Joaquín Baldomero Fernández Álvarez Espartero, a soldier and politician from the Mancha (1793-1879). Representative of the so-called progressives, his regency, from 1840 to 1843, was sustained by revolutionary assemblies in cities and played a decisive role in the liberal revolution. He removed the last of Spain’s interior economic borders and gave cause for a national, unified market, devoted himself to the abolition of the estates via the deregulation and in the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and advanced individual rights and liberties. The moderate bourgeoisie, frightened by the idea of a drifting parlimentary democracy, drove General Narváez's coup d’état in 1843, giving way to 24 years of modernism that were only interrupted by the Progressive Biennium of 1854-1856.