Cantonalism, mainly prevalent in the late 19th century and early 20th century Spain, is a political option which aims to divide the state into highly autonomous cantons.
It advocates federalism with a radical character (including redistribution of wealth, improvement of the working classes etc.). Its goal is to establish a confederation of independent towns or cities (cantons). It has a resemblance in some ways to the Greek polis, due to both being systems of individual towns or cities, ruled by citizens, which make up the overall confederacy. Cantonalism was predominantly a phenomenon of the petty bourgeoisie, but also had a great influence on the nascent labor movement, and constituted a precedent for anarchism in Spain.
In Spain there have been two eras when cantonalism has come to the forefront.
The first of these events took place during the First Spanish Republic, on July 12 of 1873 in Cartagena, when an insurgency took place declaring the Canton of Cartagena. In the following days it spread through many regions including, Valencia, Andalusia (especially Granada [1] [2] ), and in the provinces of Salamanca and Ávila, all of them in places that came to articulate cantonalism. It can also be noted, the attempt to establish cantons took place in Extremadura, Coria, Hervás and Plasencia. Pi y Margall, seeing that cantons declared independent by the tardiness of the taxation of improvements, resigned from his post to be succeeded by Nicolás Salmerón who worked to defeat the cantonal movement.
The second period when this phenomenon took place, despite not being in an ideological manner as above, corresponds to the end of the Second Spanish Republic, which was developed during the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution, when for five months committees were established. Dozens of municipal and district councils of autonomous power, independent from the state, with their own notes and coins, were established. In some cases, independent municipalities or provinces communicated this decision to the League of Nations. Asturias and Leon declared sovereignty in late August 1937 with the formation of the Sovereign Council of Asturias and Leon .
In Spain, an autonomous community is the first sub-national level of political and administrative division, created in accordance with the Spanish Constitution of 1978, with the aim of guaranteeing limited autonomy of the nationalities and regions that make up Spain.
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Campo de Cartagena is a natural region (comarca) located in the Region of Murcia, in Spain. For administrative purposes, it is also known as Comarca del Campo de Cartagena or Comarca de Cartagena. It is located in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula, forming a plain which extends from the Sierra de Carrascoy to the Mediterranean. The capital city is Cartagena, the most important Naval Base of the Spanish Navy in the Mediterranean Sea.
Francesc Pi i Margall was a Spanish federalist and republican politician and theorist who served as president of the short-lived First Spanish Republic in 1873. He was also a historian, philosopher, romanticist writer, and was also the leader of the Federal Democratic Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Pi was turned into a sort of secular saint in his time.
The Cantonal rebellion was a cantonalist insurrection that took place during the First Spanish Republic between July 1873 and January 1874. Its protagonists were the "intransigent" federal Republicans, who wanted to establish immediately the Federal Republic from the bottom-up without waiting for the Constituent Cortes to draft and approve the new Federal Constitution, as defended by the president of the Executive Power of the Republic Francisco Pi y Margall, a Proudhonian Mutualist supported by the "centrist" and "moderate" sectors of the Federal Democratic Republican Party.
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The Canton of Cartagena, also known as the Canton of Murcia, was a period of Cartagena, Spain's history when it was governed by a radical cantonalist junta for six months between 1873 and 1874. The city rose up in armed insurrection on July 12, 1873 establishing the Canton's de facto independence from the First Spanish Republic and beginning a wave of cantonal rebellions across southern Spain. Loosely inspired by the more well-known Paris Commune two years earlier, the Canton of Cartagena existed during a turbulent revolutionary period of Spanish history known as the Sexenio Democrático.
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The Canton of Alicante was a short-lived canton formed during the cantonal rebellion that took place in Spain under the First Spanish Republic. It was created on July 20 as a result of a maritime expedition from the Canton of Cartagena, but as soon as the Murcian envoys left to return to Cartagena, the centralist local authorities regained control and put an end to the canton on July 23.
Manuel Cárceles Sabater was a Spanish writer, doctor, politician and one of the protagonists of the Cantonal rebellion of 1873 in Cartagena.
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