La Constitución de Cádiz y el proceso revolucionario en las Dos Sicilias (1820-1821)

Abstract

In July 1820 a revolution that had its epicenter in the border provinces to Naples resulted in the fall of absolute monarchy and the establishment of another constitutional. The revolutionaries imposed the king the Cadiz Constitution of 1812 maximum legal text. It was not a casual fact. In recent years, in a context of crisis and restructuring of territory, liberal groups in southern Italy came calling to collect a constitution demands that kings of the Restoration ignored: freedom of the press, bigger autonomy of municipal corps, parliamentarism, broad suffrage, brake to despotic ministery and equality before law. Questions to which the Constitution of Cadiz was an acceptable answer.

But it would be incorrect to say that the Constitution resulting from the revolution of the Two Sicilies, of January 1821, was a copy of Cadiz. We have studied the parliamentary proceedings of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1820-1821), a handful of brochures and all the press published in the Kingdom for the «constitutional eight months». The question is: how to adapt the Spanish Constitution of 1812, designed for another kingdom, to the peculiarities of the Mezzogiorno? In the text are classified and analyzed the different responses, ranging from doctrinaire to the defense of a decentralized democracy in municipalities and provinces.

Was there influences of southern Italian revolution in Spain? We think so. Many Italian exiles settled in Spain in 1821, after the fall of the constitutional system, and strengthened here and municipalists democratizing currents, as evidenced by the Spanish parliamentary discussion on the «Draft economic-political government of the provinces» in 1822.