The anti-clerical riots of 1835 were revolts against the religious orders in Spain, fundamentally for their support of the Carlists in the civil war that began after the death of King Ferdinand VII at the end of 1833, and which took place during the summer of 1835 in Aragon and, above all, in Catalonia, within the context of the uprisings of the Spanish Liberal Revolution that sought to put an end to the regime of the Royal Statute, implemented in 1834 by the regent María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, and to give way to a constitutional monarchy with the reestablishment of the Constitution of 1812.
The most important anticlerical riots took place in Zaragoza and in Reus, Barcelona and other Catalan towns (where the popular riots between 1835 and 1843 are known by the name of ), during which numerous convents and monasteries were assaulted and seventy members of the regular clergy and eight priests were killed, reminiscent of what had happened a year earlier in the 1834 massacre of friars in Madrid. The riots were an urban phenomenon; the rural parish priests sided with the working classes. "All the revolutionary movements that broke out in several cities during the summer of 1835 and manifested themselves in the burning of convents and in the repudiation of the Royal Statute have the same common denominator: hostility to the regular clergy, motivated either by their intervention in the repression after the Liberal Triennium, or by their sympathies for Carlism."
Background
At the end of July 1834 the Cortes were opened, convened according to the provisions of the Royal Statute, a kind of granted charter promulgated by María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, who ruled the throne on behalf of her daughter, the future Isabella II, who was then four years old, and whose succession rights had not been recognized by the Carlists, the supporters of the brother of the recently deceased King Ferdinand VII, Carlos María Isidro de Borbón, who did not accept the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 that abolished the Salic Law that did not allow women to reign, so he lost his rights to the throne in favor of his brother's newborn daughter. After the death of King Ferdinand VII at the end of September 1833, the succession lawsuit derived in a civil war, the First Carlist War, which soon became a political and ideological conflict, between the supporters of maintaining the Old Regime, the absolutists who mostly supported Don Carlos, and the defenders of a more or less radical change towards a "new regime", who defended the rights to the throne of Isabel II, so they were called "isabelinos" or "cristinos", after the name of the regent. A few days before the opening of those Cortes, the massacre of friars took place in Madrid in 1834, during which about eighty members of the regular clergy -most of whom sympathized with and supported the Carlist cause- were murdered because of the rumor that spread through the capital that the "friars had poisoned the fountains", which would have caused the terrible cholera epidemic that devastated the city -in July 1834 alone it claimed more than three thousand lives- and the rest of Spain.
A clearly liberal opposition soon appeared in the Cortes, which considered the political framework established by the Royal Statute to be insufficient because it did not recognize the principle of national sovereignty. Thus the procurators Joaquín María López, Fermín Caballero and the Count of Las Navas, addressed a letter to the regent in which they asked for a declaration of the political rights of the Spaniards, but the government of the moderate liberal Francisco Martínez de la Rosa rejected it. Months later a Law of City Councils began to be discussed so that at least at the local level the representative regime derived from the principle of national sovereignty would be accepted, but again the government did not admit it, although it meant an enormous attrition, and this together with the adverse march of the civil war caused its fall on July 6, 1835.
Martínez de la Rosa's successor was the more clearly liberal José María Queipo de Llano, VII Count of Toreno, who formed a heterogeneous government, ranging from aristocratic figures such as Pedro Agustín Girón, Marquis de Las Amarillas, to the progressive liberal Juan Álvarez Mendizábal, who was in exile in London. But this government was soon overwhelmed by a number of revolutionary movements, including the anti-clerical riots in Zaragoza and Reus, Barcelona and other Catalan towns, which took place in July and August 1835 and led to the creation of revolutionary juntas that did not recognize its authority. The government of the Count of Toreno tried to calm tempers by decreeing the expulsion of the Jesuits, which was interpreted by the Holy See as a declaration of war, breaking diplomatic relations on August 6, and on July 25 suppressing the convents with less than 12 religious, the same day that the "bullanga" of Barcelona took place, but the objective of the in Spain in religious matters went much further: the suppression of the religious orders and the confiscation of their goods.
Anti-clerical riots in Zaragoza
Riot of April 3
The anticlerical riot of Zaragoza on July 6, had an antecedent in the spring, on April 3, when a multitude went to the archiepiscopal palace to protest against the decision of its holder Bernardo Francés Caballero, of absolutist ideas -although he had not made any manifestation favorable to the cause of the Carlists-, for having withdrawn the licenses of confession and preaching to two clergymen who were chaplains of the urban militia for their reproachable conduct -in a letter sent on April 18 to the government the archbishop accused them of leading a licentious life-. The crowd was led by a lay friar, Crisóstomo de Caspe, organist of the convent of Minims in the city. Specifically, the liberal newspaper El Eco del Comercio pointed him out as the author of the murder of four or five religious who died in the incidents of that day -later the friar enlisted in the liberal army and was shot by the Carlists in the Bajo Arágón-.
The riot began in the afternoon when a crowd gathered in the Plaza de la Seo in front of the archbishop's palace shouting "Death to the archbishop and death to the traitors!", or "Death to the archbishop, death to the cabildo!", according to other versions. As the deployment of the troops and the urban militia by order of the captain general prevented the assault on the episcopal palace, the crowd then went to the convent of La Victoria, where four friars were killed, and then to the convent of San Diego, where two others were killed. At night the incidents were repeated, they stabbed a Franciscan layman and left a priest badly wounded. Although it seems that in the assault on the convent of Minim de la Victoria a detachment of the militia stopped the mutineers, "the passivity, however, is the note of the military garrison in the attack on the Franciscan convent of San Diego, located right in front of the general captaincy, and in which two friars were killed".
By order of the captain general, the archbishop left Zaragoza with military escort and after passing through Lérida he took refuge in France, specifically in Bordeaux, where he would reside until his death in 1843. In the following days, 114 absolutist clergymen hastily left the city.
It has been suggested that behind the riot there were mainly economic motivations: the abolition of the tithe charged by the Church and the confiscation of its goods. During that spring there was another riot in Murcia against the authorities who had absolutist sympathies, although those who died that time were not ecclesiastics, but a former royalist volunteer scribe, the bishop's cook and another citizen.
Riot of July 6
The most serious anticlerical riot in Zaragoza took place on July 6. It all began the day before when an attempt of pronunciamiento in favor of the Constitution of 1812 by a company commanded by Lieutenant Blas Pover, was put down and its commander arrested and imprisoned. On the 6th a multitude integrated by members of the urban militia together with men and women of the popular classes demanded the liberty of the lieutenant and spread proclamations against the government. Faced with the refusal of the Captain General to free the officer, "the rioters searched for the absolutists, killed one, disobeyed the order of formation dictated by the Captain General for the militia and immediately went through the streets of the city, with republican cries, against absolutist houses and against the convents of Santo Domingo, San Lázaro and San Agustín. Women and children participated in the destruction in a real riot against what for centuries had meant the privilege of a sacred precinct". Eleven friars of different orders died, under arms or suffocated by smoke.
The response of the authorities was to execute Lieutenant Pover and seven of his companions, as well as several individuals who had participated in the incidents. The government, for its part, dismissed the captain general, whom the newspaper La Abeja of July 13 accused of having given arms to men of the proletarian class, who would have participated in the assaults on the convents, an argument already used by the liberal press on the occasion of the massacre of friars in Madrid in 1834. This idea that there had been complicity of the urban militia and the authorities with the rioters was also picked up by a report sent to his government by the French ambassador in Madrid, Count de Rayneval. Another report by a French agent noted the fact that many peasants in the towns refused to pay the tithes, so some historians consider that the question of the tithes was possibly one of the causes of the riot, - the archbishop on some occasion had requested the intervention of the authorities of the province to be able to collect the tithes, not only in the capital but also in many towns-. "It should not be forgotten that the Church in Zaragoza possessed at least one fifth of the wealth of Aragon, which could be the cause of the popular opposition to the representatives of the Church, and furthermore, a part of the regular clergy, and above all the archbishopric, was involved in anti-government activities". "Indeed, in the case of Zaragoza, one can see the resounding economic and political animosity to an institution [the Church] bent on preserving its privileges, possessions and its own taxes".