Cánovas and the Constitution of 1876: Restoration Era

Cánovas and the Constitution of 1876

Cánovas was instrumental to the Constitution of 1876. Even during the Revolutionary Sexenio, Cánovas had bet on the idea of the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, son of Isabel II. He admired the way in which the British had managed to introduce a new liberal monarchy, bourgeois, bipartisan, which shared power with Parliament. He managed to create a similar model in Spain after the adoption of the Constitution of 1876 and consolidated the two-party system.

From January 1875 until the adoption of the Constitution of 1876, Cánovas had the dual mission of chairing the first government of King Alfonso XII and preparing to implement the new constitution that would bring all ideological sectors: from the Carlist to Republicans disillusioned with the previous stage (Sexenio Revolucionario). Cánovas intended to ultimately normalize Spanish political life through a "central system."

The Constituent Assembly

The Constituent Assembly was elected through universal male suffrage (effective Sexenio), to try to make all existing political parties and ideologies could then introduce elections, which meant accepting the legality of the restoration of the monarchy and the new political regime that seeks to create. The mission of the Constituent Cortes consisted mainly of drafting a new constitution that would serve for most of the Spanish, but, on paper, the final text had a distinctly conservative character.

Key Principles of the Constitution

The core of the new Constitution, adopted in February 1876, lies in the conservative principle of shared sovereignty (King and Cortes), ignoring national sovereignty and the democratic gains of the Revolutionary Sexenio. The Crown thus retains enormous power. Courts have the legislative power is divided into two chambers: the Congress of Deputies (lower house) and Senate (upper house). Deputies are elected one per 50,000 inhabitants, while the Senators may seriously in its own right (nobles and officials of the Church or the Army), or lifetime, designated by the Constitution adopted rey.La left in the hands of successive Cortes, approval of the relevant electoral laws, which were responsible for organizing the elections, to say who could vote and to establish the electoral system: