The First Carlist War was a civil war in Spain from 1833 to 1840, the first of three Carlist Wars. It was fought between two factions over the succession to the throne and the nature of the Spanish monarchy: the conservative and devolutionist supporters of the late king's brother, Carlos de Borbón (or Carlos V), became known as Carlists (carlistas), while the progressive and centralist supporters of the regent, Maria Christina, acting for Isabella II of Spain, were called Liberals (liberales), cristinos or isabelinos. Aside from being a war of succession, on the question who was the rightful successor to King Ferdinand VII of Spain, the Carlists' goal was the return to an absolute monarchy, while the Liberals sought to defend the constitutional monarchy.
It was the largest and most deadly civil war in nineteenth-century Europe and fought by more men than the Spanish War of Independence. It might have been the largest counter-revolutionary movement in 19th-century Europe depending on the figures. Furthermore, it is considered the "last great European conflict of the pre-industrial age". The conflict was responsible for the deaths of 5% of the 1833 Spanish population—with military casualties alone amounting to half this number. It was mostly fought in the Southern Basque Country, Maestrazgo, and Catalonia and characterized by repeated raids and reprisals against both armies and civilians.
Importantly, it was a precursor to the idea of the two Spains that would surface during the Spanish Civil War a century later.
Background
Before the start of the Carlist Wars, Spain was in a deep social, economic, and political crisis as a result of mismanagement by Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, and had stagnated since the reforms and successes of Charles III of Spain.
Demographic
Spain had only slightly more than 20 inhabitants per square kilometer in the early 19th century, much less than other European countries. At the start of the Carlist War, the population was approximately 12.3 million people.
Loss of the colonies
While the Spanish American wars of independence began in 1808, more than two decades before the death of Ferdinand VII, the social, economic and political effects of the American conflicts still were of great significance in the peninsula. In fact, not until the start of the Carlist conflict did Spain abandon all plans of military reconquest. Between 1792 and 1827 the value in millions of reales of imports of goods, imports of money, and exports from the Americas had decreased by a factor of 3.80, 28.0, and 10.3 respectively.
Furthermore, various conflicts with the British and especially the Battle of Trafalgar had left the Spanish without the naval strength to maintain healthy maritime trade with the Americas and the Philippines, leading to historically low overseas revenue. Between 1792 and 1827, Spanish foreign imports decreased from 714.9 million reals to 226.2 and exports decreased from 397 million to 221.2. This economic weakness would prove crucial at restraining Spain's ability to climb out of the woes of the next decades and leading up to the Carlist wars.
War of Spanish Independence and the Napoleonic Wars
While Spain had been an ally of Napoleon, this changed in 1808 after France occupied Spain and installed Joseph Bonaparte as King in place of the Bourbons. Although the high nobility accepted this change, the Spanish people did not and soon a bloody guerilla war erupted. This war lasted until 1814, and during those years Spain would be ravaged by the estimated deaths of over a million civilians out of the twelve that populated Spain at the time. Furthermore, French troops heavily looted the country, especially as the focus of the army shifted towards the French invasion of Russia.
Economic
In the 19th century, Spain was heavily in debt and in a dire situation economically. Various conflicts with the British and especially the Battle of Trafalgar had left the Spanish without the naval strength to maintain healthy maritime trade with the Americas and the Philippines, leading to historically low overseas revenue and ability to control the colonies. The de facto independence of many of these colonies during the Napoleonic Wars and later wars of independence further strained the royal coffers. Between 1824 and 1833 the average annual income was barely more than half the pre-wars' level. Additionally, the political instability further constrained Spain's ability to collect taxes—the Riego revolt meant the government could only collect 12% of its projected revenue for the first half of 1820.
Spain had been heavily looted during the Napoleonic Wars and had only managed to fight as a junior partner under British leadership, financed and even clothed by British subsidies. Nonetheless, the Spanish government would be overburdened with costs needed to establish control over the country over the following decades—88% of taxes collected in February 1822 went to fund the military—which increased when Ferdinand maintained a French garrison between 1824 and 1828 "as a Varangian Guard" to ensure his power. In 1833, Spain's forces comprised 100,000 Royalist Volunteers, 50,000 regulars, and 652 generals.
The progressives of the Trienio had managed to secure loans from British financiers, which Ferdinand then defaulted on. This made securing further loans even harder for the fledgling Spanish economy. Some historians argue that the Pragmatic Sanction was encouraged in order to please the politically-active liberal financiers, and in fact it was in the interest of loan repayment that the British and French protected the cristinos during the war. However, the former statement can be explained by the growing influence of Maria Cristina in the courts.
Furthermore, Spain was undergoing a deflationary spiral caused by both the Napoleonic War and the loss of the colonies, which left Spanish producers without the incredibly valuable market to sell their goods to as well as the Mint without the metal crucial to make coins. In order to protect the local industry, Spain established protectionist policies, which served to greatly encourage a black market. In fact, Great Britain was exporting three times as many products into Gibraltar than into the rest of Spain despite the dramatic discrepancy in population size.
Moreover, Spain's agricultural production had greatly stalled during Ferdinand's reign, partly due to the wars but also importantly due to a lack of improvements in practices and technology. The effects of poor harvests in 1803–1804 and the most "serious shortages of food in a century and a half" that resulted were exacerbated by the Peninsular War. Still, agriculture accounted for 85% of the Spanish GDP. While output had recovered to pre-war levels, the prices remained unattainable for many peasants. As most of the land was concentrated on the hands of wealthy nobles and the church who had no incentive to increase production, "vast tracks [sic?] [of land] lay totally uncultivated". Areas like the Basque Country were privileged exceptions to a Spain where "the majority of the population was made up of landless workers who eked out a miserable existence." One obstacle to increasing the productive use of land were the wide limits on noble, ecclesiastical, and town-owned lands' sale. These lands could be very profitable, such as in the case in mid-1700s Castile and León where land owned by the Church accounted for one-fourth of rent collected. All in all, unsellable land accounted for more than half of Spain's farmland, thus hiking the price of land and making it impossible for small farmers to acquire land.
In fact, many Spanish dishes were invented in those times to combat the lack of food. In 1817 one finds the first reference to Spanish omelette as "two to three eggs in tortilla for 5 or 6 [people] as our women do know how to make it big and thick with fewer eggs, mixing potatoes, breadcrumbs or whatever."
Ferdinand's governmental gridlock only further exacerbated the economic situation, as they were unable to create significant economic policies to tackle the issues or encourage internal demand. In fact, Ferdinand clashed with burghers as to how to manage the rural areas which were now extremely sparsely populated, to the shock of international observers. The sparseness of population as well as the general predicaments of Spanish labourers resulted in gross mismanagement of arable landand inability of Spain to significantly restart industrial and commercial activity after the Napoleonic War. The economic troubles were portrayed at the time as a result of moral faults in society, introduced by either one's political enemies or the war.
National politics
In 1823, the Spanish Government during the Trienio Liberal had re-instated the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which had abolished the fueros and established a parliamentary monarchy, among other changes. Ferdinand VII repealed it later in the year after he appealed to European powers of the Congress of Vienna in order to restore his absolute powers and France sent a military expedition. The decade that followed the end of the Trienio became known as the Ominous Decade, in which Ferdinand suppressed his enemies, the press, and the institutional reforms of the liberals. He also established a militia called the Voluntarios Realistas ("Royalist Volunteers") which peaked at 284,000 men in 1832 in order to facilitate this suppression, led by an inspector general who answered only to the King himself and funded independently by permanent tax revenues. They were recruited exclusively from conservatives and declared its aim the protection of the royals against liberal attacks.
This decade was plagued by political instability, with a large ultra-conservative revolt breaking out in 1827 and an unsuccessful British-backed liberal pronunciamiento in Pronunciamiento de Torrijos. Ferdinand was unable to control the situation and cycled through ministers, being described by Friedrich von Gentz in 1814: "The king himself enters the houses of his prime ministers, arrests them, and hands them over to their cruel enemies"; and on 14 January 1815: "the king has so debased himself that he has become no more than the leading police agent and prison warden of his country." This assessment seems accurate, as the king described himself as "a cork in a bottle of beer": as soon as that cork was removed, all the troubles of Spain would explode into the open. In addition, as part of his police state Ferdinand revived the Inquisition and expanded it to have "agents in every single village in the realm".
The divide between liberals and conservatives, both unhappy with Ferdinand's reign, was further strengthened by his publication in March 1830 of the Pragmatic Sanction, which replaced the Salic system with a mixed succession system that would allow his daughters to inherit the throne (he had no male heir). This replaced his brother Charles as next-in-succession with his first daughter Isabella, who would be born later that year in October. It was at this point that the Royalist Volunteers and police, which had become politicized towards conservatism, threatened Ferdinand's court that they might support Carlos instead of his heir. Ferdinand died a month before Isabella's third birthday (his reign is considered one of the worst in Spanish history) and so the kingdom came under a regency led at first by Isabella's mother Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies.
The strong absolutist party feared that the regent Maria Christina would make liberal reforms. This was due to her having been chosen as Ferdinand's third wife owing to the influence of liberal faction of his court, led by Princess Luisa Carlotta of the Two Sicilies, the wife of Ferdinand's youngest brother Francisco and court rival of Infanta Maria Francisca of Portugal, wife of Carlos. The absolutists therefore sought another candidate for the throne. For them, the natural choice, based on Salic law, was Ferdinand's brother Carlos. The differing views on the influence of the army and the Church in governance, as well as the forthcoming administrative reforms paved the way for the expulsion of the Conservatives from the higher governmental circles. At the same time, moderate royalists and constitutionalist liberals coalesced around their support of the Pragmatic Sanction and against Carlos.
As written by one historian:
The first Carlist war was fought not so much on the basis of the legal claim of Don Carlos, but because a passionate, dedicated section of the Spanish people favored a return to a kind of absolute monarchy that they felt would protect their individual freedoms (fueros), their regional individuality and their religious conservatism.
This opportunistic view of Carlism is further supported by the fact that "Carlism" was first mentioned in official correspondence in 1824, both after the restoration of absolutism to Spain by the French expedition and more than 35 years after the 1789 succession discussions which Ferdinand ratified in his Sanction.