 In February 1931, the government summoned municipal elections, preparing for the general parliamentary elections. During the same period, Ortega, together with the physician and writer Gregorio Marañón (1887–1960) and the novelist and poet Perez de Ayala, published the manifesto of the “Agupación al Servicio de la República” (“Group in the Service of the Republic”), appealing for an association of intellectuals and professionals dedicated to the implementation of the goal that would unite all classes and geographical regions under a national banner. The Agrupación proposed to pursue the path between the “dead ends” of Communism and Fascism: a Republic. Ortega’s political vision and intellectual style provided the inspiration and leadership sought by La Agrupación and Lorca’s intellectual cohort after the sudden abdication of Alfonso XIII and the proclamation of the Republic on April 14, 1931. Though limited through legal restrictions, La Agrupación supported the platform of Socialist Republican candidates. Fourteen members of the group, including Ortega, Marañón and Ayala, were elected in the parliamentary elections in June. Ortega was elected to the Constituent Cortes in the provinces of León and Jaén; he demitted the latter seat. The election returns revealed that Republican candidates received three times as many votes as the Monarchists. The Constituent Cortes convened on July 14, a date chosen consciously to symbolize the Second Republic’s identity with the French Revolution of 1789. The Second Republic, when observed in the broader context of European history, was the fifteenth and last of a series of republics which had been installed during the first decades of the twentieth century.