Politics: towards the Revolution of 1868

In 1864, Narcís Monturiol invented the submarine Ictíneo, which make the tests in the port of Barcelona. Monturiol had translated in 1848 the book "Travel in Icària" from the utopian socialist Étienne Cabet, which had very little diffusion and a lot of less influence than "Das Kapital", published by Marx in 1865, the same year that finished the civil war of Secession in the United States (1861-1865). As for the Spanish politics, the government of the "Liberal union", formed by the moderate ones and the progressives, was substituted for the moderate governments of the general Narváez, who sent the progressives to the opposition or the exile. These were agreed on with the republicans for overthrowing Isabel II. Three factors came together on acting Reus as the most republican city of Catalonia: being the homeland of the general Prim -with Balmes and father Claret, the three Catalans who fill in the century XIX-; the republican and anticlerical ideas of the teachers of the public instruction; and the 8.000 workers of the city who, without instruction nor religion, were manipulated like by crash force by the republican politicians. The republican effervescence expressed in great meetings and in the journalistic controversies. In 1865 -Gaudí had already thirteen years- it started the Tertúlia Progressista and the Democratic Committee, while the secret meetings of those that conspired to make Isabel II fall down multiplied. On the 2nd January of 1866 there was a pronouncement failed, that provoked the closure of the Center of Reading and of the Tertúlia Progressista. On the 15th August of 1867 there was a new insurrectionary attempt. To the political crisis an economical crisis was added, presaging the imminence of the Revolution of September of 1868.

Josep Maria Tarragona, Novemeber 11, 2006
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