First Carlist War
The First Carlist War was fought in Spain from 1833 to 1840 over the succession, and beneath it over what kind of country Spain would be. Ferdinand VII died in September 1833 leaving a three-year-old daughter, Isabella. He had set aside the Salic law, which excluded women, by a Pragmatic Sanction — reviving an earlier statute — so that she could inherit. His brother Don Carlos refused to recognise it and claimed the throne. The dispute was dynastic in form and ideological in substance. Carlos stood for absolute monarchy, the Church and the traditional regional privileges, the fueros; the regency of Isabella's mother María Cristina had to seek liberal support to survive, and so delivered a constitution, the sale of Church lands and administrative centralisation. The Carlists drew their strength from the Basque provinces, Navarre and rural Catalonia and Aragon, where the fueros were at stake and the clergy preached the cause. The fighting was a guerrilla war of columns, ambushes and sieges, notable for its savagery — prisoners were routinely shot until the Lord Eliot Convention of 1835 attempted to stop it — and for the ability of the Carlist commander Tomás de Zumalacárregui, who died of a wound at Bilbao in 1835. Britain, France and Portugal backed the regency; a British legion of volunteers fought in the north. The war ended with the Convention of Vergara in 1839, in which the Carlist general Maroto came to terms and the fueros were partly preserved. Two further Carlist wars followed. The Basque provinces kept a measure of fiscal autonomy that survives in some form today. Carlism remained a durable strand in Spanish politics for a century, and its militias fought for Franco in 1936.
- Year: 1833 CE
- Category: Political
