The Carlist Wars were a series of conflicts which raged in Spain between the 1830s and the 1870s. The wars were brought about by the many problems which Spain faced in the nineteenth century, notably widespread discontent about the loss of its empire in the Americas in the 1810s and 1820s, the backwards nature of the Spanish domestic economy, political inertia and constitutional crises, and a severe ideological divide in Spain between royalist traditionalists and urban liberals. There were three distinctive Carlist Wars. The first of these was the bloodiest and raged between 1833 and 1840. The Second Carlist War was fought in the late 1840s, while the third and final clash came between 1872 and 1876. Overall these failed to provide lasting changes of a kind that could remedy Spain’s political woes and the Spanish Civil War was fought over half a century later over many of the same issues. The Carlist Wars led to considerable migration, particularly the First Carlist War, a very gruesome affair which caused famine in northern Spain and saw a huge exodus from the Basque country.[1]
Carlist Wars chronology of events
The Carlist Wars were in many ways the product of two centuries of national humiliation in Spain. Back in the sixteenth century Spain was the most powerful country in the world, with an empire that had enclaves all around the world and which provided annual treasure fleets from the Americas that gave Spain’s governments bottomless pockets for a time. Yet, owing to an extraordinary mismanagement of the Spanish state by King Philip II (1556–1598) and King Philip III (1598–1621), Spain still managed to reach a state of insolvency on numerous occasions. Then the flow of gold and silver bullion from the Americas dried up in the seventeenth century, revealing Spain to otherwise be a backwards and dysfunctional state.[2]
By the eighteenth century it had been reduced to a second-rate power whose affairs were constantly interfered in by France, Britain and others. Finally, in the 1810s and 1820s, after national occupation by France during the Napoleonic Wars, revolts across South and Central America resulted in the loss of the majority of Spain’s empire as new states like Argentina, Mexico, Peru and Gran Colombia acquired their independence.[3]
All of these events had led for calls for reform of Spain’s politics, society and economy since the late sixteenth century onwards, but there was never any success achieved in this regard. Disillusionment joined with the twin forces of liberal nationalism in the early nineteenth century to lead to ever growing calls for reform. Finally, the death of King Ferdinand VII and the succession of Queen Isabella II in 1833, who was still two weeks shy of her third birthday at the time, led to the political crisis exploding and the outbreak of the First Carlist War. The conflicts became known as the Carlist Wars as Spanish traditionalists and conservatives who opposed the liberals were generally led by Infante Carlos, the brother of King Ferdinand VII and uncle of Queen Isabella II, who for a time tried to dominate the Spanish government during his niece’s minority.[4]
The First Carlist War was fought between 1833 and 1840 and was the bloodiest of the three. It primarily played out in the Basque region in northern Spain and in Catalonia and was essentially a war of succession as Carlos sought to claim the throne for himself. The Second Carlist War was fought between 1846 and 1849, again primarily in Catalonia, and ostensibly over the issue of who the now grown Queen Isabella should marry, although more longstanding ideological and political issues formed the backdrop of it once again. Finally, the Third Carlist War was fought from 1872 to 1876. Its ultimate roots lay in the decision of Queen Isabella to abdicate the throne in 1868 and emergence of various rivals for it in the years that followed. The war notably led to the brief establishment of the First Spanish Republic between February 1873 and December 1874, before a return to a constitutional monarchy.[5] Ultimately the Carlist Wars failed to remedy Spain’s many political, economic and social woes and many historians view the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 as a belated Fourth Carlist War.[6]
Extent of migration associated with the Carlist Wars
The era of the Carlist Wars in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was one of mass-migration from Spain. It is difficult to precisely assess how much of this was owing to the wars and how much of it was simply the Spanish version of the European migration to the Americas and other parts of the world which characterized the nineteenth century in general. Spain was an active participant in this, with the flow of Spanish migrants to the Americas rising to a very high level from the 1870s onwards at the tail end of the Carlist Wars. However, the migration which can be tied most closely to the wars was the Basque exodus of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. At the end of the First Carlist War harsh policies were adopted towards the Basque region to crush the separatism that had been on display here in the 1830s. These policies, along with the advent of the potato blight across Europe in the 1840s, resulted in a famine in the Basque region.[7] As this occurred, tens of thousands of Basque people left Spain and headed across the Atlantic Ocean to various parts of the Americas. Conservative estimates hold that between the 1830s and the 1930s some 200,000 Basques left Spain.[8]
Demographic impact of the Carlist Wars
The demographic impact of the Carlist Wars was considerable. On the one hand it reduced the population of Spain through sheer mortality. Out of an estimated population of about 13 million in 1830, as many as 300,000 people alone died in the First Carlist War, although the number may have been substantially higher. In terms of the migratory impact, the greatest effect was felt in various parts of the Americas where the Basques and other groups were arriving from the 1840s onwards. Many of these settled in places like Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay which were experiencing greater levels of settlement at this time as the advent of the railways opened up in the interior of these thinly populated countries. Others headed for California in the early 1850s as news of the gold rush there spread. In due course some of the Basque people involved spread out around the West Coast of the United States and established important communities in places like Oregon, Indiana and Nevada. Some 60,000 Americans today are of Basque heritage of one kind or another, so many Americans will be able to trace their ancestry back to the impacts of the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century.[9]
Explore more about the Carlist Wars
- Spain, Baptisms, 1502-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Spain, Marriages, 1565-1950 records collection on MyHeritage
- Spain, Navarre, Index of Baptisms, 1559-1910 records collection on MyHeritage
- Spain, Navarre, Index of Marriages, 1577-1940 records collection on MyHeritage
- Spain, Navarre, Census, 1816-1935 records collection on MyHeritage
- Matrimonio a la española: marital customs & marriage records in Spain at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Mark Lawrence, Nineteenth-Century Spain: A New History (London, 2019), chapters 3–5.
- ↑ John H. Elliott, ‘The Decline of Spain’, in Past & Present, No. 20 (November, 1961), pp. 52–75.
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/place/Latin-America/The-independence-of-Latin-America
- ↑ https://www.atrapaelnorte.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/GUIA-MUSEO-CARLISMO-Eng-web.pdf
- ↑ Mark Lawrence, Nineteenth-Century Spain: A New History (London, 2019), chapters 3–5.
- ↑ A. A. Parker, ‘Carlism in the Spanish Civil War’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 26, No. 103 (September, 1937), pp. 383–398.
- ↑ R. A. Gomez, ‘Spanish immigration to the United States’, in The Americas, Vol. 19, No. 1 (July, 1962), pp. 59–78.
- ↑ Raphael Tsavkko Garcia, The Basque Diaspora in Latin America: Euskal Etxeak, Integration, and Tensions (European Diversity and Autonomy Papers, 2016).
- ↑ https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/cchm/custom/ba-overview