Raising Heirs to the Throne in Nineteenth-Century Spain by Richard Meyer Forsting

Author:Richard Meyer Forsting
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.3 Alfonso XIII

The link between military elites and Alfonso XIII has been well established and the impact of this relationship on Spain continues to influence judgements of Alfonso’s reign. This is due to his personal involvement in the 1921 Desastre de Annual (a battle in Morocco that cost thousands of Spanish lives), his implicit support for the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and his initial patronage of the future Generalissimo, the dictator Francisco Franco Bahamonde. This chapter will aim to avoid a teleological interpretation of Alfonso XIII’s relationship with the armed forces; it does not set out to find the origins of his later behaviour. Instead it will analyse the role that military instruction and education played in his upbringing based on three themes that shaped and determined Alfonso XIII’s military education and its functions. Having said that, the question of whether his military upbringing in some ways predisposed him toward intervention in military affairs and siding with the armed forces at crucial junctures in his life will be touched upon.

The first theme is the influence of the legal, constitutional, and historical framework on Alfonso XIII’s military upbringing. The analysis will centre on the 1876 Constitution, the 1878 Ley Constitutiva del Ejército, and the example set by his father. To what extent was the role of the future monarch defined by the 1876 Constitution and the Ley Constitutiva? Did the monarch’s position in the constitutional system of the Restoration make military instruction an essential component of his upbringing? The other factor to be considered is the influence of Alfonso XII’s example and legacy on his son’s education. To what extent was Alfonso XIII meant to emulate the soldier-king and pacificador image of his father and follow a similar educational path?

The second theme concerns the idea of military training and the formation of a martial habitus in its connection to moral, modern, and national education. The purpose of this is to analyse how the pedagogical concept of military educators might have been linked to wider issues of morality, national virtues, and modernity. Another issue to be highlighted here is the extent to which military instruction formed part of the military’s wider efforts to extend its soft power while retreating from more direct forms of public intervention.

The final section of the chapter will engage with what was probably the most decisive event to occur during Spain’s fin de siècle and Alfonso’s youth, the 1898 desastre , the loss of Spain’s remaining overseas colonies in the Spanish-American War. The swift defeat of the Spanish forces impacted on the already uneasy relationship between military and civilian institutions that had been brought about by a strong sense that there was a need for regeneration. These events would have had an impact on Alfonso’s upbringing, his public representation, and his world view. It is worth asking whether the soldierly image created of Alfonso XIII can be understood as a response to the urges unleashed by military defeat and led to an increased emphasis placed on his military upbringing.

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