ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the collapse of the Isabelline system in the revolution of 1868 led to a brief but diverse experimentation in politics, society, and culture known as the ‘Revolutionary Sexennium’. Republicanism will be analysed in terms of its doctrines as well as its expressions of sectarianism, internationalism, and anti-militarism. The chapter explores the growth in the intellectual known as krausismo and of the new radical politics of anarchism. Republicanism was boosted by the lack of an obvious king to replace Isabella and by radical subcultures which had flourished especially in the south since the 1850s. Long-standing radical networks meant that provincial republicanism in such port cities as Malaga was more strident and millenarian than the ‘respectable’ republicanism of Madrid, hence the reluctance of the Democrat Party to back state intervention lest it be accused of ‘socialism’. The regional republican risings known as cantonalism were the radical response, conditioned by conscription, morale, livelihoods, and war aims.
