Carlism, a Spanish political movement of traditionalist character, originating in the 1820s in the apostólico or extreme clerical party and mobilized in 1827 in the form of paramilitary Royalist Volunteers. This opposition to liberalism crystallized in the 1830s around the person of Carlos María Isidro de Borbón (Don Carlos), younger brother of King Ferdinand VII, and afterward conde de Molina. In claiming the right to succeed his brother, Don Carlos denied the validity of Charles IV’s pragmatic sanction of 1789, then being used by Ferdinand to ensure the succession of his infant daughter Isabella, who was born in 1830 (see Pragmatic Sanction of King Ferdinand VII). Instead, the Carlists invoked the Salic Law of Succession, introduced into Spain by Philip V in 1713, which excluded females from the royal succession.
The disputed succession and its ideological overtones provoked the Carlist War of 1833–39. Although the Carlists were defeated, thereafter they upheld their cause in the face of the constitutional regime of Isabella and unsuccessful attempts to effect a dynastic reconciliation through a marriage between Isabella II and Don Carlos’s heir, Don Carlos, conde de Montemolín. The Carlist claim passed to the latter upon the “abdication” of “King Charles V” in 1845. On the death of “King Charles VI” (Montemolín) in 1861, the leadership of the cause was assumed by his brother Don Juan; his alleged liberalism brought about his “abdication” in 1868 in favour of his son, Don Carlos, duque de Madrid, “King Charles VII,” who then led the movement until his death in 1909. During the 19th century the Carlists frequently resorted to armed rebellion: a second Carlist War was unsuccessfully waged in the late 1840s, an abortive attempt made at a military coup d’état in 1860, and full-scale war resumed between 1872 and 1876 during the political upheavals following the deposition (1868) of Isabella II. Yet another defeat, and the restoration in 1874 of Isabella’s son Alfonso XII, brought decline to Carlism until Spain’s humiliation in the Spanish-American War stimulated new growth and a brief return to insurgency in 1900–02.
From the 1880s the party’s history was characterized by a series of conflicts between those who argued for understandings with other Catholic parties that accepted the framework of parliamentary liberalism (or with parties that resisted the encroachment of centralized state power) and those for whom the tactical alliance implied a watering down of principle. The latter point of view found expression in the creation (1918) by Juan Vázquez de Mella of the Traditionalist Party, which subsequently became the principal exponent of Carlism. In 1937 General Francisco Franco merged it with the Falange, a party with which it had little in common.
The third Don Carlos, duque de Madrid, was succeeded as pretender in 1909 by his only son, Don Jaime, duque de Madrid, on whose death without issue in 1931 the succession passed to his uncle Don Alfonso Carlos, duque de San Jaime. With Alfonso’s death in Vienna on September 29, 1936, the Carlist line became extinct, although Alfonso had nominated his successor, Francis Xavier of Bourbon-Parma (styled Charles IX by his adherents in Spain). By 1960, however, most Carlists had accepted the recognition given in 1958 by prominent members of their party to the son of King Alfonso XIII, Don Juan, conde de Barcelona, an outspoken critic of Franco, as rightful pretender to the throne. In July 1969 Franco named Juan Carlos, prince of Asturias and son of Don Juan, his legal heir. Upon Franco’s death in 1975 Juan Carlos became king.