Download

126 Europe II
that the extinguished fires of the Inquisition will ever be relighted, or the broken
sceptre of the Bourbons mended.” Despite its likely failure, the republican
experiment was worth attempting, and Spain stood to learn a thing or two
from it. 36
Contributing to this burst of optimism was the incessant propagandizing
and journalistic skill of Emilio Castelar, a former professor of history at Madrid,
who for a few fruitless months in late 1873 sought to fulfill his dream of a
Spanish republic. A brilliant orator and fervent republican, Castelar wrote
not only about Spain, but more broadly about the prospects of republicanism
in all of Eu rope and became a well- known contributor to American journals.
Although his po liti cal acumen was sometimes questioned, he received rave
notices from Americans who knew him as a friend of republicanism everywhere;
as a man who was “as conspicuous for his probity as for his earnestness
and genius.” Alvee Adee, a State Department official, described Castelar
as “the embodiment of the republican idea, in a land where traditional religious
faith and ingrained obedience to the extremest tenets of absolutism offered
an unpromising soil for the development of democracy.” A brief pen
portrait in John Hay’s Castilian Days was especially laudatory. For a fleeting
moment, Castelar and his desired federal republic seemed to be exactly the
solution to Spain’s po liti cal instability. 37
But American enthusiasm was halfhearted at best, and it was not long before
po liti cal chaos and the desire for stability in Spain elicited calls for an authoritarian,
law- and- order solution. As the republic struggled to survive in
the midst of a Bourbon rising, The Nation commented that “no such spectacle
of moral and po liti cal disorder has, we think, been witnessed since the fall
of the roman empire.” One year later, troubled by reports of atrocities on all
sides, it called for an abandonment of the republic by the Eu ro pe an powers
that had recognized it. “The interests of humanity and civilization demand
that the country should not be entirely free to give itself up to rapine and
murder,” it concluded. Even a protectorate might not be a bad idea for, whatever
its ideological shortcomings, it was a solution that at least would produce
order. As the chaos subsided early in 1875 with the generals rallying to the
cause of Alfonso, son of Isabella, The Nation looked back with disgust at “a
somewhat ludicrous picture of the conversion of a republic into a monarchy.”
“Indeed,” it summed up, “there is something farcical in all Spanish revolutions.”
38