Marx reports on Spain’s ‘Bienio progresista’ period of revolutionary struggles as it comes to an end with Barcelona’s working class shelled into submission. Marx sees a new stepping-off point for the next Revolution.

‘Revolution in Spain’ by Karl Marx from New-York Daily Tribune. No. 4775 & 4783. August 8 & 18, 1856.

The news brought by the Asia yesterday, though later by three days than our previous advices, contains nothing to indicate a speedy conclusion of the civil war in Spain. O’Donnell’s coup d’etat, although victorious at Madrid, cannot yet be said to have finally succeeded. The French Moniteur, which at first put down the insurrection at Barcelona as a ‘mere riot’ is now obliged to confess that

“the conflict there was very keen, but that the success of the Queen’s troops may be considered as secured.”

According to the version of that official journal the combat at Barcelona lasted from 5 o’clock in the afternoon of July 18 till the same hour on the 21st–exactly three days–when the “insurgents” are said to have been dislodged from their quarters, and fled into the country, pursued by cavalry. It is, however, averred that the insurgents still hold several towns in Catalonia, including Gerona, Junquera, and some smaller places. It also appears that Murcia, Valencia and Seville have made their pronunciamientos against the coup d’etat; that a battalion of the garrison of Pampeluna, directed by the Governor of that town on Soria, had pronounced against the Government on the road, and marched to join the insurrection at Saragossa; and lastly that at Saragossa, from the beginning the acknowledged center of resistance, Gen. Falcon had passed in review 16,000 soldiers of the line, reinforced by 15,000 militia and peasants from the environs.

At all events, the French Government considers the “insurrection” in Spain as not quelled, and Bonaparte, far from contenting himself with the sending of a batch of battalions to line the frontier, has ordered one brigade to advance to the Bidassoa, which brigade is being completed to a division by reinforcements from Montpellier and Toulouse. It seems, also, that a second division has been detached immediately from the army of Lyons, according to orders sent direct from Plombieres on the 23d ult., and is now marching toward the Pyrenees, where, by this time, there is assembled a full corps d’observation of 25,000 men. Should the resistance to the O’Donnell government be able to hold its ground; should it prove formidable enough to inveigle Bonaparte into an armed invasion of the Peninsula, then the coup d’etat of Madrid may have given the signal for the downfall of the coup d’etat of Paris.

If we consider the general plot and the dramatis personae, this Spanish conspiracy of 1856 appears as the simple revival of the similar attempt of 1843, with some slight alterations of course. Then, as now, Isabella at Madrid and Christina at Paris; Louis Philippe, instead of Louis Bonaparte, directing the movement from the Tuileries; on the one side, Espartero and his Ayacuchos; on the other, O’Donnell, Serrano, Concha, with Narvaez then in the proscenium, now in the background. In 1843, Louis Philippe sent two millions of gold by land and Narvaez and his friends by sea, the compact of the Spanish marriages being settled between himself and Madame Munoz. The complicity of Bonaparte in the Spanish coup d’etat–who has, perhaps, settled the marriage of his cousin Prince Napoleon with a Mdlle. Munoz, or who, at all events, must continue his mission of mimicking his uncle”–that complicity is not only indicated by the denunciations hurled by the Moniteur for the last two months at the communist conspiracies in Castile and Navarre, by the behavior before, during and after the coup d’etat of M. de Turgot, the French Embassador at Madrid, the same man who was the Foreign Minister of Bonaparte during his own coup d’etat; by the Duke of Alba, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, turning up as the President of the new ayuntamiento at Madrid, immediately after the victory of O’Donnell; by Ros de Olano, an old member of the French party, being the first man offered a place in O’Donnell’s Ministry; and by Narvaez being dispatched to Bayonne by Bonaparte as soon as the first news of the affair reached Paris. That complicity was suggested beforehand by the forwarding of large quantities of ammunition from Bordeaux to Bayonne a fortnight in advance of the actual crisis at Madrid. Above all, it is suggested by the plan of operations followed by O’Donnell in his razzia against the people of that city. At the very outset he announced that he would not shrink from blowing up Madrid, and during the fighting he acted up to his word. Now, although a daring fellow, O’Donnell has never ventured upon a bold step without securing a safe retreat. Like his notorious uncle/ the hero of treason, he never burnt the bridge when he passed the Rubicon. The organ of combativeness is singularly checked in the O’Donnells by the organs of cautiousness and secretiveness. It is plain that any general who should hold forth the threat of laying the capital in ashes, and fail in his attempt, would forfeit his head. How then did O’Donnell venture upon such delicate ground? The secret is betrayed by the Journal des Debats, the special organ of Queen Christina.

“O’Donnell expected a great battle, and at the most a victory hotly disputed. Into his provisions there entered the possibility of defeat. If such a misfortune had happened, the Marshal would have abandoned Madrid with the rest of his army, escorting the Queen, and turning toward the northern provinces, with a view to approach the French frontier.”

Does not all this look as if he had laid his plan with Bonaparte? Exactly the same plan had been settled between Louis Philippe and Narvaez in 1843, which, again, was copied from the secret’ convention between Louis XVIII and Ferdinand VII, in 1823.

This plausible parallel between the Spanish conspiracies of 1843 and 1856 once admitted, there are still sufficiently distinct features in the two movements to indicate the immense strides made by the Spanish people within so brief an epoch. These features are: the political character of the last struggle at Madrid; its military importance; and finally, the respective position of Espartero and O’Donnell in 1856 compared with those of Espartero and Narvaez in 1843. In 1843 all parties had become tired of Espartero. To get rid of him a powerful coalition was formed between the Moderados and Progresistas. Revolutionary juntas springing up like mushrooms in all the towns, paved the way for Narvaez and his retainers. In 1856 we have not only the court and army on the one side against the people on the other, but within the ranks of the people we have the same divisions as in the rest of Western Europe. On the 13th of July the Ministry of Espartero offered its forced resignation; in the night of the 13th and 14th the Cabinet of O’Donnell was constituted; on the morning of the 14th the rumor spread that O’Donnell, charged with the formation of a cabinet, had invited Ryos y Rosas, the ill-omened Minister of the bloody days of July, 1854, to join him. At 11 a.m. the Gaceta confirmed the rumor. Then the Cortes assembled, 93 deputies being present. According to the rules of that body, 20 members suffice to call a meeting, and 50 to form a quorum. Besides, the Cortes had not been formally prorogued. Gen. Infante, the President, could not but comply with the universal wish to hold a regular sitting. A proposition was submitted to the effect that the new Cabinet did not enjoy the confidence of the Cortes, and that her M’ajestya should be informed of this resolution. At the same time, the Cortes summoned the National Guard to be ready for action. Their Committee, bearing the resolution of want of confidence, went to the Queen, escorted by a detachment of National Militia. While endeavoring to enter the palace they were driven back by the troops of the line, who fired upon them and their escort. This incident gave the signal for the insurrection. The order to commence the building of barricades was given at 7 in the evening by the Cortes, whose meeting was dispersed immediately afterward by the troops of O’Donnell. The battle commenced the same night, only one battalion of the National Militia joining the Royal troops. It should be noted that as early as the morning of the 13th, Senor Escosura, the Esparterist Minister of the Interior, had telegraphed to Barcelona and Saragossa that a coup d’etat was at hand, and that they must prepare to resist it. At the head of the Madrid insurgents were Senor Madoz and Gen. Valdez, the brother of Escosura. In short, there can be no doubt that the resistance to the coup d’etat originated with the Esparterists, the citizens and Liberals in general. While they, with the militia, engaged the line across Madrid from east to west, the workmen under Pucheta occupied the south and part of the north side of the town.

On the morning of the 15th, O’Donnell took the initiative. Even by the partial testimony of the Debats, O’Donnell obtained no marked advantage during the first half of the day. Suddenly, at about I o’clock, without any perceptible reason, the ranks of the National Militia were broken; at 2 o’clock they were still more thinned, and at 6 o’clock they had completely disappeared from the scene of action, leaving the whole brunt of the battle to be borne by the workmen, who fought it out till 4 in the afternoon of the 16th. Thus there were, in these three days of carnage, two distinct battles–the one of the Liberal Militia of the middle class, supported by the workmen against the army, and the other of the army against the workmen deserted by the militia. As Heine has it:

“It is an old story, but is always new.”

Espartero deserts the Cortes; the Cortes desert the leaders of the National Guard; the leaders desert their men, and the men desert the people. On the 15th, however, the Cortes assembled again, when Espartero appeared for a moment. He was reminded by Senor Assensio and other members of his reiterated protestations to draw his grand sword of Luchana on the first day when the liberty of the country should be endangered. Espartero called Heaven to witness his unswerving patriotism, and when he left, it was fully expected that he would soon be seen at the head of the insurrection. Instead of this, he went to the house of Gen. Gurrea, where he buried himself in a bomb-proof cellar, a la Palafox, and was heard of no more. The commandants of the militia, who, on the evening before, had employed every means to excite the militiamen to take up arms, now proved as eager to retire to their private houses. At 2 ½ p.m. Gen. Valdez, who for some hours had usurped the command of the militia, convoked the soldiers under his direct command on the Plaza Mayor, and told them that the man who naturally ought to be at their head would not come forward, and that consequently everybody was at liberty to withdraw. Hereupon the National Guards rushed to their homes and hastened to get rid of their uniforms and hide their arms. Such is the substance of the account furnished by one well-informed authority. Another gives as the reason for this sudden act of submission to the conspiracy, that it was considered that the triumph of the National Guard was likely to entail the ruin of the throne and the absolute preponderance of the Republican Democracy. The Presse of Paris also gives us to understand that Marshal Espartero, seeing the turn given to things in the Congress by the Democrats, did not wish to sacrifice the throne, or launch into the hazards of anarchy and civil war, and in consequence did all he could to produce submission to O’Donnell.

It is true that the details as to the time, circumstances, and break-down of the resistance to the coup d’etat, are given differently by different writers; but all agree on the one principal point, that Espartero deserted the Cortes, the Cortes the leaders, the leaders the middle class, and that class the people. This furnishes a new illustration of the character of most of the European struggles of 1848-49, and of those hereafter to take place in the Western portion of that continent. On the one hand there are modern industry and trade, the natural chiefs of which, the middle classes, are averse to the military despotism; on the other hand, when they begin the battle against this same despotism, in step the workmen themselves, the product of the modern organization of labor, to claim their due share of the result of victory. Frightened by the consequences of an alliance thus imposed on their unwilling shoulders, the middle classes shrink back again under the protecting batteries of the hated despotism. This is the secret of the standing armies of Europe, which otherwise will be incomprehensible to the future historian. The middle classes of Europe are thus made to understand that they must either surrender to a political power which they detest, and renounce the advantages of modern industry and trade, and the social relations based upon them, or forego the privileges which the modern organization of the productive powers of society, in its primary phase, has vested in an exclusive class. That this lesson should be taught even from Spain is something equally striking and unexpected.

II.

Saragossa surrendered on August 1, at 1:30 p.m., and thus vanished the last center of resistance to the Spanish counter­revolution. There was, in a military point of view, little chance of success after the defeats at Madrid and Barcelona, the feebleness of the insurrectionary diversion in Andalusia, and the converging advance of overwhelming forces from the Basque provinces, Navarre, Catalonia, Valencia and Castile. Whatever chance there might be was paralyzed by the circumstance that it was Espartero’s old aide-de-camp, General Falcon, who directed the forces of resistance; that “Espartero and Liberty” was given as the battle-cry; and that the population of Saragossa had become aware of Espartero’s incommensurably ridiculous fiasco at Madrid. Besides, there were direct orders from Espartero’s headquarters to his bottle-holders at Saragossa, that they were to put an end to all resistance, as will be seen from the following extract from the Journal de Madrid of July 29:

“One of the Esparterist ex-Ministers took part in the negouat1ons going on between General Dulce and the authorities of Saragossa, and the Esparterist member of the Cortes, Juan Martinez Alonso, accepted the mission of informing the insurgent leaders that the Queen, her Ministers and her generals, were animated by a most conciliatory spirit.”

The revolutionary movement was pretty generally spread over the whole of Spain. Madrid and La Mancha in Castile; Granada, Seville, Malaga, Cadiz, Jaen, etc., in Andalusia; Murcia and Cartagena in Murcia; Valencia, Alicante, Alzira, etc., in Valencia; Barcelona, Reus, Figueras, Gerona, in Catalonia; Saragossa, Teruel, Huesca, Jaca, etc., in Aragon; Oviedo in Asturias; and Corufia in Galicia. There were no moves in Estremadura, Leon and old Castile, where the revolutionary party had been put down two months ago, under the joint auspices of Espartero and O’Donnell–the Basque provinces and Navarre also remaining quiet. The sympathies of the latter provinces, however, were with the revolutionary cause, although they might not manifest themselves in sight of the French army of observation. This is the more remarkable if it be considered that twenty years ago these very provinces formed the stronghold of Carlism–then backed by the peasantry of Aragon and Catalonia, but who, this time, were most passionately siding with the revolution; and who would have proved a most formidable element of resistance, had not the imbecility of the leaders at Barcelona and Saragossa prevented their energies from being turned to account. Even The London Morning Herald, the orthodox champion of Protestantism, which broke lances for the Quixote of the auto-da-fe, Don Carlos, some twenty years ago, has stumbled over that fact, which it is fair enough to acknowledge. This is one of the many symptoms of progress revealed by the last revolution in Spain, a progress the slowness of which will astonish only those not acquainted with the peculiar customs and manners of a country, where “a la mafiana” is the watchword of every day’s life, and where everybody is ready to tell you that “our forefathers needed eight hundred years to drive out the Moors.”

Notwithstanding the general spread of pronunciamientos, the revolution in Spain was limited only to Madrid and Barcelona. In the south it was broken by the cholera morbus, in the north by the Espartero murrain. From a military point of view, the insurrections at Madrid and Barcelona offer few interesting and scarcely any novel features. On the one side–the army–everything was prepared beforehand; on the other everything was extemporized; the offensive never for a moment changed sides. On the one hand, a well-equipped army, moving easily in the strings of its commanding generals; on the other, leaders reluctantly pushed forward by the impetus of an imperfectly-armed people. At Madrid the revolutionists from the outset committed the mistake of blocking themselves up in the internal parts of the town, on the line connecting the eastern and western extremities–extremities commanded by O’Donnell and Concha, who communicated with each other and the cavalry of Dulce through the external boulevards. Thus the people were cutting off and exposing themselves to the concentric attack preconcerted by O’Donnell and his accomplices. O’Donnell and Concha had only to effect their junction and the revolutionary forces were dispersed into the north and south quarters of the town, and deprived of all further cohesion. It was a distinct feature of the Madrid insurrection that barricades were used sparingly and only at prominent street corners, while the houses were made the centers of resistance; and–what is unheard of in street warfare–bayonet attacks met the assailing columns of the army. But, if the insurgents profited by the experience of the Paris and Dresden insurrections, the soldiers had learned no less by them. The walls of the houses were broken through one by one, and the insurgents were taken in the flank and rear, while the exits into the streets were swept by cannon-shot. Another distinguished feature in this battle of Madrid was that Pucheta, after the junction of Concha and O’Donnell, when he was pushed into the southern (Toledo) quarter of the town, transplanted the guerrilla warfare from the mountains of Spain into the streets of Madrid. The insurrection, dispersed, faced about under some arch of a church, in some narrow lane, on the staircase of a house, and there defended itself to the death.

At Barcelona the fighting was still more intense, there being no leadership at all. Militarily, this insurrection, like all previous risings in Barcelona, perished by the fact of the citadel, Fort Montjuick, remaining in the hands of the army. The violence of the struggle is characterized by the burning of 150 soldiers in their barracks at Gracia, a suburb which the insurgents hotly contested, after being already dislodged from Barcelona. It deserves mention that, while at Madrid, as we have shown in a previous article, the proletarians were betrayed and deserted by the bourgeoisie, the weavers of Barcelona declared at the very outset that they would have nothing to do with a movement set on foot by Esparterists, and insisted on the declaration of the Republic. This being refused, they, with the exception of some who could not resist the smell of powder, remained passive spectators of the battle, which was thus lost–all insurrections at Barcelona being decided by its 20,000 weavers.

The Spanish revolution of 1856 is distinguished from all its predecessors by the loss of all dynastic character. It is known that the movement from 1808 to 1814 was national and dynastic. Although the Cortes in 1812 proclaimed an almost republican Constitution, they did it in the name of Ferdinand VII. The movement of 1820-23, timidly republican, was altogether premature and had against it the masses to whose support it appealed, those masses being bound altogether to the Church and the Crown. So deeply rooted was royalty in Spain, that the struggle between old and modern society, to become serious, needed a testament of Ferdinand VII, and the incarnation of the antagonistic principles in two dynastic branches, the Carlist and Cristina ones. Even to combat for a new principle the Spaniard wanted a time-honored standard. Under these banners the struggle was fought out, from 1833 to 1843. Then there was an end of revolution, and the new dynasty was allowed its trial from 1843 to 1854. In the revolution of July, 1854, there was thus necessarily implied an attack on the new dynasty; but innocent Isabel was covered by the hatred concentrated on her mother, and the people reveled not only in their own emancipation but also in that of Isabel from her mother and the camarilla.

In 1856 the cloak had fallen and Isabel herself confronted the people by the coup d’etat that fomented the revolution. She proved the worthy, coolly cruel, and cowardly hypocrite daughter of Ferdinand VII, who was so much given to lying that notwithstanding his bigotry he could never convince himself, even with the aid of the Holy Inquisition, that such exalted personages as Jesus Christ and his Apostles had spoken truth. Even Murat’s massacre of the Madrilenos in 1808 dwindles into an insignificant riot by the side of the butcheries of the 14-16th July, smiled upon by the innocent Isabel. Those days sounded the death-knell of royalty in Spain. There are only the imbecile legitimists of Europe imagining that Isabel having fallen, Don Carlos may rise. They are forever thinking that when the last manifestation of a principle dies away, it is only to give its primitive manifestation another turn.

In 1856, the Spanish revolution has lost not only its dynastic, but also its military character. Why the army played such a prominent part in Spanish revolutions, may be told in a very few words. The old institution of the Captain-Generalships, which made the captains the pashas of their respective provinces; the war of independence against France, which not only made the army the principal instrument of national defense, but also the first revolutionary organization and the center of revolutionary action in Spain; the conspiracies of 1814-19, all emanating from the army; the dynastic war of 1833-40, depending on the armies of both sides; the isolation of the liberal bourgeoisie forcing them to employ the bayonets of the army against clergy and peasantry in the country; the necessity for Cristina and the camarilla to employ bayonets against the Liberals, as the Liberals had employed bayonets against the peasants; the tradition growing out of all these precedents; these were the causes which impressed on revolution in Spain a military, and on the army a pretorian character. Till 1854, revolution always originated with the army, and its different manifestations up to that time offered no external sign of difference beyond the grade in the army whence they originated. Even in 1854 the first impulse still proceeded from the army, but there is the Manzanares manifesto of O’Donnell to attest how slender the base of the military preponderance in the Spanish revolution had become. Under what conditions was O’Donnell finally allowed to stay his scarcely equivocal promenade from Vicalvaro to the Portuguese frontiers, and to bring back the army to Madrid? Only on the promise to immediately reduce it, to replace it by the National Guard, and not to allow the fruits of the revolution to be shared by the generals. If the revolution of 1854 confined itself thus to the expression of its distrust, only two years later, it finds itself openly and directly attacked by that army–an army that has now worthily entered the lists by the side of the Croats of Radetzky, the Africans of Bonaparte, and the Pomeranians of Wrangel. How far the glories of its new position are appreciated by the Spanish army, is proved by the rebellion of a regiment at Madrid, on the 29th of July, which, not being satisfied with the mere cigarros of Isabel, struck for the five franc pieces, and sausages of Bonaparte, and got them, too.

This time, then, the army has been all against the people, or, indeed, it has only fought against them, and the National Guards. In short, there is an end of the revolutionary mission of the Spanish army. The man in whom centered the military, the dynastic, and the bourgeois liberal character of the Spanish revolution–Espartero–has now sunk even lower than the common law of fate would have enabled his most intimate connoisseurs to anticipate. If, as is generally rumored, and is very probable, the Esparterists are about to rally under O’Donnell, they will have confirmed their suicide by an official act of their own. They will not save him.

The next European revolution will find Spain matured for cooperation with it. The years 1854 and 1856 were phases of transition she had to pass through to arrive at that maturity.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (for Marx) wrote hundreds of articles in English for the New York Daily Tribune which ran from 1841 and was closely associated with Horace Greeley and, until the founding of the Republican Party, progressive Whigs. Marx contributed from August 1851 to March 1862 as the Tribune’s London correspondent. One of the largest papers in the U.S., Marx’s work was read widely, including by Lincoln who was a subscriber. The Tribune was an important outlet for Marx’s political ideas in the years of European reaction between the failure of ’48 and the International. Marx would break with the paper in 1862 over its increasing conservatism and compromising attitude towards the abolition of slavery during the Civil War. The ten years of political writings for the Tribune in the 1850s, often covering European wars, empires and politics, show Marx’s evolving understanding of imperialism, particularly his work on India and China. We need a Marx-Engels series entirely devoted to collecting and annotating their entire Daily Tribune articles. Until then, we will post compelling ones here.

Access to PDF of original issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1856-08-08/ed-1/seq-4/

PDF of issue 2: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1856-08-18/ed-1/seq-4/