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The reign of Alfonso XII of Spain began after the triumph of the Pronunciamiento de Sagunto of December 29, 1874, which put an end to the First Spanish Republic and ended with the death of King Alfonso on November 25, 1885, giving way to the Regency of his wife, María Cristina of Habsburg. During the reign, the political regime of the Restoration was created, which was based on the Spanish Constitution of 1876, in force until 1923.[1][2] It was a constitutional monarchy, but neither democratic nor parliamentary,[3] "although far from the party exclusivism of the Elizabethan era". "It was defined as liberal by its supporters and as oligarchic by its critics, particularly the regenerationists. Its theoretical foundations are to be found in the principles of doctrinaire liberalism", Ramón Villares has pointed out.[4]
According to Carlos Dardé, it was "a brief reign ―just under eleven years― but an important one. At its end, the situation of Spain in all areas was much better than when it began. And, in spite of the uncertainty caused by the disappearance of the monarch ―especially because of the unknown succession― the improvement continued during the regency of María Cristina of Austria, during the minority of her posthumous son, Alfonso XIII. The foundations laid proved to be sufficiently solid. That reign had been a new starting point of the liberal regime in Spain".[5][6]
The almost eleven years of the reign were years of economic growth based on the continuation of the railway network, foreign investments, the mining boom and the growth of agricultural exports, especially wine, taking advantage of the great phylloxera plague that was devastating the French vineyards.[7] The great beneficiaries of this economic boom were the nobility and the high bourgeoisie, increasingly intertwined by matrimonial, personal and economic ties, thus constituting the "power bloc" of the Restoration, intimately connected with the political elite, fully identified with their interests.[8][9][10] At the opposite extreme, in a society that remained agrarian (two thirds of the working population belonged to the primary sector) and in which the middle classes made up only 5 to 10% of the population,[11] there were millions of poor day laborers in the southern half of the country.[12]