Álvaro de Figueroa y Torres, 1st Count of Romanones (9 August 1863 – 11 October 1950) was a Spanish politician and businessman. He served as Prime Minister three times between 1912 and 1918, president of the Senate, president of the Congress of Deputies, Mayor of Madrid and many times as cabinet minister. He belonged to the Liberal Party. Romanones, who built an extensive political network, exerted a tight control on the political life of the province of Guadalajara during much of the Restoration period. He also was a prolific writer, authoring a number of history essays.
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Biography
Early life
Born on 15 August 1863 in the Casa de Cisneros, at the Madrid's Plaza de la Villa, he was son of Ignacio Figueroa y Mendieta (a millionaire who had inherited a fortune from the mining companies of his father) and Ana de Torres y Romo (an aristocrat, daughter of the Marquis of Villamejor). His siblings were Francisca, José, Gonzalo and Rodrigo.
When he was a child, he suffered a barouche accident that broke his right leg and caused a limp for the rest of his life. His disability would come to be mocked on a regular basis in cuplés, jokes and caricatures.
He earned a licentiate degree in Law from the Central University of Madrid in 1884. He moved in February 1885 to the University of Bologna's Collegio di Spagna, where he remained until December 1885, earning a doctorate in jurisprudence by reading a dissertation titled Introduzione allo studio del diritto costituzionale. Despite this, he never practiced law.
Politics in Restoration Spain
In 1888, he became member of the Congress of Deputies in representation of Guadalajara for the first time, elected in a by-election to fill a vacant seat. Short by a few months of turning the 25 years of age needed to become a legislator, he reportedly hid this circumstance. Shortly after, on 21 September 1888, in San Sebastián, Figueroa married the daughter of the Minister of Grace and Justice Manuel Alonso Martínez: Casilda Alonso Martínez, with whom he had seven children: Casilda, Luis, Álvaro, Carlos, José, Eduardo and Agustín.
He participated in a parliamentary scandal in July 1889, when amid a tense squabble in the legislature, he wielded his walking stick against Felipe Ducazcal, who had reportedly approached the Marquis of Vega de Armijo displaying an aggressive attitude. He was falsely accused by Romero Robledo of "having drawn the rapier he had hidden in his cane".
He was elected Madrid municipal councillor in 1889. After serving as responsible for the districts of Buenavista and Audiencia, as patron of the School of San Ildefonso, and as director of the Services of Abattoirs, Markets and Thoroughfares and Works, Figueroa renounced to the office in 1892.
He delivered an ignominious tirade against the Mayor of Madrid Alberto Bosch y Fustegueras from his parliamentary seat in 1892, so much that the offended called for a duel, which was held on 10 July 1892 in Leganés. The combatants crossed two shots. He also held another duel with the Marquis of Valdeiglesias.
In 1894 he was appointed as Mayor of Madrid. In 1896 he acquired a daily newspaper, El Globo, based in Madrid, appointing Francos Rodríguez as editor and tilting the editorial line from republicanism to liberal monarchism.
He served as Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts (1901–1902) in the government of Sagasta. In 1901, he incorporated primary education teachers' salaries (hitherto dependent on the local administrations) in the State budget, securing the teachers economic autonomy and curbing the influence of caciquismo in education. In 1903 he founded a new political newspaper, Diario Universal, replacing El Globo, which had been sold to Emilio Rius y Periquet.
Monetary reform and the Saneamiento de la moneda speech
In November 1904, Romanones participated prominently in parliamentary debates concerning the saneamiento de la moneda (“stabilization of the currency”), a major Restoration-era effort focused on exchange-rate stabilization, fiscal credibility, and monetary reform in post-1898 Spain. The debates centered on proposals for the regularización y mejora del cambio exterior y saneamiento de la moneda (“regulation and improvement of foreign exchange and stabilization of the currency”), which were discussed before a special parliamentary commission during the parliamentary sessions of November 1904.
Romanones publicly associated himself with the monetary stabilization campaign and criticized delays in implementing the reforms. In a March 1905 open letter addressed to Raimundo Fernández Villaverde and reproduced in El Imparcial, Romanones described the issue as “apremiante, apremiantísimo” (“urgent, exceedingly urgent”) and argued that a national budget could not be considered financially truthful without first restoring the value of the peseta. The letter quoted Villaverde’s earlier parliamentary statements asserting that “no podría hacerse en España un presupuesto… sin haber restablecido previamente el valor de la peseta, porque de otra suerte el presupuesto sería una mentira” (“a budget could not be made in Spain without first restoring the value of the peseta, because otherwise the budget would be a lie”).
The monetary debates of 1901–1904 formed part of broader Restoration-era disputes regarding gold convertibility, exchange instability, public finance, and Spain’s economic modernization after the Spanish–American War. Modern scholarship has interpreted the stabilization debates as politically and socially significant conflicts involving industrial interests, exporters, and competing visions of national economic development.
In 1913, Valencian artist Asensio Gómez Salvador created a monumental illuminated vellum manuscript reproducing Romanones’s parliamentary speech on monetary stabilization. Contemporary press accounts described the work as a large-format documento parlamentario (“parliamentary document”) consisting of approximately 125 vellum folios with illuminated initials, Gothic-inspired calligraphy, and a bronze heraldic escutcheon of the Count of Romanones. The manuscript was reportedly intended for display at a decorative arts exhibition and represented an unusual fusion of parliamentary commemoration, political symbolism, and Gothic Revival decorative art.
Later life
During the Second Republic, he remained deputy representative for Guadalajara.
The outbreak of the Civil War found him in San Sebastián in charge of his own business, and he crossed over to France with the help of the French ambassador. He moved to the Nationalist zone in 1937, and, having become an ardent supporter of Francisco Franco, he was one of the signatories of the Advisory Opinion on the Illegitimacy of the Acting Powers on the 18th of July 1936, an ad-hoc juridical report commissioned by the Francoist Government in Burgos, trying to legitimate the "national uprising"—the 1936 coup d'etat—by means of twisted arguments such as imputing on those assaulted the very crime that the assault entailed, that of "aiding of the rebellion".
After the war he wrote his memoirs and was president of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and member of the academies of History and Jurisprudence.
He died on 11 September 1950 in Madrid.
Works and views
Romanones was a prolific writer and he wrote his memoirs during the Second Republic. He wrote several biographies as well as political works and essays.
Although Catholic, he was against religious intolerance and also against the influence of the clergy for which he often clashed with religious authorities. An example of this happened with the enactment of the Civil Marriage Law of 1905 which stated that those getting married did not have to declare their religion. He reinstated diplomatic relations with the Holy See but he was a fervent supporter of the separation of Church and State.
Honours
He was a Doctor of Law by the University of Bologna, a member of the Royal Academy of History and of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Director of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and a president of the Ateneo Madrileño.
He was made Count of Romanones in 1893 and Grandee of Spain in 1911, as well as 7th Count of Yebes in 1922.