El posibilismo republicano ante el catolicismo durante el reinado de Alfonso XII. A propósito de los sucesos de <i>La Santa Isabel</i> (1884)

During the reign of Alfonso XII, possibilism attempted to build a type of republicanism that wasn't anticlerical. This project wasn’t viable due to the kind of opposition it showed toward the conservative government and the Monarchy, as well as by the attacks of catholic fundamentalism against liberalism. Possibilists wanted to take advantage of the alliance of Casanova’s liberal-conservatives with Alejandro Pidal’s Catholic Union to denounce an alleged involution. The purpose was to define conservatives as reactionaries and link them to the Monarchy, so that criticism from the left-wing liberals of the government’s actions and program would become a weapon against the monarchic form. The speech made in 1884 by Miguel Morayta, professor of History at the Central University and possibilistic republican, and the events it led to, known as «La Santa Isabel", revealed that strategy. The political events it generated determined the impossibility of a republicanism that wasn’t anticlerical, and strengthened the anti-liberalism of catholic fundamentalism