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.
After a falling-out over politics, Mateo Morral's father gave his son a monetary parting gift, which he took to Barcelona in 1905. Morral's father was a textiles industrialist in the town of Sabadell, and Morral had traveled widely for his father's company, in addition to his prior studies abroad. He broke with his father over his support of a radicalized group of freethinkers, republicans, and freemasons—the Librepensadores. In Barcelona, Morral grew close to the anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer, whom he had befriended two years earlier. Morral was captivated with Ferrer's Escuela Moderna, a school for rationalist workers' education, and offered the project 10,000 pesetas. Ferrer, in his telling of the story, declined and instead offered Morral a job in the school's library.
An unrequited love interest and a desire for infamy spurred the attempted regicide. While working at Ferrer's school, Morral became infatuated with the director of elementary studies, Soledad Villafranca, but she did not return his private admission of love. Shortly afterwards, on May 20, 1906, he told Ferrer that he would be traveling to recuperate from illness. He went to Madrid, where he walked the streets, attended tertulia roundtables, and sent postcards to Villafranca professing his undying love and his feelings of alienation. Villafranca resided with Ferrer and they were likely lovers, though it is possible that this uncertainty was just as opaque to Morral.
One week before the regicide attempt, a watchman at Parque del Buen Retiro found threats against the king carved into a tree's trunk, which he later attributed to Morral.
Morral used his real name to check into a pension on Calle Mayor, 88. He paid in advance and requested a room facing the street and a daily bouquet of flowers. On the day of the regicide attempt, he requested sodium bicarbonate from the pension's attendant to treat a stomach problem and requested privacy.
On 31 May 1906, Mateu Morral threw a bomb at King Alfonso XIII's carriage as he returned with Victoria Eugenie from their wedding in Madrid. It was a year to the date following a similar attack on his carriage. The bomb was concealed in a bouquet of flowers. While the King and Queen emerged unscathed, 24 bystanders and soldiers were killed and over 100 more wounded. A British colonel observing the scene compared it to one of war. The bride's wedding gown was splattered with horse blood. The King and Queen were escorted to the Royal Palace.
The fugitive Morral absconded to Malasaña in the ensuing chaos and sought help from the republican journalist José Nakens. Nakens was a vocal opponent of anarchism, but his anticlerical leadership attracted such radicals. Historians have disagreed as to whether Morral's choice of approaching Nakens was premeditated, but Morral was likely introduced to Nakens through Ferrer's school, which purchased the journalist's anticlerical writings. Morral introduced himself as the assassin upon entering Nakens' printing shop and recounted how Nakens had previously helped Michele Angiolillo, the Italian anarchist who had assassinated Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain, in 1897. Nakens was hesitant but agreed to help. He hid Morral at the press while arranging lodging for him and returned 90 minutes later to transport him to a friend's house for the night. However, Morral grew distrustful during the night and was gone by morning.
Morral was discovered at a Madrid railway station two days after the attack, whereupon he shot a police officer and killed himself. He had first arrived in Torrejón de Ardoz for food and shelter. However, with his Catalan accent, handsome face, and dirty clothes, Morral was out of place, and locals quickly noticed him. In lieu of a direct confrontation, they sent someone to notify Madrid of their suspicions. On the second day, village militiamen attempted to detain Morral, who countered by using his revolver to fire two fatal shots: one to a villager in the face and the other to himself in the chest. Morral's body was returned to Madrid, where it was identified.
Álvaro de Figueroa, 1st Count of Romanones, the Minister of the Interior, was responsible for the king's security. Both he and the commissary of Spanish anarchist activity in France had anticipated an attack, given the high profile of the event and symbolism of Madrid as the center of the revolutionists' ire. Romanones prepared for an attack on San Jerónimo el Real, the wedding church, which Morral originally planned to attack, and then reconsidered based on the level of security. Once the royals had safely left the vicinity of the church, Romanones lay down to rest, believing that his job was done. He would later offer a 25,000 peseta bounty for information in the hunt for the attacker, which went to the widow of the villager Morral had shot.
Between his 1901 return from Parisian exile and the 1906 attempted regicide, the outsize influence and rapidity of the rise of anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer worried Spanish authorities, who moved quickly to repress him. Ferrer's school threatened many Spanish social foundations with its antimilitary, antireligious, antigovernmental curriculum and other subversive activities. The conservative government and Catholic church each regarded the school as a hotbed for insurrectionary violence and heretical blasphemy, respectively. Ferrer was subject to police surveillance and harassment at home and denigrated in the press.
Authorities used the 1906 regicide attempt as a pretext to stop Ferrer. He was arrested within a week of the attack and charged with both its organization and recruiting of Morral. Ferrer was imprisoned for a year while prosecutors pursued evidence for his trial. The anarchist and pseudonymous writer Juan Montseny led Ferrer's legal defense. He attempted to recruit the jurist Gumersindo de Azcárate, who declined upon reviewing the preliminary evidence and concluding that Ferrer was guilty.
Prosecutors had no easy case against Ferrer. In casting him as the bombing's mastermind, they relied on his ties to anarchism and revolutionary propaganda and proposed that Ferrer both fostered Morral's insurrectionism and suggested that Morral approach Nakens based on Ferrer's high regard for the journalist's works. However, in correspondence between the educator and the anti-anarchist journalist just days before the bombing, the latter declined an offer from the former to write books for his school—while the two were cordial, Nakens regarded himself as an outspoken enemy of anarchism. In reply, Ferrer insisted that Nakens keep the money, perhaps intended as a bribe. The court was not convinced of conspiracy by this evidence.