Intervention and Nonintervention in Spain, 1838-39

Abstract

W x rHEN Ferdinand VII died on September 30, 1833, as ineptly as he had reigned, leaving behind a nearly bankrupt treasury, a disputed succession, and all the makings of a civil war, there was little likelihood that the new struggle over the fate of his misgoverned country would be fought out solely among the contending Spanish factions. Dynastic claims, geographical proximity, economic interests, and ideological sympathies earlier or later led all the great powers and many of the lesser ones to give public or furtive support to one side or the other. In assertion of dynastic claims Sardinia-Piedmont, Naples, and France had, even before 1833, contested Ferdinand's individual right to change the order of succession. On broader grounds of international law Prince Metternich maintained that the Spanish rule of inheritance, established by the Pragmatic Sanction of Philip V, was a part of the public law of Europe and could not be changed by a unilateral act.' But at bottom for Metternich, as for the other statesmen of Europe, the challenge was primarily one of the danger, or the hope, of the spread of liberalism. As a hundred years later, incompatible philosophies, deadlocked elsewhere in Europe, seemed to have chosen Spanish soil as a duelling-ground. Then, as later, each Spanish faction looked, with an odd mixture of naive optimism and self-deprecation, for victory to issue from the support expected from the great powers of its own political camp. This expectation was fostered by the political tension which followed the revolutions of 1830. While Charles X of