ISABELLA II, Queen of Spain. - B. 10 Oct. 1830 in Madrid, d. 9 Apr. 1904 in Paris. Daughter of Ferdinand VII and Maria Christina, she lost her father at the age of three. Before dying, Ferdinand VII had promulgated the "Pragmatic Sanction," assuring the succession to his daughter, an act that met with the hostility of his brother Charles, who on the King's death (19 Sept. 1833) considered himself injured in his legitimate rights. Maria Christina, who had been named regent, thus found herself involved in a civil war that lasted almost seven years (from 1833 to 1839). When I. reached her majority in 1843, the internal situation of Spain did not improve.
The personal ambitions of politicians and generals prevented the formation of any stable government, nor were the hopes of the Carlists of seizing the throne definitively at an end. The solution of the dynastic problem, after the renunciation of Don Carlos in favor of his son Don Carlos Luis, count of Montemolin, who assumed the name Charles VI, seemed near, but the plan for a marriage between the latter and I. encountered the hostility not only of the liberals but also of certain foreign powers (France, England), so that the pacification between the two factions could not take place. The marriage contracted in 1846 by I. with the duke of Cadiz, a union favored and desired by the courts of London and Paris, further embittered the dynastic dispute. Relations with the Holy See and with the Catholic Church, immediately after the death of Ferdinand VII, deteriorated markedly, although the Spanish government and the Queen exerted themselves for the pontifical restoration in Rome after the events of 1848-49, and although I. became a devoted supporter with Pius IX both of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and of that of the Assumption of Mary. Nor did they improve with the Concordat of 16 March 1851, because, three years later, the appointment of General Espartero as president of the council of ministers marked the beginning of new measures against the Church. When a revolution broke out in Sept. 1868, I. was forced to leave the country, settled in Paris and abdicated in 1870 in favor of her son Alfonso XII.
Bibliography5 works
Silvio Furlani