Arsenio Martinez Campos

Arsenio Martinez Campos restored the Bourbon monarchy in Spain by pronouncing for it, ended one Cuban war by negotiating, and refused to fight the next one the way his government wanted. He was a career officer who had served in Morocco, Mexico and Cuba, and in December 1874 at Sagunto he declared for Alfonso XII, the exiled son of Isabel II, at a moment when the First Republic had exhausted everyone. The pronunciamiento succeeded without fighting and produced the Restoration settlement that governed Spain until 1923. He then finished the Third Carlist War, and in 1878 ended the Ten Years' War in Cuba with the Peace of Zanjon, a negotiated settlement offering amnesty, reforms and freedom for the slaves who had fought on either side, which he regarded as the only durable way to hold the island. He was made prime minister briefly and was governor of Cuba again when the final war of independence broke out in 1895. Against an insurgency that would not stand and fight he proposed the same combination of military pressure and political concession, warned Madrid explicitly that the alternative was a war against the civilian population, and said he was not the man to conduct it. He resigned in 1896 and was replaced by Valeriano Weyler, who instituted the reconcentration camps in which perhaps a sixth of rural Cuba died - the policy that gave the American press its cause and Spain its catastrophe in 1898. He died in 1900, having been right about the war and unable to prevent it. He survived an anarchist bomb thrown at him in Barcelona in 1893, which killed his horse and several bystanders. He had been made a marquis and a captain-general and held both titles when he resigned Cuba. His warning to Madrid about what holding the island would require is preserved in his own correspondence.

• Lived: 1831 CE – 1900 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: military, politician