Amadeo I of Spain
Amadeo I ruled Spain for barely two years, from 1871 to 1873, and abdicated with the observation that the country was ungovernable. Born in Turin in 1845, he was the second son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and was made Duke of Aosta, serving in the Italian army and fighting at Custoza in 1866. The Spanish throne fell vacant when Isabella II was deposed in the revolution of 1868. The provisional government under General Prim spent two years searching Europe for a constitutional monarch — the candidacy of Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen along the way provided the pretext for the Franco-Prussian War — and settled on Amadeo, who was elected by the Cortes in November 1870. He landed at Cartagena on 30 December 1870 and learned on arrival that Prim, his principal sponsor, had been assassinated in Madrid three days earlier. He went straight to lie in state beside the body. He had no domestic base. The Carlists rejected him and launched a third civil war in 1872; republicans wanted no king at all; the old Bourbon aristocracy snubbed him and his wife socially; the church distrusted the son of the man who had taken Rome from the pope in 1870; and the Cuban war of independence ran throughout. He behaved with scrupulous constitutional propriety, refusing to intervene in politics, which left him without allies when six governments fell in two years. He survived an assassination attempt in July 1872. He abdicated on 11 February 1873, saying he could not find a remedy for the country's ills. The First Spanish Republic was declared the same day and lasted under two years.
- Lived: 1845 CE – 1890 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: king, head_of_state
