Background
At the time the Cortes drafted and adopted the Constitution, it was taking refuge from the French on Spain's Atlantic coast, first in Isla de León (now San Fernando) and then in Cádiz. From a Spanish point of view, the Peninsular War was a war of independence against the French Empire and the king installed by the French, Joseph Bonaparte. In 1808, both King Ferdinand VII and his predecessor and father, Charles IV, had resigned their claims to the throne in favor of Napoleon Bonaparte, who in turn passed the crown to his brother Joseph. While many in elite circles in Madrid were willing to accept Joseph's rule, the Spanish people were not. That war began on the night of 2 May, immortalized by Francisco Goya's painting The Charge of the Mamelukes.
Napoleon's forces faced both Spanish partisans and the British under the Arthur Wellesley. The Spanish partisans organized an interim Spanish government, the Supreme Central Junta and called for a Cortes to convene with representatives from all the Spanish provinces throughout the worldwide empire, in order to establish a government with a firm claim to legitimacy. The Junta first met on 25 September 1808 in Aranjuez and later in Seville, before being cornered in Cádiz.
The Supreme Central Junta, originally under the leadership of the elderly Count of Floridablanca, initially tried to consolidate southern and eastern Spain to maintain continuity for a restoration of the Bourbons. However, almost from the outset they were in physical retreat from Napoleon's forces, and the comparative liberalism offered by the Napoleonic regime made Floridablanca's enlightened absolutism a likely basis to rally the country. In any event, Floridablanca's strength failed him and he died on 30 December 1808.
When the Cortes convened in Cádiz in 1810, there appeared to be two possibilities for Spain's political future if the French could be driven out. The first, represented especially by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, was the restoration of the absolutist Antiguo Régimen ("Old Regime"); the second was to adopt some sort of written constitution.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Constitution Of 1812
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