Restoration (Spain)

The Restoration (Spanish: Restauración) or Bourbon Restoration (Spanish: Restauración borbónica) was the period in Spanish history between the First Spanish Republic and the Second Spanish Republic from 1874 to 1931. It began on 29 December 1874, after a pronunciamento by General Arsenio Martínez Campos in Valencia ended the First Spanish Republic and restored the Bourbon monarchy under King Alfonso XII, and ended on 14 April 1931 with the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. After nearly a century of political instability and several civil wars, the Restoration attempted to establish a new political system that ensured stability through the practice of turno, an intentional rotation of liberal and conservative parties in leadership, often achieved through electoral fraud. Critics of the turnismo system included republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, Basque and Catalan nationalists, and Carlists. However, the relative stability to the turnismo system outlived its creator, the Conservative politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, and characterised the era with comparative peace, despite great social inequalities in the agricultural areas of Spain, and sporadic unrest relating to military defeats abroad. During the interwar period, the Bourbon monarchy tied itself to the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923, an event that succeeded by means of both a military coup d'état and the acquiescence of King Alfonso XIII. It took the protracted political turmoil in the wake of economic depression, caused by the aftermath of the First World War, and the Spanish defeat at the Annual in Morocco for the restored monarchy to be swept away with Rivera's dictatorship, ending with the general being forced to resign in 1930 and the king's voluntary dethronement and exile to Fascist Italy in 1931.