Zawarcie małżeństwa kanonicznego i cywilnego w prawie hiszpańskim – zarys perspektywy historycznej
Contracting a canonical and civil marriage in Spanish law: A historical perspective

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on the possibilities of contracting a canonical and civil marriage in Spain in the period from the rule of the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, to the present-day constitutional monarchy. The analysis begins with a discussion of the possibilities of contracting a canonical marriage in the Catholic Habsburg Monarchy. The second historical period examined in the paper is the First Spanish Republic, when the legislator, laying foundations of a civil state, attempted to introduce the institution of civil marriage to Spanish law for the first time. When it comes to the subsequent three historical periods, the Bourbon Restoration, the Second Spanish Republic, and General Franco’s Spain, the paper analyses the regulations that either enabled or limited the possibility to contract a canonical and civil marriage. A careful reader will notice that those regulations were not created from the perspective of the right to contract a marriage, which corresponds to a specific person’s convictions (the perspective of private law), but from the dynamically changing perspective of state-church relations in the political system (the perspective of public law). That approach was abandoned by the Spanish legislator only in the times of the present-day constitutional monarchy.

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