Unpublished extract from a series of articles
"Revolutionary Spain"^[457]

... banner of revolution, the army of Ballesteros, which, since the capitulation of his chief [was] still concentrated at Priego, 10 leagues north of Malaga. On this his second Cadiz expedition[458] he[a] was made prisoner by one of General Molitor's corps, surrendered to the apostolical band, and sent to Madrid there to be executed, on the 7th November, four days before Ferdinand's return to the capital.

When Ferdinand on his arrival at Madrid was waited upon and congratulated by the officers of the bands of the Foi[459] they having withdrawn, he exclaimed in the midst of his court: "It is the same dogs but with different collars".

The number of friars who in 1822 had mustered 16,310, amounted in 1830 to 61,727, being an increase of 45,417[b] in the course of 8 years. From the Madrid Gaceta we see that in the single month from the 24th August to the 24th September 1824, 1,200 persons were shot, hanged, and quartered, and then the barbarous decree against Comuneros[460], Freemasons, etc., had not yet been divulgated[c]. The University of Sevilla was closed for years, but in its stead a governmental school of bullfighting was established.

Original of unpublished extract from Marx's Revolutionary Spain

Frederick the Great, conversing with his War Minister, asked him, which country in Europe he thought most difficult to ruin? Perceiving the minister to be rather embarrassed, he answered for him:

"It is Spain: as its own government has for many years endeavoured to ruin it—but all in vain."[d]

Frederick the Great seems to have prognosticated the reign of Ferdinand VII.

The failure of the Revolution of 1820-1823 is easily accounted for. It was a middle class revolution and, more especially, a town revolution, while the country, ignorant, lazy, wedded to the pompous ceremonies of the church, remained passive observers of the party strife they did hardly understand. In the few provinces where they exceptionally took an active share in the struggle, it was rather on the side of the counter-revolution,—a fact not to be wondered at in Spain, "that storehouse of ancient customs, that repository of all, elsewhere forgotten and past by", a country where, during the war of independence peasants were seen using spurs taken from the armoury of the Alhambra and armed with halberds and pikes of curious and ancient workmanship, which had been wielded in the wars of the 15th century. Besides it was a feature peculiar to Spain that every peasant who had a noble ensign cut in stone over the door of his miserable cabin, considered himself a nobleman and that thus the country people, generally, if poor and plundered, did never groan under that consciousness of abject degradation which exasperated them in the rest of feudal Europe. That the revolutionary party did not know how to link the interests of the peasantry to the town movement, is avowed by two men, both of whom acted a principal part in the Revolution, by General Morillo and by San Miguel. Morillo, who cannot be suspected of revolutionary sympathies, wrote from Galicia to the Duke of Angoulême:

"If the Cortes had sanctioned the bill on the seignorial rights, and thus despoiled the grandees of their properties in favour of the multitude, Your Highness would have encountered numerous, patriotic and formidable armies, which would have organized themselves, as they did in France, under similar circumstances".

On the other hand San Miguel (see his Civil War of Spain, Madrid. 1836) tells us:

"The greatest error of the liberals consisted in their not considering that by far the majority of the nation were indifferent or hostile to the new laws. The numerous decrees published by the Cortes with a view to ameliorating the material condition of the people, were unable to produce so immediate results as were required by the circumstances. Neither the abolition of half the tithes, nor the sale of the monastic estates, contributed to ameliorating the material condition of the lower agricultural classes. The last measure, on the contrary, by throwing the land out of the hands of the indulgent monks into those of calculating capitalists, impaired the position of the old farmers by causing higher rents to be imposed upon them, so that the superstition of this numerous class, already wounded by the alienation of sanctified patrimony, became exaggerated by the suggestions of material interests".

The revolutionary town population thus estranged from the mass of the nation, were therefore forced, in their struggle with the Grandees, the rural clergy, the monastic power, and the crown which represented all these antiquated elements of society, to depend altogether on the army and its chiefs. The very position thus usurped by the army in the revolutionary camp, together with its isolation from the masses, made it an instrument dangerous for the hands that wielded it, but inoffensive to the enemy it was to strike. Finally, the upper rank of the middle-class, the so-called Moderados, became soon lukewarm and then traitors to the Cause of the Revolution, lulling themselves, as they did, into the hope of getting their reign established by means of a French intervention and thus enjoying the fruits of a new society without painstaking and without admitting the plebeians to participate in them.

The positive result of the Revolution of 1820-1823 was not limited to the great fermentation which expanded the minds and renewed the character of some large classes of the nation. The second restoration[461], in which the antiquated elements of society assumed such shapes as to become insupportable to, and incompatible with the national existence of Spain, was itself a product of the Revolution. Its principal work was to whet the antagonism to such a point as to make all compromises impossible and a war to the knife inevitable. According to Lord Liverpool himself, there never was an extensive political change attended with less violence or bloodshed than the Spanish Revolution during 1820-1823[e]. When we behold, therefore, the civil war of 1833-1843[462] exterminating the antiquated elements of Spanish society[f], with fire and sword and disgracing itself by acts of cannibalism, we must not attribute the savage inexorableness of that epoch to the peculiar character of the Spanish race, but to the same force of circumstances that imposed upon France the reign of terrorism. While the French centralised and, therefore, abbreviated the reign of terrorism, the Spaniards, true to their traditions, decentralised and, consequently, procrastinated it. Conforming to Spanish tradition, the revolutionary party was not likely to prove victorious by subverting the throne. With them, to be successful, the Revolution itself needed to appear as a competitor for the throne. The struggle of the two societies ought to assume the form of a struggle of opposite dynastic interests. The Spain of the 19th century did her revolution with ease; when she was allowed to give it the form of the civil wars of the XIVth century. It was Ferdinand the Seventh who gave to the Revolution a royal name that of Isabella, while he leagued to the counter-revolution the Don Quixote of the Auto-da-fé, Don Carlos. Ferdinand VII proved true to his character to the [end][g]. If, during his whole life, he had cheated the liberals by false promises, should he not indulge the sport [when ch]eating the serviles on his death-bed?[463] As to religious matters, he had always been a sceptic. He was unable to [con]vince himself that any one even the Holy Ghost should be so silly as to speak the truth.

Notes

[327] The decree of March 6, 1820 and the decrees mentioned by Marx below were published in Miraflores, Essais historiques et critiques pour servir à l'histoire d'Espagne, de 1820 h 1823, t. I, Paris, 1836, pp. 257, 261-62. It is probable that Marx's main source in describing these events were: Henry Davis, The War of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, 1852; La España. Bajo el Poder Arbitrario de la congregacion Apostólica o Apuntes Documentados para la Historia de este Pais desde 1820 a 1832. Second edition, Paris, 1833 and M. de Chateaubriand, Congrès de Vérone. Guerre d'Espagne. Negociations. Colonies espagnoles, Brussels, 1838, t. 1, excerpts from which he made in October 1854.