A few pieces of chronological information may make it easier to
understand the following account.

On February 9, 1873 King Amadeo was fed up with his Spanish
kingdom; he—the first king to go on strike—abdicated. On the
12th the republic was proclaimed; immediately after that a new
Carlist rebellion broke out in the Basque provinces.*””

On April 10 a constituent assembly was elected which met in
early June and proclaimed the federative republic on June 8. On
the 11th a new administration under Pi y Margall was formed. At
the same time a committee was elected to draw up the new
constitution, but the extreme republicans, the so-called Intransigents, were excluded. But when this new constitution was proclaimed on July 3, it did not go far enough for the Intransigents in
breaking Spain up into “independent cantons”; so the Intransigents staged revolts in the provinces; in the days from July 5 to 11
they triumphed everywhere: in Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Malaga,
Cadiz, Alcoy, Murcia, Cartagena, Valencia, etc., and in each of
these towns they set up an independent cantonal government. On
July 18 Pi y Margall resigned and was replaced by Salmerén, who
at once embarked on a campaign against the insurgents. The latter
were defeated in a few days, offering little resistance; on July 26
the rule of the government was restored throughout Andalusia by
the fall of Cadiz, while Murcia and Valencia were suppressed at
roughly the same time; only Valencia put up much of a fight.

Cartagena alone stood firm. This, the largest naval harbour in
Spain, which had fallen into the hands of the rebels along with the
fleet, possessed thirteen more detached forts on the landward side
apart from the ramparts, and was thus not easy to capture. And as

the government took good care not to destroy its own naval
station, the “sovereign Canton of Cartagena” survived until
January 11, 1874, when it finally surrendered, because it no
longer served any earthly purpose whatsoever.

In this whole disgraceful insurrection we are only concerned
here with the even more disgraceful deeds of the Bakuninist
anarchists; it is only they who are described in any detail here, as a
warning to the rest of the world.