Eugenio Montero Ríos (1832–1914)

Spanish politician, born at Santiago de Compostela, Corunna, on the 13th of November 1832. He had a distinguished career at the university of Santiago. He was elected to the chair of ecclesiastical discipline at the university of Oviedo, was transferred to a similar chair at Santiago, and thence passed to the chair of canonical law at the Central University, Madrid. His political career began with the foundation in Santiago of La Opinión Publica, a journal designed to reunite the scattered Progressist party. In 1869 he was elected deputy (Progressist) and showed himself in the Chamber a strong opponent of ultramontanism and a defender of democratic monarchy. He was Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Grace and Justice in Zorrilla’s administration and became the minister under Prim’s, and whilst in office was instrumental in introducing civil marriage. Throughout the revolutionary period Montero was the object of bitter attacks by the clerical parties. He continued to hold office during the short reign of Amadeo I. and drew up that King’s act of abdication, but held aloof from politics for some years after the accession of Alphonso XII., occupying himself in legal studies. In 1872 he had been made a member of a commission for codifying criminal law, and later in life (1898) he was president of a section of the General Codification commission. In 1888 he was for a short time president of the Supreme Tribunal. Having held office in Herrera’s Cabinet (1883) and Sagasta’s (1885 and 1892–93), he became a member of the Senate in 1893 and its president 1894–95. He was chief of the Spanish delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris with the U.S. at the close of the Spanish-American War of 1898, being also in 1899 again president of the Senate. Throughout his political career he was regarded as one of the leading men in the Liberal party; from 1903 to 1906 he was its chief, and for a few months in 1905 he was prime minister. From 1909 until his death in 1914 he was again president of the Senate. He died at Madrid on the 12th of May 1914.