrols, the ships (loaded with Spanish weapons) were escorted by 5 Spanish ships more and carried the Spanish naval ensign till its arrival to Lima, under the excuse that they were protecting the Spanish citizens in the city. Once the Peruvian fleet was reinforced, it defeated the Chilean squadrons one by one at the battles of Tocopilla (August), Mejillones (September) and Antofagasta (November). These victories gave the Peruvians the complete control of the seas and enabled the recovering of Antofagasta before the end of the year, though only after the loss of many Peruvian and Bolivian soldiers in two bloody assaults from the sea (the first attempt being repelled) and several “death marchs” against the Chilean fortresses in the dunes of Atacama. Meanwhile, Chilean ships misidentified and attacked a Spanish ship near the Chonos Archipielago. Fearing that the incident could lead to Spain joining the war and taking some big reward in the region, the United States and Britain pressed the three South American countries to start peace negotiations. With Antofagasta and most of its fleet lost and a hellish war of attrition in the Atacama desert ongoing, the exhausted Chilean Republic agreed.
The Treaty of Lima (1880) returned the borders to the status quo antebellum and established heavy war reparations to be paid by Chile, as it was considered the clear aggressor; it also ended the mutual “diplomatic ignorance” between Chile and Spain. The Chilean Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarriles de Antofagasta, whose refusal to pay had started the whole conflict, was disbanded and many of its possessions confiscated by the Bolivian government, yet other Chilean companies were able to do the same they where doing before the conflict started, but under the new tax of 10 centavos for Kg extracted that the Bolivian Government had demanded in 1879[4]. At sea, the defeated Chile lost most of its war and merchant fleets in the conflict and need to build them completely, leaving the position of leading power in the South-American Pacific to Peru. Another side effect of the conflict was the Spanish occupation of the empty island of Sala y Gómez, claiming historical rights due to its discovery by a Spanish sailor in 1793, and extending it to the near Pascua Island[5] after signing a protectorate treaty with the reduced native population in 1880. These islands were seen as valuable resting posts for the renewed route that connected the Philippines with the Caribbean and the Iberian Peninsula across the Straits of Magellan.
Spanish route to the Philippines across the Pacific in 1880, showing the strategic importance of the Sala y Gómez and Pascua Islands.
Flag of the Spanish protectorate of Pascua Island seen in the room dedicated to Spanish Polinesia in Barcelona's world fair of 1888.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Or, in other words, the Peninsular War.
[2] ITTL is the usual name for the Pacific conflict between Chile, Peru and Bolivia. The First War of the Pacific is the Spanish-South American War of 1865.
[3] In OTL it was delayed till 1879 (note that it is also one year after the end of the Cuban War, which in OTL lasted till 1878 instead of 1875).
[4] In the armistice the Bolivians wanted to increase the tax to 15 or 20 cents, but they were turned down by British pressure. This had an obvious relation with the fact that most of the Chilean companies involved had British investors at the time.
[5] Easter Island.
Additional Notes:
- The Huáscar wasn’t ever captured nor sunk by the Chileans in TTL. As a result its captain Grau Seminario survived and was ascended to the grade of Admiral, leading the Peruvian fleet in the later naval battles and the attacks on Antofagasta. He later reached the Peruvian presidency in 1890s and leaded a far more stable Peru than in OTL.
- My knowledge of Chile in this era is probably equal or more limited than my one of Peru. I think that Balmaceda’s presidency and the 1891 Chilean Civil War of OTL would probably happen as well in TTL, but probably following a different path as the severely weakened Chilean Navy (which was a decisive supporter of the Congress in its rebellion against Balmaceda in OTL) isn’t as powerful as in our world. Chile is clearly going to take some sort of revanchist sentiment in TTL (probably more than OTL Bolivia) that will have an influence in future events.
Paradise in Hell: The fate of the Dominican Republic in the late 19th Century
In the northern half of the New World, the United States of Ulysses S. Grant welcomed the new Spanish dynasty and its decision to end slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The same did the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, as Isabella had supported at first the French attempt to establish a puppet monarchy in the country; he and the Central American republics accepted the Spanish mediation to end the boundary disputes in 1885. Yet none of these countries showed ever an “interest” for Spain at the same level than Buenaventura Báez’s Dominican Republic.
General Báez had been one of the biggest strongmen of the chaotic Dominican Republic since the 1850s, taking the presidential site from time to time, and retaining it until some other member of the military overthrew him, only to return and recover it again. In the late 1860s this game turned so difficult to Báez that he started to like the idea of having his country occupied or annexed by other country while that country gave him the total power in the island; in 1870 he convinced US President Ulysses S. Grant to study the idea, but the US Congress turned down his proposal. Báez was overthrown again in 1874 but could recover the power another time in 1876. Probably impressed by the new regime that the reborn Kingdom of Spain had granted to Cuba the year before, that almost turned the island into a state inside other, Báez recovered the idea of his country returning to the “Mother Country” – an idea that, like everyone he met in his long political career, he supported sometimes and opposed others during the four years (from 1861 to 1865) that it became a reality.
Báez’s emissaries probably contacted the Spanish authorities around the same days when they where negotiating the re-establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations with Peru. Leopold liked the idea, but his top generals (who remember clearly the fiasco of the 1860s) convinced him to turn it down. Thus, Báez remained in power another two years till he was overthrown again in 1878 by a military group commanded by the General Cesáreo Guillermo. Yet this time the men behind the coup didn’t want to feel the risk of a counter-coup by Báez and sent him to exile. Báez moved then to Spanish Puerto Rico.
However, even in exile Báez didn’t abandone his plans to recover the Dominican government in some form, and resumed his attempts to have the Spanish government covering his return to power. The plans to re-annex the country to Spain where changed to establish some sort of protectorate relation and finally Báez achieved help in the form of boats, weapons and men. In 1880, taking advantage of the state of civil war following the overthrown of Cesáreo Guillermo the year before, the Expedition of the Ten Thousands[1] leaded by Báez in person landed at Boca de Yuma and quickly seized Salvaleón de Higüey in the eastern part of the island, where they established their primary base. From there, the expedition headed west and defeated at Consuelo a counter-expedition directed by the then man in power, General Gregorio Luperón. This victory opened the way to Santo Domingo, but the control of the interior and especially the central mountain range of the island needed some years before being secured because many members of the defeated Blue Party fled to the area and started a guerrilla campaign. This permanent state of war leaded to growing demands of weapons that gave Spanish, Haitian and US dealers the possibility of making substantial businesses.
Naturally, the Caribbean country was so destroyed that it had no real form to pay for these weapons apart from selling itself, i.e. its land. The entire Republic was soon full of ranches, sugarcane plantations and sugar windmills owned by foreign businessmen, attracted by the almost inexistent taxes compared to the ones of the near Cuba, which had been increased since the island achieved autonomy. In order to defend the foreign exploitations from the local guerrilla bands, the owners built stonewalls and hired mercenary guards like in feudal times. In a short time, the country looked like a colony again, despite its proclaimed independence.
The perfect image that illustrates how low had fallen the state was what happened when Báez suddenly died in his mansion of Santo Domingo, in March 1884. Disturbs soon appeared in the main Dominican cities and Spain (who had the most important number of foreign “investors” in the Dominican Republic) sent a corp of marines in the ironclad Numancia to occupy Santo Domingo with the excuse of protecting her citizens in the capital. The only country who protested and could be taken in consideration was the United States, but still recovering from the destructions of the civil war and in the middle of the problematic presidency of Chester A. Arthur there wasn’t much the US government could do. Still, Spain simply claimed that she had no intention at all of annexing the Dominican Republic and that the American protests where exaggerated, and her troops left the country as soon as the presidential seat was sure under the control of José Desiderio Valverde (a man that had supported the Spanish annexation in 1861 and had been in exile in Spain between 1865 and 1880). A puppet Dominican Republic was more profitable than a colonial Santo Domingo, profitable enough to contemplate occasional military intervention. The Spanish Revolution of 1868 had demanded a true democratic government in Spain, but apparently this wasn’t necessarily the same regarding other countries.
Still, the Dominican Issue was probably the first thing that affected the originally friendly relations between the United States of American and Hohenzollern Spain, and one of the reasons that leaded to a limited naval career between the two countries in the late 1890s.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Many of the members of the expedition were Dominican exiles that had left the country for political reasons since the 1860s. There were also many Cuban and Puerto Rican mercenaries, mostly black and mulatto soldiers that had recovered their positions in the Spanish military following the decisions of the Baragua Compromise of 1875 but where facing economic problems due to the lack of work.
In the northern half of the New World, the United States of Ulysses S. Grant welcomed the new Spanish dynasty and its decision to end slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The same did the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, as Isabella had supported at first the French attempt to establish a puppet monarchy in the country; he and the Central American republics accepted the Spanish mediation to end the boundary disputes in 1885. Yet none of these countries showed ever an “interest” for Spain at the same level than Buenaventura Báez’s Dominican Republic.
General Báez had been one of the biggest strongmen of the chaotic Dominican Republic since the 1850s, taking the presidential site from time to time, and retaining it until some other member of the military overthrew him, only to return and recover it again. In the late 1860s this game turned so difficult to Báez that he started to like the idea of having his country occupied or annexed by other country while that country gave him the total power in the island; in 1870 he convinced US President Ulysses S. Grant to study the idea, but the US Congress turned down his proposal. Báez was overthrown again in 1874 but could recover the power another time in 1876. Probably impressed by the new regime that the reborn Kingdom of Spain had granted to Cuba the year before, that almost turned the island into a state inside other, Báez recovered the idea of his country returning to the “Mother Country” – an idea that, like everyone he met in his long political career, he supported sometimes and opposed others during the four years (from 1861 to 1865) that it became a reality.
Báez’s emissaries probably contacted the Spanish authorities around the same days when they where negotiating the re-establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations with Peru. Leopold liked the idea, but his top generals (who remember clearly the fiasco of the 1860s) convinced him to turn it down. Thus, Báez remained in power another two years till he was overthrown again in 1878 by a military group commanded by the General Cesáreo Guillermo. Yet this time the men behind the coup didn’t want to feel the risk of a counter-coup by Báez and sent him to exile. Báez moved then to Spanish Puerto Rico.
However, even in exile Báez didn’t abandone his plans to recover the Dominican government in some form, and resumed his attempts to have the Spanish government covering his return to power. The plans to re-annex the country to Spain where changed to establish some sort of protectorate relation and finally Báez achieved help in the form of boats, weapons and men. In 1880, taking advantage of the state of civil war following the overthrown of Cesáreo Guillermo the year before, the Expedition of the Ten Thousands[1] leaded by Báez in person landed at Boca de Yuma and quickly seized Salvaleón de Higüey in the eastern part of the island, where they established their primary base. From there, the expedition headed west and defeated at Consuelo a counter-expedition directed by the then man in power, General Gregorio Luperón. This victory opened the way to Santo Domingo, but the control of the interior and especially the central mountain range of the island needed some years before being secured because many members of the defeated Blue Party fled to the area and started a guerrilla campaign. This permanent state of war leaded to growing demands of weapons that gave Spanish, Haitian and US dealers the possibility of making substantial businesses.
Naturally, the Caribbean country was so destroyed that it had no real form to pay for these weapons apart from selling itself, i.e. its land. The entire Republic was soon full of ranches, sugarcane plantations and sugar windmills owned by foreign businessmen, attracted by the almost inexistent taxes compared to the ones of the near Cuba, which had been increased since the island achieved autonomy. In order to defend the foreign exploitations from the local guerrilla bands, the owners built stonewalls and hired mercenary guards like in feudal times. In a short time, the country looked like a colony again, despite its proclaimed independence.
The perfect image that illustrates how low had fallen the state was what happened when Báez suddenly died in his mansion of Santo Domingo, in March 1884. Disturbs soon appeared in the main Dominican cities and Spain (who had the most important number of foreign “investors” in the Dominican Republic) sent a corp of marines in the ironclad Numancia to occupy Santo Domingo with the excuse of protecting her citizens in the capital. The only country who protested and could be taken in consideration was the United States, but still recovering from the destructions of the civil war and in the middle of the problematic presidency of Chester A. Arthur there wasn’t much the US government could do. Still, Spain simply claimed that she had no intention at all of annexing the Dominican Republic and that the American protests where exaggerated, and her troops left the country as soon as the presidential seat was sure under the control of José Desiderio Valverde (a man that had supported the Spanish annexation in 1861 and had been in exile in Spain between 1865 and 1880). A puppet Dominican Republic was more profitable than a colonial Santo Domingo, profitable enough to contemplate occasional military intervention. The Spanish Revolution of 1868 had demanded a true democratic government in Spain, but apparently this wasn’t necessarily the same regarding other countries.
Still, the Dominican Issue was probably the first thing that affected the originally friendly relations between the United States of American and Hohenzollern Spain, and one of the reasons that leaded to a limited naval career between the two countries in the late 1890s.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Many of the members of the expedition were Dominican exiles that had left the country for political reasons since the 1860s. There were also many Cuban and Puerto Rican mercenaries, mostly black and mulatto soldiers that had recovered their positions in the Spanish military following the decisions of the Baragua Compromise of 1875 but where facing economic problems due to the lack of work.
Dr. Strangelove
Banned
This is just awesome, Tocomocho, keep up with this.
I had this very same idea in my "timelines to do" list, thanks for saving me the effort.
I had this very same idea in my "timelines to do" list, thanks for saving me the effort.