Karl Marx
Spain-Intervention
(Draft)

 banner of revolution, the army of Ballesteros, which, since the capitulation
of his chief still concentrated at Priego, 10 leagues north of Malaga. On this
his second Cadiz expedition he was made a 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.
"Non por su culpa caia Riego:
Traiciön
D'un vil Borbon!"

(Not by his fault fell Riego but by the treason of a vile Bourbon.)

When Ferdinand on his arrival at Madrid was waited upon and congratulated by the officers of the bands of the Faith they having withdrawn,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 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, 1200 persons were shot, hanged, and quartered, and
then the barbarous decree against Comuneros, Freemasons etc. had not yet
been divulgated. The University of Sevilla was closed for years, but in its
stead a governmental school of bullfighting was established.

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

The failure of the Revolution of 1820-3 is easily accounted for. It was a
middleclass revolution and, more especially, a town revolution, while the

country, ignorant, lazy, wedded to the pompous ceremonies of the church,

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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 counterrevolution,—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. Thatthe 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 partin the Revolution,

by General Morillo and by San Miguel. Morillo, who cannot be suspected
of revolutionary sympathies, wrote from Galicia to the Duke of Angouléme:
"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 ar-

mies, which would have organized themselves, as they didin 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, unpaired
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 townpopulation thus estranged
from the mass of the nation, was 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

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enemy itwas to strike. Finally, the upper rank of the Middleclass, the socalled
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 plebejans
to participate in them.

The positive result of the Revolution of 1820-3 was not limited to the great
fermentation which expanded the minds and renewed the character of some
large classes of the nation. The second restauration, 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 whetthe antagonism to such apoint
as to make all compromises impossible and a war to the knife inevitable.
When according to Lord Liverpool himself, there never was an extensive
political change attended with less violence or bloodshed than the Spanish
Revolution during 1820-3. When we behold therefore, the civil war of 1833-43
exterminating the antiquated elements of Spanish society, 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, discentralised
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 X1Vth century. It was Ferdinand the
Seventh who gave the Revolution a royal name—that of Isabella—while he
leagued to the old Counterrevolution the Don Quixotte of the Auto-da-fé,
Don Carlos. || Ferdinand VII proved true to his character to the end. If, during
his whole life, he had cheated the liberals by false promises, should he not
indulge the sport of cheating the serviles on his deathbed? As to religious
matters, he had always been a sceptic. He was unable to convince himself
that any one—even the holy ghost—should be so silly as to speak the truth.