Centenary paper the first spanish constitution draft: the 'constitutional laws' of Manuel de Aguirre (1786)

Abstract

In 1796, the Basque thinker and military man Manuel de Aguirre entered a competition for ideas on how to improve national legislation in order to achieve public happiness. His proposal consisted of drawing up the first constitutional draft drawn up in Spain. It was still a very basic project, but it reflected how part of the Spanish Enlightenment was interested in reforming the Enlightenment despotism of Charles III and replacing it with a representative government in which the king still had important powers, but was limited by bodies of a representative nature.