‘The elections held last Sunday clearly show me that I do not have the love of my people today’, wrote King Alfonso XIII in a farewell note to the Spanish people, before leaving the Royal Palace on the night of Tuesday 14 April 1931.

According to Miguel Maura, ‘the Monarchy had committed suicide’, so he, the son of Antonio Maura, former leader of the monarchist conservatives, had decided ‘to join’ the Republic almost a year before it was proclaimed, as he stated in an address in the Ateneo (literary society) in San Sebastián on 20 February 1930. Maura was joined by other distinguished monarchists who realised that it was better to defend ‘legitimate conservative principles’ within the Republic, rather than leaving ‘the way clear’ for the leftist parties and workers' organisations. Nineteen-thirty was a year of noteworthy resignations of politicians who had hitherto been loyal to the Crown. José Sánchez Guerra, the former leader of the Partido Conservador, took this step in February, a few days after Miguel Maura. Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a liberal minister under Alfonso XIII, did so in April. In little more than a year – the period that spanned the fall of the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, which had seized power in September 1923, and the abdication of the King – hostility towards the Monarchy spread unchecked through the medium of meetings and demonstrations throughout Spain.