Regenerationism

While both movements shared a similar negative judgment of the course of Spain as a nation in recent times, the regenerationists sought to be objective, documentary, and scientific, while the Generation of '98 inclined more to the literary, subjective and artistic.

This made the late 19th century, after the last of the Carlist Wars, a period of an illusory stability sustained on the basis of massive political corruption.

Regenerationism was strongly influenced by Krausism, the philosophy of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, which proclaimed freedom of conscience.

Another Regenerationist magazine was Nuevo Teatro Crítico ("New Critical Theater"), written almost entirely by literary theorist Emilia Pardo Bazán, who was Europeanist as well as sincerely feminist.

Lucas Mallada strongly criticized the Idearium español proposed by Ángel Ganivet and addressed French Hispanophobia as a grave evil, countered somewhat by German Hispanophilia.

Rejecting Macías Picavea's call for a dictatorship, he sympathized instead with the 18th century satirist Juan Pablo Forner and with Joaquín Costa, who sought to reform Spain's democracy.

The ideals and proposals of the Regenerationists were seized upon by conservative politicians such as Francisco Silvela, whose famous article "Sin pulso" ("Without a pulse") was published in El Tiempo 16 August 1898, and Antonio Maura, who saw Regenerationism as a sufficient vehicle for his political aspirations.

Benito Pérez Galdós assimilated Regenerationism to his initial Krausism in the final works of his Episodios nacionales and even the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera appropriated some of Costa's discourse, particularly his call for an "iron surgeon" to accomplish urgently needed national reforms.

But the figures who most prominently prolonged the current of Regenerationism until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 were such writers as Juan Pío Membrado Ejerique, Julio Senador Gómez, Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós, Luis Morote, Ramiro de Maeztu, Pedro Corominas, Adolfo Posada, and José Ortega y Gasset.