The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 which sought, in effect, to impose the progressive ideals of the French Revolution on the socially conservative Spanish Empire at the point of a gun, set off a long tug of war between traditionalists and liberals within the Spanish leadership class.

While over the ensuing six decades the insurgent liberals, or afrancesados (frenchified ones) as the conservatives derisively called them, would occasionally nose their way into the country’s central precincts of power, their presence in these places were generally short-lived, and the results of the reforms they enacted while there, mostly ephemeral.

This dynamic changed dramatically in 1868 when a progressive army officer named Prim forced the abdication of the conservative Queen Isabel II, and installed a constitutional monarchy under the aegis Amadeo of Savoy, imported to the country by Prim after a pan-European search, to serve as the figurehead for his progressive project.

But mere days before Amadeo was to formally assume the throne, Prim was assassinated in a murder that remains unsolved to this day. Deprived of the support of the man who had led the revolution, Amadeo floundered, and after an attempt on his life and several other insults to his person, fled back his home to Turin.