This dynamic changed dramatically in 1868 when a progressive army officer named Prim forced the abdication of the conservative Queen Isabel II, and installed a constitutional monarchy under the aegis Amadeo of Savoy, imported to the country by Prim after a pan-European search, to serve as the figurehead for his progressive project.
But mere days before Amadeo was to formally assume the throne, Prim was assassinated in a murder that remains unsolved to this day. Deprived of the support of the man who had led the revolution, Amadeo floundered, and after an attempt on his life and several other insults to his person, fled back his home to Turin.
For the more radical elements of the Spanish left, the failure of the reformist constitutional monarchy could mean only one thing: it was time to double down and declare a republic. And not only a republic, but a federal one. This, in the country that had essentially invented and first put into practice the concept of the centralized ethnically homogenous nation-state.
Moreover, the key intellectual driver of the new Federal Republic and one of its future presidents, Francisco Pi i Margall, decided, in keeping with his veneration for the ideas of the French proto-anarchist Proudhon, that the shape and nature of the constituent elements of the new, decentralized republic would be determined not in Madrid, but at the local level in according to the spontaneous desires of local citizenries.
This resulted in the birth of an endless series of local “republics” that fought with each other and against the relatively timid attempts of the central government to force them to align their politics with its broadly conceived national goals.
Not surprisingly after only 11 months and four presidents, the Spanish Federal Republic died, replaced first by a militarily-led centralist one, and very shortly thereafter, by a restored Bourbon monarchy.
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