Morral affair
The Morral affair was the attempted regicide of Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his bride, Queen Victoria Eugenie, on their wedding day, May 31, 1906, and its subsequent effects.
The attacker, Mateu Morral, acting on a desire to spur revolution, threw a bomb concealed in a floral bouquet from a Madrid hotel window as the King's procession passed, killing 24 bystanders and soldiers and wounding over 100 others, while leaving the royals unscathed.
Morral sought refuge from republican journalist José Nakens but fled in the night to Torrejón de Ardoz, whose villagers reported the interloper.
The affair became a pretext to stop Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist pedagogue who ran Escuela Moderna, the influential, rationalist, antigovernment, anticlerical, antimilitary, Barcelonean school in whose library Morral worked.
The journalist Nakens and two friends, however, received prison sentences, held partially responsible for the murder Morral committed after fleeing the city.
Nakens' role in the affair spotlighted fissures in the Spanish republican movement between gradualism and near-term revolution that would later become an identity crisis.
[2] Morral was captivated with Ferrer's Escuela Moderna,[1] a school for rationalist workers' education, and offered the project 10,000 pesetas.
While working at Ferrer's school, Morral became infatuated with the director of elementary studies, Soledad Villafranca, but she did not return his private admission of love.
He went to Madrid, where he walked the streets, attended tertulia roundtables, and sent postcards to Villafranca professing his undying love and his feelings of alienation.
[3] One week before the regicide attempt, a watchman at Parque del Buen Retiro found threats against the king carved into a tree's trunk, which he later attributed to Morral.
[3] On May 31, 1906, Mateu Morral threw a bomb at King Alfonso XIII's car as he returned with Victoria Eugenie from their wedding in Madrid.
Morral was out of place, with his Catalan accent, handsome face, and dirty clothes, by means of which the locals quickly recognized him.
[10] Álvaro de Figueroa, 1st Count of Romanones, the Spanish Minister of the Interior, was responsible for the king's security detail.
[9] Both he and the commissary of Spanish anarchist activity in France had anticipated an attack, given the high profile of the event and symbolism of Madrid as the center of the revolutionists' ire.
[12] Between his 1901 return from Parisian exile and the 1906 attempted regicide, the outsize influence and rapidity of the rise of anarchist pedagogue Francisco Ferrer worried Spanish authorities, who moved quickly to repress him.
He attempted to recruit the jurist Gumersindo de Azcárate, who declined upon reviewing the preliminary evidence and concluding that Ferrer was guilty.
However, in correspondence between the pedagogue and the anti-anarchist journalist just days before the bombing, the latter declined an offer from the former to write books for his school—while the two were cordial, Nakens regarded himself as an outspoken enemy of anarchism.
The Oxford University historian Joaquín Romero Maura [es] concluded, based on Spanish and French police official records, that Ferrer had provided the funds and explosives as the mastermind of both bombing attempts who sought to foment a revolution.
[3] "Barring the discovery of conclusive evidence," historian Paul Avrich wrote, "Ferrer's role in the Morral affair must remain an open question.
His advocacy for more humane prison conditions, through regular reports in a republican daily newspaper, improved his standing with those previously upset by his harboring of Morral.
[25] On the afternoon of the attack, both Ferrer and the republican partisan Alejandro Lerroux awaited news from Madrid while seated at separate tables in the same Barcelona café.
[27] Nakens was shortsighted to believe that his messages of egalitarianism, democracy, and cultural revolution would not appeal to the leftists he sought to avoid,[28] and his popularity within anarchist and radical circles reflected anticlericalism's status as a uniting force across the left.
