Mateu Morral

Life & Legacy

The Morral affair was the attempted regicide of Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his bride, Queen Victoria Eugenie, on their wedding day, 31 May 1906, and its subsequent effects. The attacker, Mateu Morral, acting on a desire to spur revolution, threw a bomb concealed in a floral bouquet from a Madrid hotel window as the King's procession passed, killing 24 bystanders and soldiers and wounding over 100 others, while leaving the royals unscathed. Morral sought refuge from republican journalist José Nakens but fled in the night to Torrejón de Ardoz, whose villagers reported the interloper. Two days after the attack, militiamen accosted Morral, who killed one before killing himself. Morral was likely involved in a similar attack on the king a year earlier.
The affair became a pretext to suppress Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist educator who ran Escuela Moderna, the influential, rationalist, antigovernment, anticlerical, antimilitary, Barcelonean school in whose library Morral worked. An unrequited love interest from the school might also have influenced Morral. Ferrer was charged with masterminding the attack, and though he was acquitted for lack of evidence, he remained a target of the government and church. The journalist Nakens and two friends, however, received prison sentences, held partially responsible for the murder Morral committed after fleeing the city. Following a prominent campaign for royal pardon, the three were released within a year of sentencing. Nakens' role in the affair spotlighted fissures in the Spanish republican movement between gradualism and near-term revolution that would later become an identity crisis.