The Spanish military force in defense of Pius IX (1848-1850)

Abstract

The European history of central years of the 19th century finds in the Spanish military action in Italy an interesting line of research in order to understand the political complexity of Isabelline Spain, within a context of war and revolution in Europe. In the case of the process of the Italian unification, it responded to a foreign policy based on moderate liberalism, which mediated internally between the most progressive tendencies and the Carlist opposition. Although this subject has been addressed from other standpoints, the impulse of the military studies taken place in Spain in recent years has aroused the interest of Spanish research on the creation of the Italian nation from a comparative perspective. Likewise, it has continued to contribute with new data to the debate on the presence of Spanish troops in the context of Italian unification, continuing an historiographical discussion that affects Spain and Italy. In this article we analyze these facts to reorder them and at the same time we contribute with a more heterodox interpretation than that which can be consulted in classical works, fruit of the knowledge produced on the subject at present, of a novel investigation made in the Vatican Secret Archive, and of the consultation of nineteenth-century Spanish newspapers and novels that opined and reported on the Spanish military force in defense of Pius IX, decanting public opinion in various ways according to its editorial policy line or the sensitivity of the author.

What we want to demonstrate here is that although the Spanish operation in Italy between 1848-1850 did not have the desired importance on the part of the government of Narváez, causing that a significant part of the Spanish public opinion to be disappointed and reinforcing the critical political positions with that external intervention, they were a remarkable success in several aspects. On the one hand, to resituate Isabel II’s liberal Spain between the great European powers of the moment, once the Carlism had been defeated in the civil war, and the military defeats in the American continent had diminished sensibly the nationalimperial idea of the Old Regime. On the other hand, it also helped to temper the internal moods between liberal liberals favourable to Italian unification and patriotic legitimists, who were addicted to the cause of the Papal States because of the reactionary sense the war had.