Antonio Cánovas del Castillo

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Antonio Cánovas del Castillo
President of the Ministry-Regency[lower-alpha 1]
In office
December 31, 1874 – February 13, 1875
Preceded byFrancisco Serrano y Domínguez
Succeeded byOffice abolished
President of the Council of Ministers of Spain
In office
March 23, 1895 – August 8, 1897
MonarchAlfonso XIII
Preceded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
Succeeded byMarcelo Azcárraga
In office
July 5, 1890 – December 11, 1892
MonarchAlfonso XIII
Preceded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
Succeeded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
In office
January 18, 1884 – November 27, 1885
MonarchsAlfonso XII (1884–1885)
Alfonso XIII (1885)
Preceded byJosé de Posada Herrera
Succeeded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
In office
December 9, 1879 – February 8, 1881
MonarchAlfonso XII
Preceded byArsenio Martínez-Campos
Succeeded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
In office
December 2, 1875 – March 7, 1879
MonarchAlfonso XII
Preceded byJoaquín Jovellar Soler
Succeeded byArsenio Martínez-Campos
In office
January 9[lower-alpha 1] – September 12, 1875
MonarchAlfonso XII
Preceded byPráxedes Mateo Sagasta
Succeeded byJoaquín Jovellar Soler
Minister of the Interior
In office
March 1, 1864 – September 16, 1864
Preceded byAntonio Benavides Fernández de Navarrete
Succeeded byLuis González Bravo
Minister of Overseas
In office
June 21, 1865 – July 10, 1866
Preceded byManuel Seijas Lozano
Succeeded byAlejandro de Castro Casal
President of the Congress of Deputies
In office
December 26, 1885 – March 8, 1886
Preceded byFrancisco de Borja Queipo de Llano
Succeeded byCristino Martos
Personal details
Born(1828-02-08)February 8, 1828
Málaga (Spain)
DiedAugust 8, 1897(1897-08-08) (aged 69)
Mondragón (Spain)
Cause of deathAssassination
PartyLiberal Union
Conservative Party
Parent(s)Antonio Cánovas García
Juana del Castillo Estébanez
OccupationPolitician
ProfessionHistorian and diplomat

Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (Málaga, February 8, 1828 – Mondragón, August 8, 1897) was a Spanish politician and historian, a central figure in Spanish politics in the second half of the 19th century. He drafted the Manifesto of Manzanares, published at the beginning of the Progressive Biennium. He was a prominent member of the Liberal Union, the principal champion of Alfonso XII, and the chief architect of the political system of the Restoration, during which he was the top leader of the Conservative Party, which he himself founded. He held the office of President of the Council of Ministers on six occasions, alternating in power mainly with his political rival Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.

Under his government the Constitution of 1876 was approved, and he contributed to the system of peaceful turn, through which he created an appearance of democracy that put an end to the political instability the country had been dragging along since previous decades. This strategy was consolidated in 1885 in the Pact of El Pardo, with the aim of preventing the imminent death of King Alfonso XII from destabilizing Spanish politics once again. His governments were marked mainly by a greater development of capitalism in the economic sphere, the creation of the Commercial Code in the legal sphere, the conflicts with Cuba that led to the Cuban War of Independence, and the growing tensions with anarchists and other workers' groups; he was assassinated in 1897, during his sixth term, by the anarchist Michele Angiolillo.

The term «canovismo» designates the political current whose basis is the establishment of a traditional, non-revolutionary liberal representative system, similar to the British model of the time. Upheld by the monarchy as a moderating element, it believed in bipartisanship and alternation in power, although both rested on caciquismo and electoral manipulation.

Biography

Early years

Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was the firstborn son of Antonio Cánovas García, a schoolteacher born in Orihuela (Alicante), and of Juana del Castillo y Estébanez, daughter of Juan José del Castillo and first cousin of the writer and Arabist Serafín Estébanez Calderón. He was a good student, interested above all in history and the humanities. But he lost his father at the age of fifteen, along with his four siblings, in March 1843.[1]

He managed to get by with a job as an assistant in the same school where his father had worked, and he combined his studies with his fondness for journalism (at seventeen he edited and wrote the local weekly La Joven Málaga, which published fourteen issues in 1845).[2] That same year, appreciating his nephew's journalistic merits, his uncle Serafín Estébanez called him to Madrid, even though the famous costumbrista writer did not tolerate company very well. Nevertheless, he did not go back; he settled in a boarding house on Calle del Barco and, with a job as a clerk and later as an employee of the railway company (thanks to a recommendation from his uncle), he was able to pay for the law degree he decided to undertake, which he alternated with journalism. After three years he was able to settle his whole family in Madrid, and even "placed" numerous friends from Málaga; even then his great political and managerial skill was beginning to show: he even sold the notes he took in his law classes to make some profit.[3] In the literary field, the theater reviews he published in 1849 in the Madrid weekly La Patria, whose editorship he assumed from 1850, stand out.[4] Also in April 1849 he entered the Ateneo with a lecture on Las siete partidas.

However, at that time he was only interested in the study of the History of Spain; in three years (from 1851 to 1854) he published Historia de la decadencia de España (1854), a historical novel, La campana de Huesca: crónica del siglo XII (1852), and wrote a historical drama about the Princess of Éboli (which was never published). Moreover, he contributed several articles to the Compendio histórico de todas las monarquías.[5]

Beginnings in politics

He began his political career under the guidance of the director of La Patria, Joaquín Francisco Pacheco, a jurist and politician who had taken over the leadership of a more centrist dissident group of the Moderate Party, the so-called puritanos. Members of the group included the writer Nicomedes Pastor Díaz, the banker José de Salamanca, the politicians and publicists Antonio Ríos Rosas and Patricio de la Escosura, and other figures of reputed influence, as well as many young men who were then starting out in politics, among them Cánovas himself. While working as an editor and, in 1850, director of La Patria, he occasionally contributed to El Oriente, El Constitucional, El Contemporáneo, Las Novedades and above all to the Semanario Pintoresco, where he published numerous historical notes.[6] Pacheco even came to preside over the Council of Ministers in the faction of Leopoldo O'Donnell, architect of the revolution of '54, proclaimed with the «Manifesto of Manzanares» that Cánovas himself had written. A member of the Liberal Union, in 1854 he was elected deputy for Málaga to the Constituent Cortes and, upon O'Donnell's fall, civil governor of Cádiz.

Portrait of Cánovas around 1869

He married María de la Concepción Espinosa de los Monteros y Rodrigo de Villamayor on October 20, 1860, and was widowed barely two years later, on September 3, 1863.[7]

He was appointed Minister of the Interior in 1864 and Minister of Overseas in 1865.

After the Revolution of 1868 and the end of the Bourbon monarchy, he took charge of preparing the return of the future Alfonso XII, son of Isabella II.

Bourbon Restoration

By 1874 four newspapers supporting the return of the Bourbons were already being published in Madrid. Under Cánovas's influence, Prince Alfonso signed the Sandhurst Manifesto on December 1, 1874. General Arsenio Martínez Campos had long wished for an Alfonsine pronunciamiento, in close contact with Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, but he did not have his permission, since Cánovas sought to avoid even the slightest possibility of a civil war. Martínez Campos, however, grew tired of waiting: «I take on the responsibility for this act... I have no right to the protection of the Party: you are the judges of whether or not you should give it to me; I desire it, but I have lost it by departing from your opinion».

On December 27, 1874, he had written to him:

I do not meddle in politics... I do demand that, if the movement triumphs in Madrid, you be the one to head the Government... I wish to be left the Barcelona garrison, and I am firmly resolved not to accept any command, promotion, title or remuneration whatsoever... On my part there is no political antipathy whatsoever toward you... The difference between you and me lies in the different methods of proceeding on the question of the uprising.[8]

The Pronunciamiento of Sagunto by General Martínez Campos and the proclamation of Alfonso XII as King took place two days later, on December 29. The first thing Cánovas did was to distance himself from the militarism and the old moderantism embodied by this general, and thereafter he pointed out, whenever he could, his discomfort with it, emphasizing that everything had already been done before the staging of this excess of force in which, however, not a single shot was fired. He gradually set the Restoration system in motion. In order to marginalize and isolate the Democratic Party, he proposed a two-party system between conservatives and progressives who would alternate in power, and in this he admitted to Francisco Silvela[9] that his model was a regime similar to the British one of Tories and Whigs personified at the time by Disraeli and Gladstone. The problem was the complete absence of fair play: to make it possible, it was necessary to nullify the Democratic Party by means of deliberate periodic electoral frauds, supported by rural caciquismo; only in this way would alternation in power be feasible and secure, as a means of dispelling tensions, confining to barracks the restless army, always involved in pronunciamientos, and achieving the longed-for political stability at the cost of the pucherazo or electoral fraud. In this way he acceded seven times to the office of President of the Council of Ministers of Spain under Alfonso XII.

Liberty is only possible where there is a very strong and very powerfully constituted State. If the State is weak, the injustice of some will try to impose itself on the rights of others. But when the State is truly strong and powerful..., when the State is a great creation, child of the centuries, or is strengthened by the love of all, then in this State it is easy to uphold the rights of the individual.[10]

To set his political model in motion—popularly known as canovismo or the Canovist system—Cánovas was forced to make pacts with other political forces, such as the Catholic right. Manuel Orovio Echagüe, his Minister of Development, suspended academic freedom in Spain «if dogmas of faith were attacked», through the so-called «Orovio decree», which, according to Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, Cánovas considered «an outrage».[11]

Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, by Ricardo de Madrazo (1896, oil on canvas, 63 × 54 cm, Senate)

Under his government the Constitution of 1876, drafted by Manuel Alonso Martínez, was approved. The framework of action established in the Constitution was that, in order to achieve political stability, peaceful alternation in power was necessary. This was achieved through the turn of parties. The new system, based on the Constitution of 1876, was in theory a parliamentary democracy. A defender of the two-party system, he favored the formation of a Liberal Party that would accept the legitimacy of the political system, and he agreed with the liberal leader Sagasta on the obligatory political turn, through the Pact of El Pardo in 1885. He initially decreed restricted suffrage in 1878, and the restoration of universal male suffrage was not contemplated until 1890. Except for two brief periods in which the presidency was held by Jovellar (1875) and Martínez Campos (1879), he held this office for as long as he deemed necessary until Sagasta was ready to take power, in 1881.

Cánovas was a member of one of the pressure groups called «Leagues» that advocated the survival of slavery in the colonies; despite this, and under pressure from abolitionist groups, he signed the definitive abolition of slavery in Spain in 1880 (although in a gradual manner in Cuba, establishing a patronato by the former owners that remained in place until October 7, 1886).[citation needed]

He married for the second time, to Joaquina de Osma y Zavala, on November 14, 1887. Joaquina was the daughter of the Peruvian diplomat Joaquín de Osma and of Ana Zavala de la Puente, Marchioness of la Puente y Sotomayor. As a wedding gift from the bride's parents they received the palace on Calle Serrano, known as La Huerta.[12][13]

The Corpus Christi procession bombing, committed by anarchists, led to the arrest of anarchists, socialists and trade unionists, who were held in the bastille of Montjuich and subjected to torture.[14] After the bombing a new law against anarchism was passed, on September 3, 1896, which came to be applied retroactively against acquitted prisoners, through their deportation from the country.[15]

Assassination

Main article: Assassination of Cánovas del Castillo
Illustration of the assassination in a book by Francisco Pi y Margall
Drawing of the body of Cánovas del Castillo made by Juan Comba from a photograph by the Count of Aldana, published in the pages of La Ilustración Española y Americana.

Cánovas died on August 8, 1897, at the Santa Águeda spa in the Gipuzkoan municipality of Mondragón, assassinated by the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo, who was registered at the establishment as a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Il Popolo. As he would declare at the time of his arrest, the motive was revenge for the deaths of the anarchists detained in Barcelona following the bombing of the Corpus Christi procession in June 1896.

Two detailed descriptions of the assassination have been preserved.[16] After hearing Mass and sending a telegram to the Minister of the Interior, who had consulted him on a matter, Cánovas went with his wife to the dining room, but she stopped to talk with an acquaintance, so he sat down to read the newspaper La Época on a bench in the courtyard. From a meter and a half away he received the first shot; he rose, received the second shot, and, already on the ground, received a third. Unconscious, he died an hour later.[17] The assassin, Michele Angiolillo, declared only: «I have avenged my brothers of Montjuich», referring to the scandalous military trial suffered by the anarchist terrorists implicated in the Corpus Christi bombing in Barcelona, who were tortured in prison. The trial for the crime was almost immediate; no accomplices were found, although he had received money from Cuban separatists and from the Spanish republican journalist José Nakens, and he was executed by garrote on August 19.

Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, commenting on the figure of his political rival and friend, uttered the following phrase: «After the death of Don Antonio, all of us politicians can address one another as tú». In 1901, Alfonso XIII granted his widow Joaquina de Osma y Zavala the title of Duchess of Cánovas del Castillo. Among the children of his brother Emilio, the photographer Antonio (known as Kaulak) and the politician and lawyer Jesús Cánovas del Castillo y Vallejo (1879–1936), murdered in the Paracuellos massacres, stood out. In 1975 the City Council of Málaga erected a monument in homage to this politician from Málaga, and in 2009 a plaque in his honor was installed in the plenary hall of the city hall of Málaga.[18]

Thought

It has been pointed out that the two figures who most influenced his political ideas were Edmund Burke (from whom he drew a traditionalism of a more historicist than religious nature) and Joaquín Francisco Pacheco.[19] He defended an essentialist, metaphysical and providentialist conception of the nation.[20] Opposed to universal suffrage, he went so far as to state that «this universal suffrage engenders socialism in a natural, necessary and inevitable manner».[21]

As for his idea of the nation, for him it «was a thing of God or of nature, not of human invention», and in 1882 he maintained in a speech at the Ateneo de Madrid, thus diverging on this point from Renan's ideas of the nation: «The nation is not, nor will it ever be... the product of a daily plebiscite, nor the work of the consent, constantly ratified by all its members, to the continuation of life in common. No; the bond of nationality that binds and preserves nations is, by its nature, indissoluble».[22][23]

A supporter of slavery, he declared in November 1896 in a press interview: "The Blacks in Cuba are free; they can make contracts, work or not work, and I believe that slavery was much better than this freedom that they only take advantage of to do nothing and create masses of unemployed. Anyone who knows the Blacks will tell you that in Madagascar, in the Congo, as in Cuba, they are lazy, savage, prone to behaving badly, and that they must be directed with authority and firmness to get anything out of them. These savages have no master other than their own instincts, their primitive appetites."[24]

Works

Cánovas's political creed:

Politics is the art of applying, in each period of history, that part of the ideal which circumstances make possible; we come above all with reality; we are not to do or aim at everything we would like, but everything that at this moment can be applied without danger. (...)

There is a great difference between speaking of an internal Constitution alongside an express and written Constitution, in which case there is a notorious contradiction, and speaking of an internal Constitution in a country where, owing to the circumstances of events, no written Constitution remains standing. Where this happens, one cannot but say that there is no Constitution in force; and how, nevertheless, it is impossible for a country to live without some principles, without some foundations, without some seeds that develop its life. (...) Call this whatever you like; if you do not like the name of internal Constitution, give it any other; but it must be acknowledged that in fact it exists. [...]

Invoking the whole history of Spain, I believed then, and I believe now, that, all our written Constitutions having been undone by successive movements of force, in the light of history and in the light of present reality only two principles remained intact in Spain: the monarchical principle, the hereditary principle, deeply professed—in my judgment—by the immense majority of Spaniards, and, on the other hand, the age-old institution of the Cortes.

— Antonio Cánovas del Castillo

  • Obras completas, Fundación Cánovas del Castillo, 1997, 13 vols. Complete work: ISBN 978-84-88306-33-3. ISBN 84-88306-33-4. CD-ROM edition: Fundación Cánovas del Castillo and Boletín Oficial del Estado. NIPO: 007-00-048-2 ISBN 84-340-1205-7

Narrative

  • La campana de Huesca. Crónica del siglo XII, 1852.

Essays and lectures

  • Problemas contemporáneos, 1884–1890, 3 vols.
  • Artes y letras, 1887.
  • Estudios del reinado de Felipe IV, 1888, 2 vols.
  • Criterio histórico con que las distintas personas que en el descubrimiento de América intervinieron han sido después juzgadas: Conferencia inaugural de D. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, pronunciada el día II de febrero de 1891. Madrid, Establecimiento tip. "Sucesores de Rivadeneyra", 1892.

Speeches

  • De cómo he venido yo á ser doctrinalmente proteccionista, Imprenta de Fortanet, 1891.
  • Discursos pronunciados en el Congreso de los Diputados por el Excmo. Sr. Don Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Imprenta de la librería de Miguel Guijarro, 1886.

History

  • Apuntes para la historia de Marruecos, Madrid: Impr. de La América, 1860.
  • Direction of the Historia general de España escrita por individuos de número de la Real Academia de la Historia; bajo la dirección del Sr. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Madrid: El Progreso Editorial, 1890–1894, 18 vols.
  • Historia de la decadencia de España desde Felipe III hasta Carlos II. 1854. Second edition, with a prologue by J. Pérez de Guzmán. Madrid, 1910.
  • "Del principio y fin que tuvo la supremacía militar de los españoles en Europa con algunas particularidades de la batalla de Rocroy", in Revista de España, 1868.
  • "De las ideas políticas de los españoles durante la Casa de Austria", in Revista de España, 1869.
  • "Roma y España a mediados del siglo XVI", Revista de España, 1868.
  • La Casa de Austria en España: Bosquejo histórico, 1869.
  • De la escarapela roja y las banderas y divisas usadas en España. Madrid: T. Fortanet, 1871.
Mausoleum of Cánovas, by Agustín Querol[25] (1906–1908), in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men in Madrid

Literary criticism

  • Estudios literarios de D. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, individuo de número de las Reales Academias Española y de la Historia. Madrid, Imprenta de la Biblioteca universal económica, 1868, 2 vols.
  • «El Solitario» y su tiempo: biografía de Serafín Estébanez Calderón y crítica de sus obras. A. Pérez Dubrull, 1883, 2 vols.
  • Noticias y documentos inéditos acerca del proceso inquisitorial formado a D. Esteban Manuel de Villegas, M. G. Hernández, 1882.

Lyric poetry

  • Obras poéticas, 1887.


See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 By decree of December 31, 1874, the Ministry-Regency was constituted in order to govern the country until the arrival of Alfonso XII, with Cánovas as its president. By royal decree of January 9, 1875, the King appointed Cánovas President of the Council of Ministers and confirmed the rest of the ministers in their posts. By royal decree of February 13, 1875, the King ordered the cessation of the functions of the Ministry-Regency, the corresponding ministry continuing in office.

References

  1. ↑ Cf. José Luis Comellas, Cánovas, Madrid: Ediciones Cid, 1965, p. 14.
  2. ↑ Vázquez, Alfonso. «Cánovas periodista, recuperado gracias a una tesis doctoral.» February 22, 2016. La Opinión de Málaga.
  3. ↑ See. José Luis Comellas, op. cit., p. 22.
  4. ↑ González, Luciano. Antonio Cánovas, periodista, doctoral thesis, UMA.
  5. ↑ See. José Luis Comellas, op. cit., p. 25.
  6. ↑ See. J. L. Comellas, op. cit., p. 34.
  7. ↑ Espinosa de los Monteros y Ortega, Eugenio. "Una carta inédita de Cánovas del Castillo". ABC (in español).
  8. ↑ Letter from A. Martínez Campos to Cánovas, December 27, 1974, read by Martínez Campos himself six years later in a parliamentary speech, Diario de Sesiones del Senado, June 12, 1880. Cited by José Luis Comellas, op. cit., pp. 185–186.
  9. ↑ See. Letter from Cánovas to Silvela in the Artículos, discursos y conferencias de Francisco Silvela, 354–355. Cf. Melchor Fernández Almagro, Cánovas, 433–434 and José Luis Comellas, op. cit., p. 173.
  10. ↑ Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, in his Problemas contemporáneos, I, 389, cited by José Luis Comellas, op. cit., p. 159.
  11. ↑ Avilés Farré, Elizalde Pérez-Grueso & Sueiro Seoane 2002, p. 44.
  12. ↑ "La Duquesa de Cánovas del Castillo" (PDF). Gente Conocida (in español). August 21, 1901.
  13. ↑ Roldán de Montaud, Inés (2015). "La elite político-administrativa del Ministerio de Ultramar: los subsecretarios (1863-1899)". In Jean-Philippe Luis (ed.). L'État dans ses colonies (in español). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. pp. 99–118.
  14. ↑ Avilés Farré, Elizalde Pérez-Grueso & Sueiro Seoane 2002, pp. 106–107.
  15. ↑ Herrerín López & Avilés Farré 2009, pp. 121–131.
  16. ↑ Cf. José Luis Comellas, op. cit. p. 359.
  17. ↑ Cf. José Luis Comellas, op. cit. p. 360.
  18. ↑ «El Ayuntamiento cumple con el homenaje a Cánovas, 111 años después.» February 20, 2009. Málaga Hoy.
  19. ↑ Gómez Ochoa 2000, p. 152.
  20. ↑ Osés Gorráiz 1999, p. 193.
  21. ↑ Osés Gorráiz 1999, p. 202.
  22. ↑ Osés Gorraiz 1999, p. 197.
  23. ↑ Speech at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1882. It appears in his Problemas contemporáneos, II, p. 57. The text is taken from J. L. Comellas, op. cit., p. 153.
  24. ↑ Caballero, José Luis (2021-02-19). Enigmas de la historia de Barcelona (in español). Ma Non Troppo.
  25. ↑ "Arte Funerario en Madrid. Capítulo II. El Panteón de Hombres Ilustres – 2a Parte" (in español). October 10, 2018. Retrieved February 20, 2022.

Bibliography

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