The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge
Paul Preston
No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did.The Spanish Civil War is burned into European consciousness, not simply because it prefigured the much larger world war that followed it, but because the intense manner of its prosecution was a harbinger of a new and horrific form of warfare that was universally dreaded. At the same time, the hopes awakened by the attempted social revolution in republican Spain chimed with the aspirations of many in Europe and the United States during the grim years of the great Depression.On the 80th Anniversary of the conflict, this is a full-blooded account of this pivotal period in twentieth-century European history. Paul Preston vividly recounts the struggles of the war, analyzes the wider implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, tracks the emergence of Francisco Franco’s brutal (and, ultimately, extraordinarily durable) fascist dictatorship and assesses the ways in which the Spanish Civil War was a portent of the Second World War that ensued so rapidly after it.
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Copyright (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Harper Perennial in 2006
This book is a revised and updated version of A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, first published by Fontana Press in 1996, revised and updated from The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1986
First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2016
Copyright © Paul Preston 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016
Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007232079
Ebook Edition © July 2012 ISBN: 9780007370061
Version: 2017-05-04
Dedication (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Marshall and to the other men and women of the International Brigades who fought and died fighting fascism in Spain.
Contents
Cover (#u9fff73a7-e62c-5303-8acd-57d16ee0c0e5)
Title Page (#u1a3ba310-0525-5ac1-af51-a3bbb700a22d)
Copyright (#ulink_d9e35651-75ef-538a-a867-1ee3cb95d9c8)
Dedication (#ulink_517fcef0-5f65-527b-8c0b-61dc8c71a47d)
Map of Spain (#ulink_08141ec9-dd82-58cb-b4d6-e7d84a5ceef7)
Preface (#ulink_51133890-401a-5815-97e5-936d2387fd8a)
Introduction: The Civil War Eighty Years On (#ulink_e78eef2f-7174-5e2b-bf98-4376ca1c86cb)
1 A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931 (#ulink_cb17025a-d6ee-5c8e-9b76-d29497ead532)
2 The Leftist Challenge, 1931–1933 (#ulink_77e43bb3-1d55-5b37-a2e7-feabdf8b3d77)
3 Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934–1936 (#ulink_e94c34a5-6169-5f0b-8916-8fb16c154366)
4 ‘The Map of Spain Bleeds’: From Coup d’État to Civil War (#litres_trial_promo)
5 ‘Behind the Gentleman’s Agreement’: The Great Powers Betray Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
6 ‘Madrid is the Heart’: The Central Epic (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Politics behind the Lines: Reaction and Terror in the City of God (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Politics behind the Lines: Revolution and Terror in the City of the Devil (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Defeat by Instalments (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Franco’s Peace (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Principal Characters (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Abbreviations (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Essay (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Paul Preston (#litres_trial_promo)
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Preface (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
I wrote the first version of this book thirty years ago. My intention then was to provide the new reader with a manageable guide to the bibliographical labyrinth constituted by the fact that the Spanish Civil War has continued to be fought on paper. Even then there had been several thousand books on the Spanish Civil War and many of them were extremely long. Because the flow did not stop, I rewrote the book in 1996 in order to take account of what had been published in the ten years following its first appearance. At that point, I could not have imagined how much more was still to come. Accordingly, in 2006 I wrote a much expanded version in an attempt to come to terms with the very considerable body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, English and other European languages since 1996. It also drew on my own ongoing research on Franco, the Francoist repression and Mussolini’s role in the Spanish Civil War. Over the following years, the flood has not abated, and in this new edition I take account of the most important advances in knowledge about the war as well as drawing on my recent research on the role of Franco, on the murders of civilians behind the lines on both sides, on anti-clerical persecution, on the bombing of Guernica, and on way in which the war ended.
Inevitably, the 2006 edition of the book was much longer – the text 50 per cent longer – than in 1996, and this one adds further material in the light of recent research. Like the three earlier versions, it is interpretative rather than descriptive although even more ample use has been made of contemporary quotation to give a flavour of the period. It remains a book that does not set out to find a perfect balance between both sides. I lived for several years under Franco’s dictatorship. It was impossible not to be aware of the repression of workers and students, the censorship and the prisons. As late as 1975 political prisoners were still being executed. Despite what Franco supporters claim, I do not believe that Spain derived any benefit from the military rising of 1936 and the Nationalist victory of 1939. Many years devoted to the study of Spain of before, during and after the 1930s have convinced me that, while many mistakes were made, the Spanish Republic was an attempt to provide a better way of life for the humbler members of a repressive society. Against such temerity, the revenge taken by Franco and his followers was brutal and pitiless. Accordingly, there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding.
My early interest in Spain was stimulated by the postgraduate seminar run at the University of Reading by Hugh Thomas and by Joaquín Romero Maura in Oxford. Over many years, I learned an enormous amount during my friendship with Herbert Southworth who was always prodigal with his hospitality and his knowledge. When I wrote the 1996 version, I was aware of how much I had derived from conversations over many years with Raymond Carr, Norman Cooper, Denis Smyth, Angel Viñas, Julián Casanova, Jerónimo Gonzalo and Martin Blinkhorn. Throughout the 1990s, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War was profoundly changed by the research of Ángela Cenarro, Helen Graham, Gerald Howson, Enrique Moradiellos, Alberto Reig Tapia, Francisco Espinosa Maestre and Ismael Saz. I continue to gain greatly from reading their work and many hours of conversation with them.
My friends Paul Heywood and Sheelagh Ellwood gave me marvellous support during the writing of the first edition. Their role in the second version was assumed by Helen Graham, supplemented by constant interchanges of ideas and information with Hilari Raguer and Francisco Espinosa Maestre. I was also grateful to Francisco Moreno Gómez, Isabelo Herreros and Luis Miguel Sánchez Tostado for help with particular issues. Over subsequent years, I have benefited further from my ongoing interchanges with Linda Palfreeman, Boris Volodarsky, Carmen Negrín, Ángel Viñas, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Javier Cervera Gil, Enrique Líster López, Aurelio Martín Nájera of the Fundación Pablo Iglesias and Sergio Millares of the Fundación Juan Negrín.
My wife Gabrielle is, as ever, my shrewdest critic. With such a team of friends to help, it seems astonishing that any book could still have shortcomings. Unfortunately it does and they are mine.
INTRODUCTION
The Civil War Eighty Years On (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
On 19 October 2005 the ninety-year-old Santiago Carrillo was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Carrillo was Secretary General of the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) for three decades from 1956 to 1985. He was a crucial, if not uncontroversial, figure in the resistance against Franco’s dictatorship. The granting of the degree (título de doctor) was largely in recognition of his role in the struggle for democracy and his ‘extraordinary merits, and particularly his contribution to the policy of national reconciliation, and his decisive contribution the process of democratic transition in Spain’. Carrillo had come to be widely revered for his moderate and moderating role at a crucial stage in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. However, during the Civil War, at the age of twenty-one, he had been security chief in the Madrid defence junta when large numbers of rightist prisoners were murdered at Paracuellos. Accordingly, the degree ceremony was disrupted by militants chanting ‘¡Paracuellos Carrillo asesino!’ (‘Paracuellos – Carrillo murderer’). It was not the first time that Carrillo had been the target of violent ultra right-wing attacks. Ever since his return to Spain in 1976, he had been the object of abuse for his alleged role in the killings at Paracuellos. On 16 April 2005, at the launch of a book called The Two Spains, by the historian Santos Juliá, where Carrillo was scheduled to speak, the event was interrupted when the bookshop was ransacked by extreme rightists. Barely a week later, a wall adjacent to his apartment block was scrawled with the words ‘this is how the war began and we won’, ‘Carrillo, murderer, we know where you live’ and ‘where is the Spanish gold?’.
These incidents were symptomatic of the way in which the Spanish Civil War retains a burning relevance in contemporary Spain. In geographical and human scale, never mind technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts. Nonetheless, it has generated around thirty thousand books, a literary epitaph which puts it on a par with the Second World War. In part, that reflects the extent to which, even after 1939, the war continued to be fought between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and the defeated and exiled Republicans. Even more, certainly as far as foreigners were concerned, the survival of interest in the Spanish tragedy was closely connected with the sheer longevity of its victor. General Franco’s uninterrupted enjoyment of a dictatorial power seized with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini was an infuriating affront to opponents of fascism the world over. Moreover, the destruction of democracy in Spain was not allowed to become just another fading remnant of the humiliations of the period of appeasement. Far from trying to heal the wounds of civil strife, Franco worked harder than anyone to keep the war a live and burning issue both inside and outside Spain.
Reminders of Francoism’s victory over international communism were frequently used to curry favour with the outside world. This was most dramatically the case immediately after the Second World War when frantic efforts were made to dissociate Franco from his erstwhile Axis allies. This was done by stressing his enmity to communism and playing down his equally vehement opposition to liberal democracy and socialism. Throughout the Cold War, the irrefutable anti-communism of the Nationalist side in the Civil War was used to build a picture of Franco as the bulwark of the Western system, the ‘Sentinel of the West’ in the phrase coined by his propagandists. Within Spain itself, memories of the war and of the bloody repression which followed it were carefully nurtured in order to maintain what has been called ‘the pact of blood’. The dictator was supported by an uneasy coalition of the highly privileged, landowners, industrialists and bankers; of what might be called the ‘service classes’ of Francoism, those members of the middle and working classes who, for whatever reasons – opportunism, conviction or wartime geographical loyalty – threw in their lot with the regime; and finally of those ordinary Spanish Catholics who supported the Nationalists as the defenders of religion and law and order. Reminders of the war were useful to rally the wavering loyalty of any or all of these groups.
The privileged usually remained aloof from the dictatorship and disdainful of its propaganda. However, those who were implicated in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, the beneficiaries of the killings and the pillage, were especially susceptible to hints that only Franco stood between them and the revenge of their victims. In any case, for many who worked for the dictator, as policemen, Civil Guards, as humble serenos (night-watchmen) or porteros (doormen), in the giant bureaucracy of Franco’s single party, the Movimiento, in its trade union organization, or in its huge press network, the Civil War was a crucial part of their curriculum vitae and of their value system. They were to make up what in the 1970s came to be known as the bunker, the die-hard Francoists who were prepared to fight for the values of the Civil War from the rubble of the Chancellery. A similar, and more dangerous, commitment came from the praetorian defenders of the legacy of what Spanish rightists refer to broadly as el 18 de julio (from the date of the military rising of 1936). Army officers had been educated since 1939 in academies where they were taught that the military existed to defend Spain from communism, anarchism, socialism, parliamentary democracy and regionalists who wanted to destroy Spain’s unity. Accordingly, after Franco’s death, the bunker and its military supporters were to attempt once more to destroy democracy in Spain in the name of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War.
For these ultra-rightists, Nationalist propaganda efforts to maintain the hatreds of the Civil War were perhaps gratuitous. However, the regime clearly thought it essential for the less partisan Spaniards who rendered Franco a passive support ranging from the grudging to the enthusiastic. Catholics and members of the middle classes who had been appalled by the view of Republican disorder and anti-clericalism generated by the rightist press were induced to turn a blind eye to the more distasteful aspects of a bloody dictatorship by constant and exaggerated reminders of the war. Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow, as either squalidly self-interested or the blood-crazed perpetrators of sadistic atrocities. Until well into the 1960s, a stream of publications, many aimed at children, presented the war as a religious crusade against Communist barbarism.
Beyond the hermetically sealed frontiers of Franco’s Spain, the defeated Republicans and their foreign sympathizers rejected the Francoist interpretation that the Civil War had been a battle of the forces of order and true religion against a Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy. Instead, they maintained consistently that the war was the struggle of an oppressed people seeking a decent way of life against the opposition of Spain’s backward landed and industrial oligarchies and their Nazi and Fascist allies. Unfortunately, bitterly divided over the reasons for their defeat, they could not present as monolithically coherent a view of the war as did their Francoist opponents. In a way which weakened their collective voice, but immeasurably enriched the literature of the Spanish Civil War, they were sidetracked into vociferous debate about whether they might have beaten the Nationalists if only they had unleashed the popular revolutionary war advocated by anarchists and Trotskyists as opposed to mounting the conventional war effort favoured by the Republicans, the Socialists and the increasingly powerful Communists.
Thereafter, the debate over ‘war or revolution’ engaged Republican sympathizers unable to come to terms with the leftist defeat. During the Cold War, it was used successfully to disseminate the idea that it was the Stalinist suffocation of the revolution in Spain which led to Franco’s victory. Several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to propagate this idea. The success of an unholy alliance of anarchists, Trotskyists and Cold Warriors has obscured the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory, not Stalin. Nevertheless, new generations have continued to discover the Spanish Civil War, sometimes scouring for parallels, in the light of national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua, sometimes just seeking in the Spanish experience the idealism and sacrifice so singularly absent from modern politics.
The relevance of the Civil War to Franco’s supporters and to left-wingers throughout the world does not fully explain the much wider fascination which the Spanish conflict still exercises today. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, it can only seem like small beer. As Raymond Carr has pointed out, compared to Hiroshima or Dresden the bombing of Guernica seems ‘a minor act of vandalism’. Yet it has provoked more savage polemic than virtually any incident in the Second World War. That is not, as some would have it, because of the power of Picasso’s painting but because Guernica was the first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is burned into the European consciousness not simply as a rehearsal for the bigger world war to come, but because it presaged the opening of the floodgates to a new and horrific form of modern warfare that was universally dreaded.
It was because they shared the collective fear of what defeat for the Spanish Republic might mean that men and women, workers and intellectuals, went to join the International Brigades. The left saw clearly in 1936 what for another three years even the democratic right chose to ignore – that Spain was the last bulwark against the horrors of Hitlerism. In a Europe still unaware of the crimes of Stalin, the Communist-organized brigades seemed to be fighting for much that was worth saving in terms of democratic rights and trade union freedoms. The volunteers believed that by fighting fascism in Spain they were also fighting it in their own countries. Hindsight about the sordid power struggles inside the Republican zone between the Communists on the one hand and the Socialists, the anarchists and the quasi-Trotskyist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) on the other cannot diminish the idealism of the individuals concerned. There remains something intensely tragic about Italian and German refugees from Mussolini and Hitler finally being able to take up arms against their persecutors only to be defeated again.
To dwell on the impact of the horrors of the Spanish war and on the importance of the defence against fascism is to miss one of the most positive factors of the Republican experience – the attempt to drag Spain into the twentieth century. In the drab Europe of the Depression years, what was happening in Republican Spain seemed to be an exciting experiment. Orwell’s celebrated comment acknowledged this: ‘I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ The cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic were only the best-known aspects of a social revolution that had an impact on the contemporary world which Cuba in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s never quite attained. Spain was not only nearby, but its social experiments were taking place in a context of widespread disillusion with the failures of capitalism. By 1945, the fight against the Axis had become linked with the preservation of the old world. During the Spanish Civil War, however, the struggle against fascism was still seen as merely the first step to building a new egalitarian world out of the Depression. In the event, the exigencies of the war effort and internecine conflict stood in the way of the full flowering of the industrial and agrarian collectives of the Republican zone. Nevertheless, there was, and is, something inspiring about the way in which the Spanish working class faced the dual tasks of war against the old order and of construction of the new. The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti best expressed this spirit when he told the Canadian reporter Pierre Van Paassen, ‘We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’
All of this is perhaps to suggest that interest in the Spanish Civil War is made up of nostalgia on the part of contemporaries of right and left and political romanticism on the part of the young. After all, there is a strong case to be made for presenting the Spanish Civil War as ‘the last great cause’. It was not for nothing that the Civil War inspired the greatest writers of its day in a manner not repeated in any subsequent war. However, nostalgia and romanticism aside, it is impossible to exaggerate the sheer historical importance of the Spanish war. Beyond its climactic impact on Spain itself, the war was very much the nodal point of the 1930s. Baldwin and Blum, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Trotsky all had substantial parts in the Spanish drama. The Rome–Berlin Axis was clinched in Spain at the same time as the inadequacies of appeasement were ruthlessly exposed. It was above all a Spanish war – or rather a series of Spanish wars – yet it was also the great international battleground of fascism and communism. And while Colonel von Richthofen practised in the Basque Country the Blitzkrieg techniques he was later to perfect in Poland, agents of the NKVD endeavoured to re-enact the Moscow trials on the leaders of the POUM because it was made up of dissident anti-Stalinist Marxists and one of its founders, along with Joaquín Maurín, was Andreu Nin, who had once been Trotsky’s secretary in Moscow. The Russians were thwarted by the Spanish Republicans’ insistence on proper judicial procedure.
Nor is the Spanish conflict without its contemporary relevance. The war arose in part out of the violent opposition of the privileged and their foreign allies to the reformist attempts of liberal Republican–Socialist governments to ameliorate the daily living conditions of the most wretched members of society. The parallels with Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s hardly need emphasizing. Equally, the ease with which the Spanish Republic was destabilized by skilfully provoked disorder had sombre echoes in Italy, and even Spain, in the 1980s. Fortunately, Spanish democracy survived in 1981 the attempts to overthrow it by military men nostalgic for a Francoist Spain of victors and vanquished. The Spanish Civil War was also fought because of the determination of the extreme right in general and the army in particular to crush Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalisms. Spain did not witness ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the kind seen in the civil war in the former Yugoslovia. Nevertheless, Franco made a systematic attempt during and after the war to eradicate all vestiges of local nationalisms, political and linguistic. Although ultimately in vain, the cultural genocide thus pursued by Castilian centralist nationalism has provoked comparisons between the Spanish and Bosnian crises.
In Spain itself, the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1986 was marked by a silence that was almost deafening. There was a television series and some discreet academic conferences, one of which, held under the title ‘Valencia: Capital of the Republic’, had its publicity poster, designed by the poet and artist Rafael Alberti on the basis of the Republican flag, unofficially, but effectively, banned. There was no official commemoration of the war. That was an act of political prudence on the part of a Socialist government fully aware of the sensibilities of a military caste brought up in the anti-democratic hatreds of Francoism. More positively it was a contribution to what has been called the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido), the tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts after the death of Franco. A rejection of the violence of the Civil War and the regime which came out of it overcame any thoughts of revenge.
In fact, in 1986, the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of a war which would see Spain suffer nearly forty years of international ostracism, the country was formally admitted into the European Community. Ten years later, the withering away of Francoism and continued consolidation of democracy were demonstrated when the Spanish government, with all-party support, granted citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought against fascism during the Civil War. It was a welcome but belated gesture of gratitude and reconciliation which serves as a reminder of a violent and bloody Spain which has perhaps gone for ever.
It might therefore be expected that, by 2006, passionate interest in the Spanish Civil War would at last be fading. Indeed, the very opposite was the case. It was only in the early years of the twenty-first century that for many families a major area of unfinished business, the location, proper burial and mourning of their dead, has begun in earnest. It is a process that, for half of Spain, was completed more than sixty years ago. That it has been denied the other half of the country until so recently is one of the main reasons for the continuing ability of the Spanish Civil War to provoke passion.
On 26 April 1942 Franco’s government set in train a massive investigation called the ‘Causa General’. Its immediate objective was to gather evidence of Republican wrongdoing. The ‘material’ gathered ranged from documents to unsubstantiated hearsay. It was an invitation to all those with genuine grievances – the relatives of those murdered or those who had been imprisoned or had had property confiscated or stolen in the Republican zone – to vent their desire for revenge. It also permitted anyone with a personal score to settle or who coveted someone’s property or wife to smear their enemies. Although the procedures were lax in the extreme, the declarations made, substantiated or otherwise, were used to intensify the generalized image of Republican depravity. It was a part of a general pattern that had been seen since July 1936 in every part of the Nationalist zone as it fell to rebel forces. Once the Nationalists were in control, those rightists killed by the left were identified and buried with honour and dignity in ceremonies that were often followed by acts of extreme violence against the local left. In the case of extremely famous victims of the war, such as the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera or the original leader of the military coup, General José Sanjurjo, their bodies were exhumed and then reinterred in elaborate ceremonies.
The consequence of these various procedures was that the large majority of the victims of crimes in the Republican zone were identified and counted. Their families could mourn them and very often their names were engraved in places of posthumous honour, inscribed in the crypts of cathedrals or on the external walls of churches, with crosses or plaques placed where they died or even, in some cases, with streets named after them. The structures of law and order disappeared in Republican Spain as a result of the military coup and it took several months for them to be re-established. Accordingly, the atrocities in the Republican zone were often the work of criminal elements or out-of-control extremists, although also, less frequently, of deliberate policy by leftist groups determined to eliminate their political enemies. This great variety of crimes was portrayed for nearly forty years by the propaganda machine of the victorious regime, written largely by policemen, priests and soldiers, as if it were the official policy of the Republic. The purpose of such writing was to justify the military coup of 1936, the slaughter it provoked and the subsequent dictatorship. Through the press and radio of the Movimiento, the education system and the pulpits of Spain’s churches, a single, monolithic interpretation of the Spanish Civil War was propagated. Until 1975, official propaganda carefully nurtured memories of the war and the bloody repression not only to humiliate the defeated, but also to help the victors recall what they owed Franco. For those who were complicit in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, it served to remind them that they needed Franco and the regime as a bulwark against the return of their victims who, they imagined, would want to wreak bloody revenge.
For those on the left there had been no equivalent process of closure. There were thousands of the ‘disappeared’ (desaparecidos), their bodies not located, their manner of death not confirmed. Unlike the families of the Nationalist victims of Republican violence, the relatives of the Republican victims of the Nationalist repression could not mourn openly, let alone bury their dead. Even after the death of Franco, the problem of confronting the memory of the Civil War remained immensely difficult because the hatreds of the war had continued to fester for thirty-seven years after its formal conclusion. The dictatorship had imposed a single vision of the past but there were many other memories, hidden and repressed. Many thousands of families wanted to know what had happened to their loved ones and if, as they feared, they had been murdered, where their bodies lay. In the first months of the transition to democracy, fear of a new civil war wrestled with the desire to know about the Republican past. In the event, the drive to guarantee the re-establishment and, later, the consolidation of democracy weighed more both with politicians and with the bulk of ordinary people. The formal renunciation of revenge which was an essential precondition for change was enshrined in a political amnesty not just for those who had opposed the dictatorship but also for those guilty of crimes against humanity committed in the service of the dictatorship. The amnesty text of 14 October 1977 was supported by the majority within the political spectrum. The ghosts of the Civil War and of Francoist repression weighed on Spain, but to prevent the reopening of old wounds successive governments, both conservative and Socialist, were extremely cautious when it came to funding commemorations, excavations and research connected to the war.
The determination of the great majority of the Spanish people to secure a bloodless transition to democracy and to avoid a repetition of the violence of another civil war not only overcame any desire for revenge but also saw the sacrifice of the desire for knowledge. Thus, the ‘pact of oblivion’ saw a curtain of silence drawn over the past in the interests of a still-fragile democracy. Accordingly, there were not only very few official initiatives aimed at commemorating the past but also a certain reticence within the education system about teaching the history of the Civil War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, at a local level many historians continued to pursue research into the Francoist repression, and, for many victims, appearance in the lists compiled in their books was their only gravestone or memorial. Despite its crucial value in political terms and its importance as a measure of the great political maturity of the Spanish people, the pacto del olvido did not apply to historians. In fact, from the first, in La Rioja, in Catalonia and in Aragón, there had been considerable research into the most disagreeable aspects of the Civil War, despite the pacto. Elsewhere, the uneasy truce with the past was soon broken, with the appearance of several important works on the repression in Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia and other regions that had found themselves within the Nationalist zone during all or part of the war. Over the last twenty years, what began as a trickle has become a torrent of books which, although written from many widely differing perspectives, has produced a generally critical vision of the insurrectionary officers of 1936.
In addition to the flood of historical works, in the same period, there has emerged a popular movement in favour of the detailed reconstruction of the war and Franco’s dictatorship at a local level. The creation of a series of organizations and associations dedicated to what has come to be called ‘the recovery of historical memory’. Several factors lay behind this development. On the one hand, there was a sense that democracy was now sufficiently consolidated to be able to withstand a serious debate about the Civil War and its consequences. Underlying this was also a terrible urgency driven by an awareness of the dwindling numbers of surviving witnesses. Without engaging in the thorny issue surrounding the fact that there are many different historical memories of the same events, it remains true that the concept of recovering memory has had a profound impact on a people whose collective memory was kept behind bars for so many decades. A process began involving the excavation of common graves (fosas), the recording of the testimonies of survivors and the proliferation of innumerable television documentaries about what happened. In consequence, today, eighty years after its outbreak, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath are again generating passionate and, at times, bitter argument.
The breaking of the taboo associated with the pacto del olvido has had a dramatic and unexpected impact. The creation of associations dedicated to the recovery of historical memory and the efforts to locate the mortal remains of the disappeared have helped close the emotional wounds of many families. Newspapers regularly print accounts of exhumations. Barely a week passes without the publication of a detailed account of the repression in some town or province and the number of known victims is rising. Indeed, after years of such figures being reduced, they are now rising towards the levels once suggested by horrified eyewitnesses during and immediately after the war itself. In some places, ‘memory routes’ have been created along which it is possible to see places where atrocities or acts of resistance took place, all of which has created enormous discomfort, not just among the perpetrators or their relatives. The outrage provoked has extended even beyond those nostalgic for the dictatorship. It has also caused distress to extended sections of society which, over time, derived benefit from the regime. It is to this audience that a series of immensely successful historical polemics have been directed.
While there is at work a veritable army of serious researchers, there has emerged a small group of authors and broadcasters who barrack from the sidelines. Their cry is that the sufferings of Republican victims were notably less than has been claimed and that any such sufferings were, in any case, their own fault. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is being fought all over again on paper. These self-styled ‘revisionists’ allege that the historiographical advances of the last forty years, in all their infinite variety, are the result of a sinister conspiracy in which almost the entire historical profession and many amateur historians are involved. A wide range of historians from conservatives and clerics to liberals and leftists, as well as regional nationalists, are accused of linking arms to impose a monolithic and politically motivated interpretation of the history of the Spanish Civil War and the regime that followed it. There is little in terms of research that is new about the revisionist works. They resuscitate the basic theses of Francoist propaganda, of writers like Tomás Borrás, or the secret policemen Eduardo Comín Colomer and Mauricio Karl. In some cases, they have even recycled the titles of famous Francoist texts. The only thing that is new is the addition, in both books and inflammatory tertulias, or radio debates, of the techniques of reality television in insulting the authors of the new historiography rather than debating with them.
The consequence has been to introduce a level of abrasive tension to daily political discourse in Spain. The bulk of the historiography of the Civil War is comprised of more or less seriously researched history, which, unusually for such research, is feeding a popular demand. In contrast, the works of the revisionists have exactly the contemporary political purpose which they denounce in others. Their criticism of the Republic is implicitly a criticism of those of its values which have survived the dictatorship or been reborn in contemporary Spanish democracy. This is particularly the case with regard to the federal elements of Spain’s current structure, revisionist ire having been provoked by the fact that the present left-wing coalition government in Catalonia is actively sponsoring research into the repression. Even before this, the right had been outraged by the successful Catalan campaign for the return of tonnes of documents plundered by the Francoists in 1939. This documentation, housed in Salamanca, was originally seized to be scoured for names of leftists and liberals. Organized by archivists provided by the Gestapo, it was used, with similarly sequestered documentation from other conquered areas, to build up a file card index which became the infrastructural tool of the repression. In the view of the fiercely anti-Catalanist revisionists both the Republic and by extension the Socialist government of 2004–11 were ‘Balkanizing’ Spain. The revisionists have also derived some succour from the re-emergence in the United States of a fiercely Cold War vision of the Spanish Civil War which portrays the vanquished as the puppets of Moscow. This view, and the response it has provoked from historians within Spain and Great Britain, has also contributed to the ongoing renovation of the historiography of the Civil War.
It is possible that the revisionists are inadvertently helping to consolidate democracy in that the Civil War will not cease to be a ghost at the feast of democracy until the resentments and hatreds associated with it are vented. They have underlined the urgency of the task at hand: not to stir up the ashes, which is what they accuse historians of the repression of doing, but to investigate, demonstrate and remember what the Civil War really was – not a war of good and evil according to the prejudices of whoever happens to be writing, but a traumatic experience of mass suffering, in which there were few winners and many losers. As one of the most dedicated and thoughtful historians of the repression, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, put it recently, ‘oblivion is not the same as reconciliation and memory is not the same as revenge’.
ONE
A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931 (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
The origins of the Spanish Civil War lie far back in the country’s history. The notion that political problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for a thousand years civil war has been if not exactly the norm then certainly no rarity. The war of 1936–9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s. The religious ‘crusade’ propaganda of the Nationalists joyfully linked it with the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. On both sides, heroism and nobility vied with primitive cruelty and brutality in a way that would not have been out of place in a medieval epic. Yet, in the last resort, the Spanish Civil War is a war firmly rooted in the modern period. The interference of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin ensured that the Spanish Civil War would be a defining moment in twentieth-century history. Yet, leaving that international dimension aside, the myriad Spanish conflicts which erupted in 1936, regionalists against centralists, anti-clericals against Catholics, landless labourers against latifundistas, workers against industrialists, have in common the struggles of a society in the throes of modernization.
To understand Spain’s progress to the bloodshed of 1936 it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction between the war’s long-term structural origins and its immediate political causes. In the hundred years before 1931, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocks. However, when the Second Republic was established on 14 April 1931 amidst scenes of popular rejoicing, few Spaniards outside the lunatic fringes of the extreme left and right, the conspiratorial monarchists and the anarchists, believed that the country’s problems could be solved only by resorting to violence. Five years and three months later, large sections of the population believed that war was inevitable. Moreover, a substantial proportion of them felt that war would be a good thing. Accordingly, it is necessary to establish exactly what happened between 14 April 1931 and 18 July 1936 to bring about that change. Nevertheless, the political hatreds which polarized the Second Republic in those five and a quarter years were a reflection of the deep-rooted conflicts within Spanish society.
The Civil War was the culmination of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had dominated Spanish history since 1808. There is a curious pattern in Spain’s modern history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have attempted to use political and military power to hold back social progress have inevitably been followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, the 1870s, between 1917 and 1923, and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the country’s social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to introduce fundamental reform, especially on the land, and to carry out redistributions of wealth. Such efforts in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional balance of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General O’Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874 and by General Primo de Rivera in 1923.
Accordingly, the Civil War of 1936–9 represented the ultimate expression of the attempts by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reform which might threaten their privileged position. The recurring dominance of reactionary elements was a consequence of the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. A concomitant of the tortuously slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain was the existence of a numerically small and politically insignificant commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were broken. The power of the monarchy, the landed nobility and the Church remained more or less intact well into the twentieth century. Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth-century Spain did not see the establishment of a democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. That is not to say that Spain remained a feudal society but rather that the legal basis for capitalism was established without there being a political revolution. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that her industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the pattern established by Prussia.
Indeed, even until the 1950s, capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian. Spanish agriculture is immensely variegated in terms of climate, crops and land-holding systems. There have long existed areas of commercially successful small and medium farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization, Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the dominant sectors in terms of political influence were, broadly speaking, the large landowners. In the main, the latifundios, the great estates, are concentrated in the arid central and southern regions of New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, although there are also substantial latifundios to be found scattered in Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy was periodically challenged by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes with virtually no success. Until well after the civil war, the urban haute bourgeoisie was obliged to play the role of junior partner in a working coalition with the great latifundistas. Despite sporadic industrialization and a steady growth in the national importance of the political representatives of the northern industrialists, power remained squarely in the hands of the landowners.
There was never any strong possibility in Spain that industrialization and political modernization would coincide. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were irrevocably diverted. The removal of feudal restrictions on land transactions combined with royal financial problems in the 1830s and the 1850s to liberate huge tracts of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and common lands. This not only diminished any impetus towards industrialization but, by helping to expand the great estates, also created intense social hatreds in the south. The newly released land was bought up by the more efficient among existing landlords and by members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment. Unwilling to engage in expensive projects of irrigation, they preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros. The departure of the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age together with the enclosing of common lands removed most of the social palliatives which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval. Paternalism was replaced by repression as the Civil Guard was created to form a rural armed police with the principal function of guarding the big estates from the labourers who worked on them. Thus, the strengthening of the landed oligarchy exacerbated an explosive social situation which could only foster the reactionary tendencies of the owners. At the same time, the syphoning into the land of the capital owned by the merchants of the great sea ports and Madrid bankers correspondingly weakened their interest in modernization.
Continued investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy debilitated those forces committed to reform. The feebleness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was underlined in the period from 1868 to 1874, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. With population growth in the middle of the century increasing pressure on the land, unskilled labourers had flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who were highly sensitive to increases in bread prices. Hardly less wretched was the position of the urban lower middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers. Conditions were perhaps worst in the Catalan textile industry which produced all the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding and low wages. When the American Civil War cut off supplies of cotton in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment combined with a depression in railway construction to drive the urban working class to desperation. In 1868, this popular discontent combined with a movement of middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy. A number of pronunciamientos by liberal army officers together with urban riots led to the overthrow of Queen Isabel II in September 1868. The two movements were ultimately contradictory. The liberals were terrified to find that their constitutionalist rebellion had awakened a revolutionary movement of the masses. To make matters worse, a rebellion began in Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba. The chosen replacement monarch, Amadeo of Savoy, abdicated in despair in 1873. In the ensuing vacuum, the First Republic was established after a number of working-class risings, an intolerable threat to the established order which was crushed by the army in December 1874.
In many respects, 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order, the bourgeoisie was frightened out of its reforming ambitions by the spectre of proletarian disorder. When the army restored the monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, reform was abandoned in return for social peace. The subsequent relation of forces between the landed oligarchy, the urban bourgeoisie and the remainder of the population was perfectly represented by the political system of the 1876 monarchical restoration. Two political parties, the Conservative and the Liberal, represented the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy, respectively the wine and olive growers of the south and the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were both monarchist and were divided not on social issues but over free trade and, to a much lesser extent, over religion. The northern industrial bourgeoisie was barely represented within the system but was, for the moment, content to devote its activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the twentieth century, they could organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers were inclined to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, while the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders.
It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression outside the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. When results were not falsified in the Ministry of the Interior, they were fixed at the local level. The system of electoral falsification rested on the social power of local town bosses, or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’). In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique was usually a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore who did not starve. Caciquismo ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened.
On occasion, overzealous local officials would produce majorities by more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, casual falsification became somewhat more difficult and, if the requisite number of peasant votes could not be mustered, the caciques were said sometimes to register as voters the dead in the local cemetery. In consequence, politics became an exclusive minuet danced out by a small, privileged minority. The nature of politics in the period of caciquismo is illustrated by the celebrated story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local casino (club). Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.
Challenges to the system did arise, however, and they were linked to the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization and to the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, especially in the countryside. Land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as the southern labourers came under the influence of anarchism. Giuseppe Fannelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, was sent to Spain by the First International in November 1868. His inspirational oratory soon secured him his own evangelists who took anarchism to one village after another. The message that land, justice and equality should be seized by direct action struck a chord among the starving day labourers, or braceros, and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fannelli’s eager converts took part in outbreaks of occasional violence, crop-burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, easily defeated revolutionary outbursts began to alternate with periods of apathy.
It was but a short step from direct action to individual terrorism. The belief that any action was licit against the tyranny of the state saw increasing levels of social violence. In January 1892, an army of braceros, armed only with scythes and sticks but driven by hunger, invaded and briefly held the town of Jerez before being driven out by the police and the Civil Guard. As anarchism took root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage reprisals from the forces of order. In August 1897 mass arrests and the use of torture provoked the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Cirilo Cánovas by a young Italian anarchist. A mass campaign against the torturing of anarchist prisoners in Barcelona’s Montjuich prison, the Spanish Bastille, saw the rise to fame of the buccaneering demagogue Alejandro Lerroux.
The system was rocked in 1898 by defeat at the hands of the USA and the loss of the remnants of empire, including Cuba. This was to have a catastrophic effect on the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. Barcelona was the scene of sporadic strikes and acts of terrorism by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Moreover, by the turn of the century, a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Catalonia, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias, although the Spanish economy remained essentially agrarian. Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than British coal. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the limited growth of these industries in the north saw the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also witnessed the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basques and Catalans paid a very high proportion of Spain’s tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy. In 1901 the Catalanist party known as the Lliga Regionalista won its first electoral victory.
In the two decades before the First World War the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao and the coal miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). However, any possibility of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement was eliminated when the Socialists made the decision, in 1899, to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent this cut off the Socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism, mediated through the dead hand of the party’s rigid leader, Pablo Iglesias. The party was isolationist, committed to the view that the workers’ party should struggle for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.
The traditional dominance of the political establishment by representatives of the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization but it would not be surrendered easily. In addition to the differing challenges represented by powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement, a more cerebral opposition to the system came from a small but influential group of middle-class Republicans. As well as distinguished intellectuals like the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, increasingly there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic, most notably the intensely scholarly man of letters Manuel Azaña, who would come to represent modernity and the European Spain of the distant future.
The rise of republicanism persuaded some elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio Prieto, of the need for the establishment of liberal democracy and they therefore fought for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans. Prieto had seen in Bilbao that, alone, the Socialists could do little, while, with the Republicans, they could secure election success. His advocacy of a Republican-Socialist electoral combination in 1909 opened up the long-term prospect of building socialism from parliament but also brought him into conflict with other leaders such as the UGT vice-president Francisco Largo Caballero, who advocated a strategy of confrontational strike action. Republican–Socialist collaboration would be the basis of eventual PSOE success. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias himself was elected to parliament in 1910. However, Prieto had earned the lifelong hostility of Largo Caballero, whose rancour would bedevil his existence and, eventually, have devastating consequences for Spain.
Another Republican movement that seemed to be threatening the system was the brainchild of the outrageous rogue Alejandro Lerroux. Born in Córdoba, Lerroux started his adult life as an army deserter after squandering his military academy fees in a casino. As a journalist he leapt to fame in 1893 by dint of an inadvertent victory in a duel with a newspaper editor. His exposés of the Montjuich tortures gained him a popular following. His skills as a demagogue gave him the leadership of a mass Republican movement in the slums of Barcelona and his ability as an organizer built a formidable electoral machine. It was revealed that he was receiving money from the central government, common practice in a period when politicians paid for the inclusion or suppression of news in newspapers. This gave rise to the widespread belief that his rabble-rousing in Barcelona was a Madrid-inspired operation to divide the anarcho-syndicalist masses and undermine the rise of Catalan nationalism. Probably no government slush fund could have achieved what he did. To become ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’, the Barcelona district where misery, criminality and prostitution held sway, required more genuine appeal than anything that could be conjured up in Madrid offices. This was achieved largely by the near pornographic techniques of anti-clerical demagogy in which he enjoined his followers, the ‘young barbarians’, to murder priests, sack and burn churches and ‘liberate’ nuns. Lerroux tapped into the profound anti-clericalism of immigrant workers. For them, the Church was the defender of the brutally unjust rural social order from which they had fled.
The first decade of the twentieth century therefore tasted an explosive cocktail of intransigence, on the part of landowners and industrialists, and subversion from a disparate array of Socialists, anarchists, Radicals, moderate Republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in which rapid but sporadic industrialization and partial labour organization coincided with major post-imperial trauma. A resentful army disappointed in Cuba turned inwards, determined not to lose further battles, and became obsessed with the defence of national unity and the existing social order. Accordingly, the officer corps was increasingly hostile both to the left and to the regional Nationalists who were perceived as ‘separatists’. Right-wing, centralist and constantly needled by the Catalan anti-militarist press, in November 1905 the army shook off its immediate post-war shame with an assault by three hundred officers on the premises of the satirical journal ¡Cu-cut! and the Catalanist newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, during which forty-six people were seriously injured. To appease the army, the government introduced the Law of Jurisdictions which deemed that any criticism of the army, the monarchy or Spain itself would result in the perpetrators being tried by the military justice system. It was a dangerous step in the process whereby the officer corps came to consider itself the ultimate arbiter in politics. Moreover, the Spanish army was not prepared merely to be the defender of a constitutional regime whose decadence it despised. It hoped to find a solution in a new imperial endeavour in Morocco, made possible by British desires for a Spanish buffer against French expansionism on the southern shores of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, woefully unprepared, the new adventure stimulated massive popular hostility against conscription, thereby intensifying the hatred of the military for the left. At the same time, after 1905 Lerroux began to lose support precisely because of the fierce sincerity with which he revealed his pro-militaristic and centralist abhorrence of Catalanism.
The volatility of the situation was revealed by the events known as the Semana Trágica which took place in Barcelona in July 1909. The colonial disaster of 1898 had fed widespread working-class pacifism and ensured that, unlike France or Britain, Germany or Italy, Spain could not use imperialist adventures to divert attention from domestic social conflict. Spain’s Moroccan entanglement was popularly regarded as the narrow personal undertaking of the King and the owners of the iron mines. In 1909, the government of the conservative Antonio Maura, under pressure from both army officers close to Alfonso XIII and investors in the mines, sent an expeditionary force to expand Spain’s Moroccan territory to encompass some important mineral deposits. Large numbers of reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and embarked from Barcelona. Untrained and ill-equipped, the Spanish army was in the throes of being defeated by the Rif tribesmen at the battle of Barranco del Lobo. There were anti-war demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and cities with railway stations from which conscripts were departing for the war. A general strike broke out in Barcelona on 26 July. The Captain-General of the region decided to treat it as insurrection and declared martial law. Barricades were set up and anti-conscription protests escalated into anti-clerical disturbances and church burnings. The movement was put down with the use of artillery. Numerous prisoners were taken and 1725 people were subsequently tried, of whom five were sentenced to death. In military eyes the repression was necessary because the disturbances had connotations of anti-militarism, anti-clericalism and Catalan separatism. In this sense, during the Semana Trágica the hostility between the military and the labour movement prefigured the violent hostilities of the civil war.
The Semana Trágica certainly took Spain a step further towards the conflicts of the 1930s in terms of developments within the anarchist movement. Lerroux’s pro-militaristic stance had exposed the fraudulence of his radicalism and saw the bulk of his ‘young barbarians’ drift towards anarchism. In the autumn of 1910, a variety of anarchist groups united to form an anarcho-syndicalist trade union known as the Confed-eración Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The new organization rejected both individual violence and parliamentary politics, opting instead for revolutionary syndicalism. This involved a central contradiction which would hinder the organization throughout its existence. On the one hand, it would act as a conventional trade union defending the interests of its members within the existing order while at the same time advocating direct action to overthrow that system. The involvement of its members in violent acts of industrial sabotage and strikes meant the new organization was soon declared illegal.
Surprisingly, however, when the next explosion came it was precipitated not by the rural anarchists or the urban working class but by the industrial bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, once the crisis started, proletarian ambitions came into play in such a way as to ensure that the basic polarization of Spanish political life became starker than ever. The geometric symmetry of the Restoration system – with political power concentrated in the hands of those who also enjoyed the monopoly of economic power – already under pressure, was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Not only were political passions aroused by a bitter debate about whether Spain should intervene and on which side, accentuating growing divisions within the Liberal and Conservative parties, but massive social upheaval followed in the wake of the war. The fact that Spain was a non-belligerent put her in the economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products. Coal mine owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, Catalan textile magnates all experienced a wild boom which constituted the first dramatic takeoff for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted somewhat. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernization.
The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen them mount challenges to the Spanish establishment by sponsoring their respective regionalist movements – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga Regionalista. The leader of the Lliga, the shrewd Catalan financier Francesc Cambó, emerged as spokesman for the industrialists and bankers. He believed that drastic action was necessary if a major revolutionary cataclysm was to be avoided. Now the reforming zeal of industrialists enriched by the war coincided with a desperate need for change from a proletariat impoverished by it. Boom industries had attracted rural labour to towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing inflation and plummeting living standards. After a number of dramatic bread riots, the Socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT were drawn together in the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then reform. While industrialists and workers pushed for change, middle-ranking army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the army.
Military discontent was related to a division within the army between those who had volunteered to fight in Africa – Africanistas – and those who had remained on the peninsula – peninsulares. For those who had fought in Africa the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. The rigours and horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars brutalized the beleaguered Africanistas, who began to see themselves as a heroic band of warriors who, in their commitment to defending the Moroccan colony, were alone concerned with the fate of the patria. Long before the establishment of the Second Republic, this had developed into contempt for professional politicians, for the pacifist left-wing masses and, to a certain extent, for the peninsulares. The mainland represented a more comfortable but boring existence with promotion only by strict seniority. When salaries started to be hit, like those of civilians, by wartime inflation, there was resentment among the peninsulares against the Africanistas who had gained more rapid promotion. The peninsulares created the Juntas Militares de Defensa, rather like trade unions, to protect the seniority system and to seek better pay.
The Juntas’ complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. The intellectual movement known as ‘Regenerationism’ associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the right or the left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate caciquista system by democratic reform and those who planned simply to crush it by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed empty ‘Regenerationist’ clichés were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. Had the movement been successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the Civil War would not have been necessary. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 merely consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.
Despite a rhetorical coincidence of their calls for reform, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the system survived by skilfully exploiting these differences. The Prime Minister, the astute Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded the officers’ economic demands and promoted the ringleaders of the Juntas. He then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers, forcing the UGT to act before the CNT was ready. Now at peace with the system, army officers – both peninsulares and Africanistas – were happy to defend it in August 1917 by crushing the striking Socialists, which they did with considerable bloodshed. Alarmed by the prospect of militant workers in the streets, the industrialists dropped their own demands for political reform and, lured by promises of economic modernization, joined in a national coalition government in 1918 with both Liberals and Conservatives. Once again the industrial bourgeoisie had abandoned its political aspirations and allied with the landed oligarchy out of a fear of the lower classes. Short-lived though it was to be, the coalition symbolized the slightly improved position of industrialists in a reactionary alliance still dominated by the landed interest.
By 1917, Spain was divided more starkly even than before into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the smallholding peasantry. Significantly, in the years before and during the First World War, efforts were made to mobilize Catholic farmers in defence of big landholding interests. With anarchism and Socialism making headway among the urban workers, the more far-sighted landowners were anxious to stop the spread of the poison to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary syndicates were financed by landlords from 1906 but the process was systematized after 1912 by a group of dynamic social Catholics led by Ángel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain before 1936. Through his organization of determined social Christian activists, the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, Herrera helped set up a series of provincial Catholic Agrarian Federations which tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery in return for their adoption of virulent anti-socialism. Many of those recruited were to play an important role when the landed oligarchy was forced to seek more modern forms of defence in the 1930s first by voting for the legalist parties of the right during the Second Republic and later by fighting for Franco.
In the aftermath of the crisis of 1917, however, the existing order survived in part because of the organizational naïvety of the left and even more because of its own ready recourse to armed repression. The foundation of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919 imbued the Spanish ruling classes with the same fear of bolshevism that afflicted all European countries. The defeat of the urban Socialists in 1917 had not marked the end of the assault on the system. Between 1918 and 1921, three years known as the trienio bolchevique, the anarchist day-labourers of the south took part in a series of risings. Eventually put down by a combination of the Civil Guard and the army, the strikes and land seizures of these years intensified the social resentments of the rural south. At the same time, urban anarchists were also coming into conflict with the system. Northern industrialists, having failed to invest their war profits in modern plant and rationalization, were badly hit by the post-war resurgence of foreign competition. The Catalans in particular tried to ride the recession with wage cuts and lay-offs. They countered the consequent strikes with lockouts and hired gunmen. The anarchists retaliated in kind and, from 1919 to 1921, the streets of Barcelona witnessed a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals. A split in the PSOE over whether or not to join the Comintern led to a factional split with the more radical elements forming the Communist Party in November 1921. The Communists’ influence was immediately felt in a series of strikes in the Asturian coal mines and the Basque iron and steel industry. It was obvious that Restoration politics were no longer an adequate mechanism for defending the economic interests of the ruling classes. Moreover, the credibility of the system was rocked by the overwhelming defeat of the Spanish forces by Moroccan tribesmen at Annual in June 1921.
On 23 September 1923 a coup d’état was carried out by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Ostensibly, Primo came to power to put an end to disorder and to prevent the King being embarrassed by the publication of an awkward report on the responsibility for Annual. However, as Captain-General of Barcelona and intimate of the Catalan textile barons, Primo was fully aware of the anarchist threat to them. Moreover, coming from a large landowning family in the south, he also had experience of the peasant risings of 1918–21. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the coalition of industrialists and landowners which had been consolidated during the great crisis of 1917. Initially, his dictatorship had two great advantages – a general revulsion against the chaos of the previous six years and an upturn in the European economy. He outlawed the anarchist movement and made a deal with the UGT whereby it was given a monopoly of trade union affairs. A massive public works’ programme, which involved a significant modernizing of Spanish capitalism and the building of a communications infrastructure that would bear fruit only thirty years later, gave the impression that liberty was being traded in for prosperity.
The Primo de Rivera dictatorship was to be regarded in later years as a golden age by the Spanish middle classes and became a central myth of the reactionary right. Paradoxically, however, its short-term effect was to discredit the very idea of authoritarianism in Spain. This fleeting phenomenon was born partly of Primo’s failure to use the economic breathing space to construct a lasting political replacement for the decrepit constitutional monarchy, but more immediately it sprang from his alienation of the powerful interests which had originally supported him. A genial eccentric with a Falstaffian approach to political life, he governed by a form of personal improvization which ensured that he bore the blame for his regime’s failures. Although by 1930 there was hardly a section of Spanish society that he had not offended, his most crucial errors led to the estrangement of industrialists, landowners and the army. Attempts to standardize promotion machinery outraged army officers. The Catalan bourgeoisie was antagonized by an offensive against regionalist aspirations. Northern industrialists were even more enraged by the collapse of the peseta in 1928, which they attributed to his inflationary public spending. Perhaps most importantly, the support of Primo’s fellow landowners was lost when efforts were made to introduce arbitration committees for wages and working conditions into rural areas. At the end of January 1930, Primo resigned.
There was no question of a return to the pre-1923 political system. Apart from the fact that it had fallen into disrepute by the time Primo seized power, significant changes had taken place in the attitudes of its personnel. Among the senior politicians, death, old age and, above all, resentment of the King’s cavalier abandonment of the constitution in 1923 had taken their toll. Of the younger men, some had opted for the Republican movement, partly out of pique, partly out of a conviction that the political future lay in that direction. Others, especially those Conservatives who had followed the authoritarian implications of ‘Regenerationism’ to the logical extreme, had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the service of the dictator. For them, there could be no going back. Their experiences under Primo had left them entrenched in the view that the only feasible solution to the problems faced by the right was a military monarchy. They would form the general staff of the extreme right in the Second Republic and were to provide much of the ideological content of the Franco regime.
In desperation, therefore, Alfonso XIII turned to another general, Dámaso Berenguer. His mild dictatorship floundered in search of a formula for a return to constitutional monarchy but was undermined by Republican plots, working-class agitation and military sedition. When he held municipal elections on 12 April 1931, Socialists and liberal middle-class Republicans swept the board in the main towns while monarchists won only in the rural areas where the social domination of the local bosses, the caciques, remained intact. Faced by the questionable loyalty of both army and Civil Guard, the King took the advice of his counsellors to depart gracefully before he was thrown out by force. The attitude of the military reflected the hope of a significant section of the upper classes that, by sacrificing the King, it would be possible to contain the desires for change of both the progressive bourgeoisie and the left. That was to be an impossible ambition without some concessions in the area of land reform.
The conflicts of the trienio bolchevique had been silenced by repression in 1919–20 and by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but they continued to smoulder. The violence of those years had ended the uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression had intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and their estate managers. By the same token, the landlords were outraged by insubordinate behaviour of the day-labourers whom they considered almost sub-human. Accordingly, the elements of paternalism which had previously mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros’ lives came to an abrupt end. The gathering of windfall crops or the watering of beasts, even the collection of firewood were deemed to be ‘collective kleptomania’ and were prevented by the vigilance of armed guards. In consequence, the new Republic was to inherit a situation of sporadic social war in the south which was dramatically to diminish its possibilities of establishing a regime of co-existence. Nevertheless, with goodwill on both sides, everything, even peace, was possible in 1931. Within weeks of the Republic being established, however, it was clear that among the erstwhile supporters of Alfonso XIII and within the anarchist movement there was anything but goodwill to Spain’s new democracy.
TWO
The Leftist Challenge, 1931–1933 (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
The coming of the Second Republic signified a threat to the most privileged members of society and raised inordinate hopes among the most humble. Ultimately, the new regime was to fail because it neither carried through its threatened reforms nor fulfilled the utopian expectations of its most fervent supporters. Moreover, the fervour with which the new political class tried to eradicate the past with exclusionist policies against those who had supported the old regime provoked powerful opposition. At the same time, the success of the right in blocking change would so exasperate the rural and urban working classes as to undermine their faith in parliamentary democracy. Once that happened, and once the left had turned to revolutionary solutions, the rightist determination to destabilize the Republic would be enormously facilitated. Yet given the failures of both the monarchy and the dictatorship, the majority of Spaniards had been prepared in 1931 to give the Republic a chance. However, behind the superficial goodwill, there was potentially savage conflict over the scale of the social and economic reform it should pursue, or, to use the jargon of the day, over what the ‘content’ of the Republic should be. In this sense, the seeds of war were buried near the surface of a Republic which was the source of hope to the left and of fear to the right.
Before 1931, social, economic and political power in Spain had all been in the hands of the same groups, the components of the reactionary coalition of landowners, industrialists and bankers. The challenge to that monopoly mounted by the disunited forces of the left between 1917 and 1923 had exposed the deficiencies of the Restoration monarchy. The defence of establishment interests was then entrusted to the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera. Because of its failure, the idea of an authoritarian solution to the problems facing the beleaguered oligarchy was briefly discredited. Moreover, the coming of the Republic found the right temporarily bereft of political organization. Accordingly, the upper classes and large sectors of the middle classes acquiesced in the departure of Alfonso XIII because they had little alternative. They did so in the hope that, by sacrificing a King and tolerating a President, they might protect themselves from greater unpleasantness in the way of social and economic reform.
However, the establishment of the Republic meant that for the first time political power had passed from the oligarchy to the moderate left. This consisted of representatives of the most reformist section of the organized working class, the Socialists, and a mixed bag of petty bourgeois Republicans, some of whom were idealists and many of whom were cynics. Therein lay a major weakness of the new government. Beyond the immediate desire to rid Spain of the monarchy, each of its components had a different agenda. The broad Republican–Socialist coalition ranged from conservative elements who wanted to go no further than the removal of Alfonso XIII, via a centre of the often venal Radicals of Alejandro Lerroux whose principal ambition was to derive profit from access to the levers of power, to the leftist Republicans and the Socialists who had ambitious, but different, reforming objectives. Together, they saw themselves using state power to create a new Spain. However, to do so required a vast programme of reform which would involve destroying the reactionary influence of the Church and the army, more equitable industrial relations, breaking the near feudal powers of the latifundio estate-owners and meeting the autonomy demands of Basque and Catalan regionalists.
Given that both economic power – ownership of the banks and industry, of the land and dominance of the landless labourers who worked it – and social power – control of the press and the radio, what passed for the mass media, and of the largely private education system – remained unchanged, this disparate programme constituted a dauntingly tall order. Broadly speaking, the masters of social and economic power were united with the Church and the army in being determined to prevent any attacks on property, religion or national unity. They were quick to find a variety of ways in which to defend their interests. Ultimately, then, the Spanish Civil War was to grow out of the efforts of the progressive leaders of the Republic to carry out reform against the wishes of the most powerful sections of society. Those efforts were to be undermined not only by the fierce opposition of the right but also by the inexperience of those leaders and the hostility of the extreme left, which believed that the Republic, like the monarchy, was merely an instrument of the bourgeoisie.
When the King fled, power was assumed by the Provisional Government whose composition had been agreed in August 1930 when Republican and Socialist opponents of the King had met and forged the Pact of San Sebastián. The Prime Minister was Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a landowner from Córdoba and an ex-minister of the King. The Minister of the Interior was Miguel Maura, the son of the celebrated Conservative politician Antonio Maura. The Minister of the Economy was the liberal Catalan Lluis Nicolau D’Olwer. Both Alcalá Zamora and Maura were Catholic conservatives and served as a guarantee to the upper classes that the Republic would remain within the bounds of reason. The Radical Alejandro Lerroux was Minister of Foreign Affairs and the deputy leader of his party, the altogether more upright and honest Diego Martínez Barrio, was Minister of Communications. The remainder of the cabinet was made up of four left Republicans and three reformist Socialists, unanimous in their desire to build a Republic for all Spaniards. Inevitably, therefore, the coming of the parliamentary regime constituted far less of a change than was either hoped by the rejoicing crowds in the streets or feared by the upper classes.
Socialist ambitions were restrained. The PSOE leadership hoped that the political power that had fallen into their hands would permit the improvement of the living conditions of the southern braceros, the Asturian miners and other sections of the industrial working class. They realized that the overthrow of capitalism was a distant dream. What the most progressive members of the new Republican–Socialist coalition failed to perceive at first was the stark truth that the great latifundistas and the mine-owners would regard any attempt at reform as an aggressive challenge to the existing balance of social and economic power. However, in the days before they realized that they were trapped between the impatient mass demand for significant reform and the dogged hostility to change of the rich, the Socialists approached the Republic in a spirit of self-sacrifice and optimism. In Madrid on 14 April, members of the Socialist Youth Movement prevented assaults on buildings associated with the right, especially the royal palace. The Socialist ministers acquiesced in Maura’s refusal to abolish the Civil Guard, a hated symbol of authority to workers and peasants. Also, in a gesture to the wealthy classes, the Socialist Minister of Finance, Indalecio Prieto, announced that he would meet all the financial obligations of the Dictatorship.
However, the potential state of war between the proponents of reform and the defenders of the existing order was not to be ignored. Rightist hostility to the Republic was quickly revealed. Prieto announced at the first meeting of ministers that the financial position of the regime was being endangered by a large-scale withdrawal of wealth from the country. Even before the Republic had been established, followers of General Primo de Rivera had been trying to build barricades against liberalism and republicanism. They started to collect money from aristocrats, landowners, bankers and industrialists to publicize authoritarian ideas, to finance conspiratorial activities and to buy arms. They realized that the Republic’s commitment to improving the living conditions of the poorest members of society inevitably threatened them with a major redistribution of wealth. At a time of world depression, wage increases and the cost of better working conditions could not simply be absorbed by higher profits. Indeed, in a contracting economy they seemed like revolutionary challenges to the established economic order.
From the end of April to the beginning of July, the Socialist Ministers of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, and of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, issued a series of decrees which aimed to deal with the appalling situation in rural Spain, shattered by a drought during the 1930–31 season and thronged by returning emigrants. De los Ríos rectified the imbalance in rural leases which favoured the landlords. Eviction was made almost impossible and rent rises blocked while prices were falling. Largo Caballero’s measures were much more dramatic. The so-called ‘decree of municipal boundaries’ prevented the hiring of outside labour while any local workers in a given municipality remained unemployed. It struck at the landowners’ most potent weapon, the power to break strikes and keep down wages by the import of cheap blackleg labour. In early May, Largo Caballero did something that Primo de Rivera had tried and failed to do – he introduced arbitration committees (known as jurados mixtos) for rural wages and working conditions which had previously been subject only to the whim of the owners. One of the rights now to be protected was the newly introduced eight-hour day. Given that, previously, the braceros had been expected to work from sun up to sun down, this meant that owners would either have to pay overtime or employ more men to do the same work. Finally, in order to prevent the owners sabotaging these measures by lockouts, a decree of obligatory cultivation prevented them taking their land out of operation. None of these decrees was applied ruthlessly and nothing was done about the owners who refused to pay hours worked over eight hours. However, together with the preparations being set in train for a sweeping law of agrarian reform, they alarmed the landowners who began to complain loudly of agriculture being ruined.
The response of the right was complex. At a local level, landlords simply ignored the new legislation, letting loose their armed retainers on the trade union officials who complained. The implementation in the countryside of the reforming decrees would depend on the efficacy and commitment of the civil governor of each province. In general terms, however, the Republican government faced enormous difficulty in finding competent and experienced personnel for its ministries. The problem was most acute at a local level. Miguel Maura wrote later of his despair at finding suitable governors for forty-nine provinces. The men recommended to him by his fellow ministers were often comically inadequate – one he rejected was a shoeshine boy who had lent money to Marcelino Domingo in harder times. In his memoirs, he wrote ‘Governors! After thirty years, just thinking about them still gives me goose flesh.’ Many governors were thus not up to the job of standing up to the landowners who openly flouted legislation. In their weakness, they often ended up as more loyal to local elites than to central government.
In terms of national politics, the powerful press networks of the right began to present the Republic as responsible for all the centuries-old problems of the Spanish economy and as the fount of mob violence. More specifically, there were two broad responses, known at the time as ‘accidentalist’ and ‘catastrophist’. The ‘accidentalists’ took the view that forms of government, Republican or monarchical, were ‘accidental’ as opposed to fundamental. What really mattered was the social content of a regime. Thus, inspired by Ángel Herrera, the leader of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (the ACNP), the ‘accidentalists’ adopted a legalist tactic. The ACNP was an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about five hundred prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions – a predecessor of Opus Dei. Herrera, who would end life as a Cardinal, was the editor of the most modern right-wing daily in Spain, El Debate. From within the ACNP a clever and dynamic leader, the lawyer José María Gil Robles, created an organization called Acción Popular by welding together a general staff from the ACNP and the Catholic smallholding masses from the old Catholic Agrarian Federations. Its few elected deputies used every possible device to block reform in the parliament, or Cortes. Massive and extraordinarily skilful efforts of propaganda were made to persuade the smallholding farmers of northern and central Spain that the agrarian reforms of the Republic damaged their interests every bit as much as those of the big landowners. The Republic was presented to the conservative Catholic smallholders as a godless, rabble-rousing instrument of Soviet communism poised to steal their lands and dragoon their wives and daughters into an orgy of obligatory free love. With their votes thereby assured, by 1933 the legalist right was to wrest political power back from the left.
At the same time, the various ‘catastrophist’ groups were fundamentally opposed to the Republic and believed that it should be overthrown by some great catastrophic explosion or uprising. It was their view which was to prevail in 1936, although it should not be forgotten that the contribution of the ‘accidentalists’ in stirring up anti-republicanism among the smallholding peasantry was crucial for Franco’s war effort. There were three principal ‘catastrophist’ organizations. The oldest was the Traditionalist Communion of the Carlists, anti-modern advocates of a theocracy to be ruled on earth by warrior priests. Antiquated though its ideas were, it was well supplied with supporters among the farmers of Navarre and had a fanatical militia called the Requeté which, between 1934 and 1936, was to receive training in Mussolini’s Italy. The best financed and ultimately the most influential of the ‘catastrophists’ were the one-time supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. These Alfonsine monarchists, with their journal Acción Española and their political party Renovación Española, were the general staff and the paymasters of the extreme right. Both the rising of 1936 and the structure and ideology of the Francoist state owed an enormous amount to the Alfonsines. Finally, there were a number of unashamed Fascist groups, which finally coalesced between 1933 and 1934 under the leadership of the Dictator’s son, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as Falange Española. Also subsidized by Mussolini, the rank-and-file Falangists supplied the cannon fodder of the ‘catastrophist’ option, attacking the left and provoking the street fights which permitted other groups to denounce the ‘disorder’ of the Republic.
Among the Republic’s enemies two of the most powerful were the Church and the army. Both were to be easily drawn into the anti-Republican right, in part because of errors made by the Republic’s politicians but also because of the actions of the Church’s own hardliner fundamentalists, or integristas. They were committed to the necessity of a ‘Confessional State’ that forcibly, by civil war if necessary, imposed the profession and practice of the Catholic religion and prohibited all others. Among this group were to be found the Cardinal Primate of All Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo, Pedro Segura, and the Bishop of Tarazona in the province of Zaragoza, Isidro Gomá. They formed a semi-clandestine group within the Church, whose members communicated with one another in code, a fact revealed when left-wingers found the secret archives of Isidro Gomá in the Archbishop’s palace at Toledo in July 1936. On 24 April, a mere ten days after the proclamation of the Republic, Spain’s bishops received a letter from the Apostolic Nuncio informing them that ‘It is the wish of the Holy See that Your Eminence recommend to the priests, religious and faithful of your diocese to respect the constituted powers and obey them in the interests of public order and the common good.’
In response, on 1 May, Bishop Gomá wrote an intransigent pastoral letter which passed virtually unnoticed in comparison with the scandal provoked by that of the ambitious and irascible Archbishop Segura. Segura spent much of his life attempting to prohibit any modern dancing in which the couples touched and his pugnacity in matters theological led the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán to compare him to ‘a bullfighter in doctrinal and pastoral issues’. Now, Segura’s letter, addressed to all the bishops and the faithful of Spain, called for the mass mobilization of all in a crusade of prayers to unite ‘seriously and effectively to ensure the election to the Constituent Cortes candidates who offer guarantees that they will defend the rights of the Church and the social order’. In irresponsibly provocative language, in a context of popular enthusiasm for the Republic, he went on to praise the monarchy and its links to the Church.
An outraged government immediately insisted on Segura’s immediate removal by the Vatican. Before a response was received, Segura, believing himself to be in danger of reprisals, requested a passport and went to Rome. However, on 11 June he slipped back into Spain and began to organize clandestine meetings of priests. Accordingly, the deeply Catholic Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, without consulting the rest of the cabinet, took the decision to expel him from Spain. Newspaper photographs of the Cardinal Primate of Spain being escorted by police and Civil Guards from a monastery in Guadalajara was immediately produced as evidence of Republican persecution of the Church. The see of Toledo would remain vacant until 12 April 1933 when Segura was replaced by an equally vehement enemy of the Republic, Isidro Gomá.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1931, the episode over Segura’s pastoral had done nothing to soften the Republican view that the Church was the bulwark of black reaction. Thus, on May 11, when a rash of church burning spread through Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante, the cabinet refused to call out the Civil Guard. Manuel Azaña, the immensely talented left Republican Minister of War, proclaimed that ‘all the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of one Republican’, a statement which was exploited by the rightist press to persuade its middle-class readership that Azaña somehow approved of the actual burnings. Certainly, the government demonstrated a notable lack of energy in dealing with the fires, which does not mean that it was to blame for them. The indifference of the watching crowds reflected just how strongly ordinary people identified the Church, the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of agents provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres, in an effort to discredit the new regime. Indeed, it was even claimed that the young monarchists of the Círculo Monárquico Independiente (CMI) had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings. On May 22, full religious liberty was declared. The monarchist daily ABC and the Catholic El Debate howled abuse and were briefly closed down by the government.
Several issues were to cause friction between the Republic and the armed forces but none more than the new regime’s readiness to concede regional autonomy. On 14 April, Colonel Macià, the leader of the Catalan Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia), declared an independent Catalan republic. A deputation from Madrid persuaded him to await government action by promising a rapid statute of autonomy. Inevitably, this aroused the suspicions of the army which had shed so much blood in the fight against Catalan separatism. To make matters worse, the Minister of War, Azaña, began in May to prepare reforms to cut down the inflated officer corps and to make the army more efficient. It was thereby hoped to reduce the political ambitions of the armed forces. It was a necessary reform and, in many respects, a generous one, since the eight thousand surplus officers were retired on full pay. However, military sensibilities were inflamed by the insensitivity with which various aspects of the reforms were implemented. Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 insisting on the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) reopened some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars. Many distinguished right-wing generals including Francisco Franco faced the prospect of being reduced to the rank of colonel. The commission carrying out the revision took more than eighteen months to report, causing unnecessary anxiety for the nearly one thousand officers affected, of whom only half had their cases examined. On 30 June 1931, Azaña closed the General Military Academy in Zaragoza for budgetary reasons and because he believed it to be a hotbed of reactionary militarism. This guaranteed Azaña the eternal enmity of its Director, General Franco.
Since Azaña’s reforms involved the abolition of the army’s jurisdictions over civilians thought to have insulted it, many officers regarded them as a savage attack. Those who were retired, having refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic, were left with the leisure to plot against the regime. This was encouraged by the conservative newspapers read by most army officers, ABC, La Época and La Correspondencia Militar, which presented the Republic as responsible for the economic depression, for the breakdown of law and order, and for disrespect for the army and anti-clericalism. In particular, a campaign was mounted alleging that Azaña’s intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the army). Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. In fact, far from depriving the army of funds and equipment, Azaña, who had made a lifetime study of civil–military relations, merely ensured that the military budget would be used more efficaciously. If anything, Azaña tended to be punctilious in his treatment of a shambolic and inefficient force which compared poorly with the armies of countries like Portugal or Romania. Ironically, the military readiness of the Spanish army in 1936 owed as much to the efforts of Azaña as to those of his successor, the rightist José María Gil Robles. Azaña was converted by the rightist propaganda machine into the bogey of the military because he wanted to provide Spain with a non-political army. For the right, the army existed above all to defend their social and economic interests. Azaña was therefore presented as a corrupt monster, determined to destroy the army, as he was allegedly determined to destroy the Church, because it was part of the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy to do so. Curiously, he had a much higher regard for military procedures than his predecessor, General Primo de Rivera. A general who presumed to ‘interpret the widespread feeling of the nation’ to Azaña was told forthrightly, ‘Your job is merely to interpret regulations.’ That was not how Spanish generals expected to be treated by civilians.
From the very first days of the Republic right-wing extremists disseminated the idea that an alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the working-class Internationals was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. Anti-semitism, even in a country whose Jews had been expelled four and a half centuries earlier, was a potent weapon. Already in June 1931 the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro had denounced Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and his Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, as Jews. The Catholic press in general made frequent reference to the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The Editorial Católica, which owned a chain of newspapers including El Debate, would soon be publishing the deeply anti-semitic and anti-masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. Even the more moderate Catholic daily, El Debate, referred to De los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The attribution of the Republic’s reforming ambitions to a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot made it that much easier to advocate violence against it. As this propaganda intensified over the next five years, the conviction grew on the extreme right that the Spanish supporters of this filthy foreign conspiracy had to be exterminated.
Such propaganda was soon widespread. However, the first major political contest of the Republic had taken place before the right was properly organized. The June 1931 elections were won by the Socialists in coalition with the left Republicans. Republicanism tended to be a movement of intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie, more an amorphous improvised grouping than a united left-wing force. The only centre grouping, the Radicals, had, on the other hand, started out as a genuine mass movement in Barcelona in the early years of the century. Led by the fiery orator and corrupt machine politician Alejandro Lerroux, the Radicals were to become progressively more conservative and anti-Socialist as the Republic developed. They did immense damage to the Republic by their readiness to opt for the winning side at any given time. The polarization brought about by the pendulum effect of a big left-wing victory in the 1931 elections followed by an equally dramatic rightist triumph in 1933 was greatly intensified by the fact that the Radicals had changed sides.
The centrifugal dynamic of Republican politics was in itself the inadvertent consequence of a set of electoral regulations which were drawn up in such a way as to avoid the political fragmentation that destroyed the Weimar Republic. To ensure strong government majorities, in any given province, 80 per cent of the seats were given to the party or list with most votes over 40 per cent of those cast. The other 20 per cent block of seats went to the list that was second past the post. Accordingly, small fluctuations in the number of votes cast could lead to massive swings in the number of parliamentary seats actually won. The pressure to form coalitions was obvious. The elections of 28 June 1931 for the Constituent Cortes therefore registered a heavy victory for the broad coalition of Socialists, the left Republicans and the Radicals, with a total of 250 seats. The PSOE had gained 116 seats. In the flush of victory, little thought seems to have been given by the Socialist leadership to the long-term implications of the fact that Lerroux’s Radicals, with a campaign that was unashamedly conservative, not to say right wing, had gained ninety-four seats and become the second largest party in the Constituent Cortes. The somewhat heterogeneous right gained only eighty seats. By 1933, however, the success of rightist tactics in blocking reform and the consequent disappointment of the left-wing rank and file had provoked a significant realignment of forces. By then, the anarchists who had voted for the leftist parties in 1931 were committed to abstention. The Socialists had so lost faith in the possibilities of bourgeois democracy that they refused to make a coalition with the left Republicans. The apparatus of the state would thus be allowed to slip out of the grasp of the left in the November 1933 elections.
That change was a reflection of the enormity of the task that faced the 1931 parliament, known as the Constituent Cortes because its primary task was to give Spain a new Constitution. For the Republic to survive it had to increase wages and cut unemployment. Unfortunately, the regime was born at the height of the world depression. Large numbers of migrant workers were returning from overseas while unskilled construction workers had been left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the Dictatorship. With agricultural prices falling, landowners had let land fall out of cultivation. The landless labourers, who lived near starvation at the best of times, were thus in a state of revolutionary tension. Industrial and building workers were similarly hit. The labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the secret organization founded in 1927 to maintain the ideological purity of the movement. To make matters worse, the wealthy classes were hoarding or exporting their capital. This posed a terrible dilemma for the Republican government. If the demands of the lower classes for expropriation of the great estates and takeovers of the factories were met, the army would probably intervene to destroy the Republic. If revolutionary disturbances were put down in order to appease the upper classes, the government would find the working class arrayed against it. In trying to tread the middle course, the Republican–Socialist coalition ended up enraging both sides.
This was soon demonstrated. The Republic’s brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order. Then, at the end of the month, clashes between striking port workers from Pasajes on the outskirts of San Sebastián and the Civil Guard left eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. The strike achieved its most notable successes in Seville and Barcelona and was an intense embarrassment to the government which was anxious to prove its ability to maintain order. The Ministry of Labour declared the strike illegal, and the Civil Guard was called in.
In Seville the CNT attempted to convert the strike into an insurrection. Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior, decided on drastic action: martial law was declared and the army sent in to crush the strike. Maura authorized the shelling of an anarchist meeting place, the Casa Cornelio. Local rightist volunteers were permitted to form a ‘Guardia Cívica’ and killed several leftists, including four anarchists shot in cold blood in the Parque de María Luisa. The revolutionary nature of the strike frightened the upper classes, while the violence with which it was put down – thirty killed and two hundred wounded – confirmed the anarchists in their hostility to the Republic.
The CNT was increasingly falling under the domination of the FAI. In the summer of 1931 there was a split between the orthodox unionists of the CNT and FAI members who advocated continuous revolutionary violence. The FAI won the internal struggle and the more reformist elements of the CNT were effectively expelled. The bulk of the anarcho-syndicalist movement was left in the hands of those who felt that the Republic was no better than either the monarchy or the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Thereafter, and until the CNT was uneasily reunited in 1936, the anarchists embarked on a policy of ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ – anti-Republican insurrectionary strikes which invariably failed because of lack of coordination and fierce repression, but enabled the rightist press to identify the Republic with violence and upheaval.
In the autumn of 1931, however, before the waves of anarchist agitation were fully under way, the Cortes was occupied with the elaboration of the new Constitution. After an earlier draft by the conservative politician Angel Ossorio y Gallardo had been rejected, a new constitutional committee, under the Socialist law professor Luis Jimenéz de Asúa, met on 28 July. It had barely three weeks to draw up its draft. In consequence, some of its unsubtle wording was to give rise to three months of acrimonious debate. Presenting the project on 27 August, Jimenez de Asúa described it as a democratic, liberal document with great social content. An important Socialist victory was chalked up by Luis Araquistain, later to be one of Largo Caballero’s radical advisers, when he prevailed on the chamber to accept Article 1, which read ‘Spain is a republic of workers of all classes’. Article 44 stated that all the wealth of the country must be subordinate to the economic interests of the nation and that all property could be expropriated, with compensation, for reasons of social utility. Indeed, the Constitution finally approved on 9 December 1931 was as democratic, laic, reforming and liberal on matters of regional autonomy as the Republicans and Socialists could have wished. It appalled the most powerful interests in Spain, landowners, industrialists, churchmen and army officers.
The opposition of the conservative classes to the Constitution crystallized around Articles 44 and 26. The latter concerned the cutting off of state financial support for the clergy and religious orders; the dissolution of orders, such as the Jesuits, that swore foreign oaths of allegiance; and the limitation of the Church’s right to wealth. The Republican–Socialist coalition’s attitude to the Church was based on the belief that, if a new Spain was to be built, the stranglehold of the Church on many aspects of society must be broken. That was a reasonable perception, but it failed to take into account the sensibilities of Spain’s millions of Catholics. Religion was not attacked as such, but the Constitution was to put an end to the government’s endorsement of the Church’s privileged position. To the right, the religious settlement of the Constitution was a vicious onslaught on traditional values. The debate on Article 26, the crucial religious clause, coming in the wake of the bitterness provoked by Azaña’s military reforms, intensified the polarization which was to end in civil war.
Substantial popular support for right-wing hostility to the Republic was secured during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. The opposition to the Constitution’s religious clauses was equalled in bitterness by that to the clauses concerning regional autonomy for Catalonia and agrarian reform. The legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders contained in Article 26 infuriated the Catholic establishment and the right-wing press, which attributed the measures to evil Jewish–Masonic machinations. During a debate late into the night of 13 October 1931, Gil Robles turned to the Republican–Socialist majority in the Cortes and declared: ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, on 18 October 1931, in the Plaza de Toros at Ledesma (Salamanca), Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic, claiming that ‘while anarchic forces, gun in hand, spread panic in government circles, the government tramples on defenceless beings like poor nuns’.
Indeed, the passing of the Constitution marked a major change in the nature of the Republic. By identifying the Republic with the Jacobinism of the Cortes majority, the ruling coalition alienated many members of the Catholic middle classes. The perceived ferocity of the Constitution’s anti-clericalism provoked the right into organizing its forces at the same time as the union made at San Sebastián in 1930 began to break up. During the debate of 13 October, later described by Alcalá Zamora as the saddest night of his life, the defence of the religious clauses of the Constitution fell to Manuel Azaña. In the course of his intervention, he made the remark that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic’, which was taken by the right as proof that the Republic was determined to destroy the Church. He was merely commenting on a reality already accepted by the more liberal elements of the Church hierarchy that, sociologically, Catholicism no longer enjoyed the preeminence that it had once had. Nevertheless, in October both Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura resigned and Azaña, who had risen to prominence during the debate, became Prime Minister. This upset Lerroux, who had been grooming himself for the job, and was excluded because of widespread fear in political circles that he would be unable to keep his hands out of the till. He went into opposition with his Radicals. Thus Azaña was forced to rely more heavily upon the Socialists. This in turn made it more difficult for him to avoid provoking the enmity of the Right.
In fact, Azaña was caught between two fires – that of the left, which wanted reform, and that of the right, which rejected it. This was made apparent when he came to deal with the agrarian problem. Agrarian violence was a constant feature of the Republic. Based on the crippling poverty of rural labourers, it was kept at boiling point by the CNT. The anarchists, together with the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT: Federatión Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra, founded in April 1930), were calling for expropriation of estates and the creation of collectives. The Republicans, as middle-class intellectuals, respected property and were not prepared to do this. Largo Caballero, as Minister of Labour, had improved the situation somewhat with the four decrees that he had introduced in the spring. However, the limits of such piecemeal reform were starkly exposed in December 1931 when the Badajoz section of the FNTT called a general strike. It was in the main a peaceful strike, in accordance with the instructions of its organizers. In one isolated village called Castilblanco, however, there was bloodshed. When the strike was called, the FNTT members in Castilblanco had already endured a winter without work. On 31 December, while they were holding a peaceful and disciplined demonstration, the Civil Guard started to break up the crowd. After a scuffle, a Civil Guard opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. The hungry villagers, in a frenzy of fear, anger and panic, fell upon the four guards and beat them to death with stones and knives.
General José Sanjurjo, the Director General of the Civil Guard, told journalists that one of the PSOE’s parliamentary deputies for Badajoz, the fiery Jewish feminist Margarita Nelken, was responsible for the entire incident. He went on to compare the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen whom he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a headquarters’. He also declared – mendaciously – that after the colonial disaster of Annual in 1921, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’. Sanjurjo’s words seemed to justify the subsequent revenge taken by the Civil Guard. More importantly, his identification of the Spanish rural proletariat and with the rebels of the Rif indicated how little the army felt that its job was to protect the Spanish people from an external enemy. The Spanish proletariat was clearly ‘the enemy’. In that sense, the mentality of the Africanista high command reflected one of the major consequences of the colonial disaster of 1898. This was simply that the right coped with the loss of a ‘real’ overseas empire by internalizing the empire; that is to say, by regarding metropolitan Spain as the empire and the proletariat as the subject colonial race.
Almost before the cabinet had time to come to terms with Castilblanco, Sanjurjo’s men had wreaked a bloody revenge which killed eighteen people. Three days after Castilblanco the Civil Guard killed two workers and wounded three more in Zalamea de la Serena (Badajoz). Two days later, a striker was shot dead and another wounded in Calzada de Calatrava and one striker was shot in Puertollano (both villages in Ciudad Real), while two strikers were killed and eleven wounded in Épila (Zaragoza), and two strikers killed and ten wounded in Jeresa (Valencia). On 5 January the most shocking of these actions occurred when twenty-eight Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Arnedo, a small town in the northern Castilian province of Logroño. Several workers had been sacked from the local shoe factory at the end of 1931 for belonging to the UGT. At a public protest, the Civil Guard opened fire, killing a worker and four women bystanders, one of them a twenty-six-year-old pregnant mother whose two-year-old son also died. A further fifty townspeople were wounded, including many women and children, some of them babes in arms. Over the next few days, five more people died of their wounds and many had to have limbs amputated, among them a five-year-old boy and a widow with six children.
Then, in early 1932, an anarchist strike was put down with considerable severity, especially in Alto Llobregat in Catalonia. Arrests and deportations followed. Anarchist and Socialist workers were simply being exasperated at the same time as the right was being left with its belief that the Republic meant only chaos and violence. Nevertheless, the need for reform was self-evident, particularly in the rural south where, despite promises of agrarian reform, conditions remained brutal. All over the south, many owners had declared war on the Republican–Socialist coalition by refusing to plant crops.
The response of the big landowners to reform measures had been rapid, both nationally and locally. Their press networks spouted prophecies of the doom that would ensue from government reforms while in reality they themselves simply went on as if the decrees had never been passed. What the vituperative outbursts of the landowners’ organizations failed to stress was the extent to which Socialist measures remained little more than hopes on paper. There was virtually no machinery with which to enforce the new decrees in the isolated villages of the south. The social power consequent on being the exclusive providers of work remained with the owners. The Civil Guard was skilfully cultivated by, and remained loyal to, the rural upper classes. Socialist deputies from the south regularly complained in the Cortes about the inability of provincial civil governors to apply government legislation and to oblige the Civil Guard to side with the braceros rather than with landowners.
Throughout 1932, the FNTT worked hard to contain the growing desperation of its southern rank and file. With agrarian reform in the air, the landowners did not feel disposed to invest in their land. The law of obligatory cultivation was effectively ignored and labour was not hired to do the tasks essential for the spring planting. Braceros were refused work because they belonged to the landworkers’ union. Nonetheless, the FNTT continued to adhere to a moderate line, and appealed to grass-roots militants to refrain from extremism and not to expect too much from the forthcoming agrarian reform. Unfortunately, the statute did little largely because its cautious provisions had been drawn up for Marcelino Domingo, the new Minister of Agriculture, by conservative agronomists and property lawyers. After painfully slow progress through the Cortes between July and September, it provided for the setting up of an Institute of Agrarian Reform to supervise the break-up of estates over 56 acres (22.5 hectares). Therefore it did absolutely nothing for the smallholders of the north. Moreover, the devices used by landowners to avoid declaring their holdings, together with the fact that the reform law’s provisions were riddled with loopholes and exceptions, ensured that it did little for the labourers of the south either. Largo Caballero described it as ‘an aspirin to cure an appendicitis’. And, if it did nothing to abate the revolutionary fervour of the countryside, it did even less to allay the hostility of right-wing landowners towards the Republic.
Another source of fierce opposition to the Republic was the statute of Catalan autonomy. Providing for Catalan control of local administration with a local parliament, the Generalitat, the statute was regarded by the army and the conservative classes as an attack on national unity. In the Cortes, a determined Azaña battled it out with right-wing deputies. In fact, the statute of Catalan autonomy, drawn up by a coalition headed by Francesc Macià, the intransigent Catalan nationalist, was far from the maximalism that had been expected by the Madrid politicians. Nevertheless, they were loath to allow the Generalitat, and particularly Macià, any real autonomy. They regarded his party, the Esquerra, as a short-lived, opportunistic coalition, dependent for its viability on the votes of the CNT rank and file. This did not prevent the right from presenting Azaña’s cabinet as hell bent on destroying centuries of Spanish unity.
However, religion remained the most potent weapon in the right-wing armoury and, to a certain extent, it was put there by Republican and Socialist imprudence. Indeed, justification for blanket hostility to the Republic could easily be found in various manifestations of anti-clericalism. Given the Church’s historic association with, and legitimization of, the most reactionary elements in Spanish society, it was not difficult to understand the extent of popular anti-clericalism. However, considerable distress was caused to ordinary Catholics by many measures which did not attack the institutional Church so much as the shared rituals that were so important in much of provincial life. Municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In many towns and villages the banning of religious processions was gratuitously provocative. When processions did take place, they often clashed with new laic festivals. In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession in the city. Many, but not all, of the members of the cofradías were militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista. Their gesture led to the popularization of the phrase ‘Sevilla la mártir’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see that the processions went ahead. The issue was manipulated politically to foment hostility to the Republic by creating the impression of religious persecution.
In January 1932, Church cemeteries passed under the jurisdiction of municipalities. There were cases of left-wing mayors (alcaldes) imposing a tax on Catholic burials or funeral processions being prohibited altogether. The state recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding were required to visit a registry office. The removal of crucifixes from schools and of religious statues from public hospitals, along with the prohibition on the ringing of bells, caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. There were many cases of left-wing alcaldes placing a local tax on the ringing of bells, to make the Church contribute to social welfare. Religious friction at both local and national level created an ambience that rightist politicians found easy to exploit. The attribution of the Republic’s reforming ambitions to a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot went hand in hand with claims that it must be destroyed and its supporters exterminated.
Indeed, the right soon demonstrated that it would not scruple to use violence to change the course of the Republic. Army officers enraged by the military reforms and autonomy statute were joined by monarchist plotters in persuading General José Sanjurjo that the country was on the verge of anarchy and ready to rise at his bidding. General Sanjurjo’s attempted coup took place on 10 August 1932. Badly planned, it was easily defeated both in Seville, by a general strike of CNT, UGT and Communist workers, and in Madrid, where the government, warned in advance, quickly rounded up the conspirators. In a sense, this attack on the Republic by one of the heroes of the old regime, a monarchist general, benefited the government by generating a wave of pro-Republic fervour. The ease with which the Sanjurjada, as the fiasco was known, was snuffed out enabled the government to generate enough parliamentary enthusiasm to get the agrarian reform bill and the Catalan statute of autonomy through the Cortes that September. Nevertheless, among those who supported the coup were the same rightists who had taken part in the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in 1931. They would soon be at liberty and with plenty of time to repeat their exploits in 1936.
The government’s prestige was at its height yet the situation was much less favourable than it appeared. The Sanjurjada showed the hostility with which the army and the extreme right regarded the Republic. Moreover, while the government coalition was crumbling, the right was organizing its forces. This process was aided by the insurrectionism of the CNT. The rightist press did not make subtle distinctions between the CNT, the UGT and the FNTT. Although the CNT regarded the Republic as being ‘as repugnant as the monarchy’, its strikes and uprisings were blamed on the Republican–Socialist coalition which was working hard to control them. However, while the extreme right in the pueblos (villages) was content to engage in blanket condemnation of disorder, the more far-sighted members of the rural bourgeoisie, who had found a home in the Radical Party, were able to use the CNT’s hostility towards the Socialists in order to drive wedges between the different working-class organizations. The most dramatic example of this process took place as a result of a nationwide revolutionary strike called by the CNT for 8 January 1933 and of its bloody repercussions in the village of Casas Viejas in the province of Cádiz. In the lockout conditions of 1932, four out of five workers in Casas Viejas were unemployed for most of the year, dependent on charity, occasional road-mending jobs and scouring the countryside for food in the shape of wild asparagus and rabbits. Their desperation, inflamed by an increase in bread prices, ensured a ready response on 11 January to the earlier CNT call for revolution. Their hesitant declaration of libertarian communism led to savage repression in which twenty-four people died.
The rightist press moved swiftly from issuing congratulations to the forces of order to a realization that the situation could be exploited. The subsequent smear campaign, in which the right-wing papers howled that the Republic was as barbaric, unjust and corrupt as all the previous regimes, ate into the morale of the Republican–Socialist coalition. The work of the government was virtually paralysed. Although the Socialists stood loyally by Azaña, who bore the brunt of rightist abuse for Casas Viejas, the incident heralded the death of the coalition, symbolizing as it did the government’s failure to resolve the agrarian problem. Henceforth, at a local level, the FNTT was to become more belligerent and its attitude filtered through into the Socialist Party in the form of a rejection of collaboration with the Republicans. The anarchists, meanwhile, stepped up the tempo of their revolutionary activities. The Radicals under Lerroux, ever-anxious for power, drew increasingly to the right and began a policy of obstruction in the Cortes.
The latent violence at local level was transmitted to national politics, where there developed increasing hostility between the PSOE and the newly created rightist group, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA). The new party, which had grown out of Acción Popular and at least forty other rightist groups, was the creation of José María Gil Robles. In his closing speech at the founding congress in Madrid, in February 1933, he told his audience:
When the social order is threatened, Catholics should unite to defend it and safeguard the principles of Christian civilization … We will go united into the struggle, no matter what it costs … We are faced with a social revolution. In the political panorama of Europe I can see only the formation of Marxist and anti-Marxist groups. This is what is happening in Germany and in Spain also. This is the great battle which we must fight this year.
Later on the same day, at another meeting in Madrid, he said that he could not see anything wrong with thinking of fascism to cure the evils of Spain. The Socialists were convinced that the CEDA was likely to fulfil a Fascist role in Spain, a charge only casually denied by the Catholic party, if at all. A majority in the PSOE led by Largo Caballero came to feel that if bourgeois democracy was incapable of preventing the rise of fascism, it was up to the working class to seek different political forms with which to defend itself.
In the meanwhile, throughout 1933, the CEDA was spreading discontent with the Republic in agrarian circles. Gil Robles specialized in double-edged pronouncements, and fuelled the Socialists’ sensitivity to the danger of fascism. Weimar was persistently cited as an example by the right and as a warning by the left. Parallels between the German and Spanish Republics were not difficult to find. The Catholic press applauded the Nazi destruction of the German Socialist and Communist movements. Nazism was much admired on the Spanish right because of its emphasis on authority, the fatherland and hierarchy – all three central preoccupations of CEDA propaganda. More worrying still was that, in justification of the legalistic tactic in Spain, El Debate pointed out that Hitler had attained power legally. The paper frequently commented on Spain’s need for an organization similar to those which had destroyed the left in Germany and Italy, and hinted that Acción Popular/CEDA could fulfil that role.
It was in such an atmosphere that elections were called for November. In contrast to 1931, this time the left went to the polls in disarray. The right, on the other hand, was able to mount a united and generally bellicose campaign. Gil Robles had just returned from the Nuremberg rally and appeared to be strongly influenced by what he had seen. Indeed, the CEDA election campaign showed that Gil Robles had learned his lessons well. Determined on victory at any price, the CEDA election committee decided for a single anti-Marxist counterrevolutionary front. Thus, the CEDA had no qualms about going into the elections in coalition with ‘catastrophist’ groups such as Renovación Española and the Carlists or, in other areas, with the cynical and corrupt Radicals.
A vast amount of money was spent on the right’s election campaign. The CEDA’s election fund was enormous, based on generous donations from the well-to-do like Juan March, the millionaire enemy of the Republic. The climax of the CEDA’s campaign came in a speech given in Madrid by Gil Robles. His tone could only make the left wonder what a CEDA victory might mean for them:
We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity … It is necessary now to defeat socialism inexorably. We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaising freemasons … We must proceed to a new state and this imposes duties and sacrifices. What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power and that is what we demand … To realize this ideal we are not going to waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it.
The Socialists, who had decided to contest the elections on their own, could not match the massive propaganda campaign mounted by the right. Gil Robles dominated the campaign of the rightist coalition, as Largo Caballero did that of the Socialists, mirroring the radical extremism of his opponent. Declaring that only the dictatorship of the proletariat could carry out the necessary economic disarmament of the bourgeoisie, he delighted his supporters but antagonized the right and helped justify its already aggressive stance.
The arguments of the moderate Indalecio Prieto that the PSOE must maintain its electoral alliance with the left Republicans were dismissed by the more radical elements of the party led by Largo Caballero. Their imposition of the decision to go it alone was an irresponsible one. They were simultaneously blaming the left Republicans for all the deficiencies of the Republic and confidently assuming that all the votes cast in 1931 for the victorious Republican–Socialist coalition would stay with the PSOE. In fact, that coalition had ranged from the middle classes to the anarchists. The Radicals were now on the right and, in the wake of Casas Viejas, the hostility of the anarchists to the Republic ensured that they would abstain. The Socialists were committing a fatal tactical error. Given the existing electoral law which favoured coalitions, together with the CEDA’s readiness to make alliances, it took twice as many Socialist votes to elect a deputy as rightist ones. The election results brought bitter disappointment to the Socialists, who won only fifty-eight seats. After local deals between the CEDA and the Radicals designed to take advantage of the electoral law, the two parties finished with 115 and 104 deputies respectively. The right had regained control of the apparatus of the state. It was determined to use it to dismantle the reforms of the previous two years. However, expectations had been raised during that time which could only ensure burning popular fury when the right put back the clock to the days before 1931.
THREE
Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934–1936 (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
In the following two years, which came to be known as the bienio negro (black two years), Spanish politics were to be bitterly polarized. The November 1933 elections had given power to a right wing determined to avenge the injuries and indignities which it felt it had suffered during the period of the Constituent Cortes. This made conflict inevitable, since, if the workers and peasants had been driven to desperation by the inadequacy of the reforms of 1931–2, then a government set on destroying these reforms could only force them into violence. At the end of 1933, 12 per cent of Spain’s workforce was unemployed and in the south the figures were nearer 20 per cent. Employers and landowners celebrated the victory by cutting wages, sacking workers, evicting tenants and raising rents. Even before a new government had taken office, labour legislation was being blatantly ignored.
The Socialists’ outrage knew no bounds. Their own tactical error in not allying with the Republicans had made a crucial contribution to their electoral defeat. However, the PSOE was convinced that the elections had been fraudulent. In the south, they had good reason to believe that they had been swindled out of seats by the caciques’ power over the starving braceros. In rural areas of high unemployment, it had been easy to secure votes by the promise of jobs or the threat of dismissal. Armed thugs employed by the caciques prevented Socialist campaigners speaking at some meetings and were a louring presence next to the glass voting urns on election day. In Spain as a whole, the PSOE’s one and a half million votes had won it 58 seats in the Cortes, while the Radicals’ eight hundred thousand votes had been rewarded with 104 seats. According to calculations made by the PSOE, the united parties of the right had together got 3,345,504 votes and 212 seats at 15,780 votes per seat, while the disunited left had received 3,375,432 votes and only ninety-nine seats at 34,095 votes per seat. In some areas of the south – Badajoz, Córdoba and Málaga, for example – the margin of right-wing victory was small enough for electoral malpractice to have made all the difference. Rank-and-file bitterness at the cynical union of Radicals with the CEDA and at losing the elections unfairly quickly gave way to dismay at the untrammelled offensive of the employers. Popular outrage was all the greater because of the restraint and self-sacrifice that had characterized Socialist policy between 1931 and 1933. Now, in response to the consequent wave of militancy, the Socialist leadership began to adopt a tactic of revolutionary rhetoric. Their vain hope was that they could both scare the right into limiting its belligerency and persuade the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, to call new elections.
Although he was not prepared to go that far, Alcalá Zamora did not invite Gil Robles to form a government despite the fact that the CEDA was the biggest party in the Cortes, albeit one without an overall majority. The President suspected the Catholic leader of nurturing more or less Fascist ambitions to establish an authoritarian, corporative state. Thus, Alejandro Lerroux, as leader of the second largest party, became Prime Minister. Dependent on CEDA votes, the Radicals were to be the CEDA’s puppets. In return for harsh social policies in the interests of the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals were to be allowed to enjoy the spoils of office. The Socialists were appalled. Largo Caballero was convinced that in the Radical Party there were those who, ‘if they have not been in jail, deserve to have been’. Once in government, they set up an office to organize the sale of state favours, monopolies, government procurement orders, licences and so on. The PSOE view was that the Radicals were hardly the appropriate defenders of the basic principles of the Republic against rightist assaults.
The first violent working-class protest, however, came from the anarchists. With irresponsible naïvety, an uprising was called for 8 December 1933. However, the government had been forewarned of the anarcho-syndicalists’ plans and quickly declared a state of emergency. Leaders of the CNT and the FAI were arrested, press censorship was imposed and syndicates were closed down. In traditionally anarchist areas, Aragón, the Rioja, Catalonia, the Levante, parts of Andalusia and Galicia, there were sporadic strikes, some trains were blown up and Civil Guard posts were assaulted. The movement was quickly over in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. In the Aragónese capital Zaragoza, however, the rising did get off the ground. Workers raised barricades, attacked public buildings and engaged in street fighting. The response of the government was to send in the army, which took four days with the aid of tanks to crush the insurrection.
Violent incidents involving the CNT diverted attention from the growing problem of malnutrition in the southern provinces. This was a consequence not only of the determination of landowners to slash wages and refuse work to union members but also of significant rises in the price of basic necessities. The Radical government had removed controls on the price of bread and it had risen by 25 to 70 per cent. Demonstrations by starving women, children and the aged calling for bread became a frequent sight. The spread of hunger in the south was also mirrored in the intensification of militancy within the principal landworkers’ union, the FNTT. Its president, the moderate Lucio Martínez Gil, was replaced by one of the more radical young followers of Largo Caballero, Ricardo Zabalza Elorga. At the end of 1933, then, the Socialist leaders were faced with a rising tide of mass militancy, which was a consequence both of the employers’ offensive and their own feeling of bitterness at the perceived unfairness of electoral defeat. Largo Caballero reacted by intensifying his revolutionary threats although his noisy rhetoric was not matched by any serious revolutionary intentions. His was verbal revolutionism both to satisfy rank-and-file aspirations and to pressure Alcalá Zamora to call new elections. It was a dangerous game, since, if the President did not succumb to such pressure, the Socialists would be left with the choice of stepping up their threats or losing credibility with their own militants. The resulting situation could benefit only the CEDA.
With a pliant Radical government in power, the success of Acción Popular’s ‘accidentalist’ tactics could hardly have been more apparent. ‘Catastrophism’ was for the moment eclipsed. Nevertheless, the extreme right remained unconvinced by Gil Robles’ democratic tactic and so continued to prepare for violence. Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the north and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. In March, representatives of both the Carlists and the Alfonsine monarchist party, Renovación Española, led by Antonio Goicoechea, went to see Mussolini who promised money and arms for a rising. Both groups were convinced that even a strong rightist government did not constitute an adequate long-term guarantee for their interests, because it would be subject to the whims of the electorate in a still democratic Republic. In May 1934, the monarchists’ most dynamic and charismatic leader, José Calvo Sotelo, returned after three years exile to take over the leadership from Antonio Goicoechea. Henceforth, the monarchist press, in addition to abusing Gil Robles’ weakness, began increasingly to talk of the conquest of the state as the only sure road to the creation of a new authoritarian, corporative regime.
Even Gil Robles was having trouble controlling his forces. His youth movement, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP), was seduced by the German and Italian examples. Great Fascist-style rallies were held at which Gil Robles was hailed with the cry ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ (the Spanish equivalent of Duce) in the hope that he might start a ‘March on Madrid’ to seize power. Monarchist hopes, however, centred increasingly on the openly Fascist group of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange Española, as a potential source of shock troops against the left. The Falange had been founded in October 1933 with monarchist subsidies. As a landowner, an aristocrat and well-known socialite, José Antonio Primo de Rivera served as a guarantee to the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not get out of their control in the way of its German and Italian equivalents. Falange Española merged in 1934 with the pro-Nazi Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista of the pro-German Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, becoming Falange Española de las JONS. Perpetually short of funds, the party remained during the Republican period essentially a small student group preaching a utopian form of violent nationalist revolution. The Falangist leader’s cult of violence facilitated the destabilization of the politics of the Second Republic. His blue-shirted militias, with their Roman salutes and their ritual chants of ¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA! and ¡ESPAÑA! ¡UNA! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡LIBRE! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡GRANDE!, aped Nazi and Fascist models. From 1933 to 1936, FE de las JONS functioned as the cannon fodder of the haute bourgeoisie, provoking street brawls and helping to generate the lawlessness which, exaggerated by the right-wing press, was used to justify the military rising. Its importance lay in the role played by its political vandalism in screwing up the tension which would eventually erupt into the Civil War.
The left was very aware of such developments and was determined to avoid the fate of the German and Austrian left. As 1934 progressed there were growing numbers of street battles between left and right. Events within the orthodox political arena did little to cool tempers. Lerroux resigned in April after Alcalá Zamora had hesitated about signing an amnesty bill which reinstated the officers involved in the Sanjurjo rising of 1932. Socialists and Republicans alike felt that the government was signalling to the army that it could make a coup whenever it disliked the political situation. The left was already suspicious of the government’s reliance on CEDA votes, since Gil Robles continued to refuse to swear his loyalty to the Republic. Moreover, since he made it quite clear that when he gained power he would change the Constitution, the left was coming to believe that strong action was necessary to prevent him doing so. In fact, even if Gil Robles was not quite as extreme as the left believed him to be, he managed to convey the impression that the Radical government, backed with CEDA votes, was intent on dismantling the progressive, reforming Republic that had been created in 1931.
In this context, it was difficult for the Socialist leadership to hold back its followers. Largo Caballero tended to give way to the revolutionary impatience of the masses, although his rhetoric, which they cheered to the echo, was unspecific and consisted largely of Marxist platitudes. No concrete relation to the contemporary political scene was ever made in Largo Caballero’s speeches of early 1934 and no timetable for the future revolution was ever given. However, rank-and-file pressure for the radicalization of the Socialist movement, particularly from its youth movement, the Federatión de Juventudes Socialistas (FJS), and its Madrid organization, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, developed throughout 1934. This led to important divisions within the PSOE. The right-wing of the party, led by the professor of logic Julián Besteiro, tried several tactics to slow down the process of bolshevization which was taking place within the party. This merely earned Besteiro the vehement hostility of the radical youth. The centre, led by the ever-pragmatic Indalecio Prieto, reluctantly went along with the revolutionary tactic out of party loyalty. The young followers of Largo Caballero came to dominate the party and the UGT, with the organizations of the Socialist movement falling into their hands in quick succession.
Thus, political tension grew throughout 1934. In March, the anarchists held a four-week strike in Zaragoza to protest against the maltreatment of prisoners taken after the December rising. Then the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an unmistakably anti-Republican gesture. In driving sleet, a crowd of twenty thousand met in a gathering which closely resembled a Nazi rally. They swore loyalty to Gil Robles, ‘our supreme chief’, and chanted ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’. The JAP’s nineteen-point programme was recited, with emphasis on point two, ‘our leaders never make mistakes’, a direct borrowing from the Italian Fascists. One CEDA deputy declared that ‘Spain has to be defended against Jews, heretics, freemasons, liberals and Marxists’. Another, the deputy for Zaragoza, Ramón Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law of General Franco and later architect of the post-Civil War National-Syndicalist state, denounced ‘degenerate democracy’. The high point of the rally was a speech by Gil Robles. His aggressive harangue was greeted by delirious applause and prolonged chanting of ‘¡Jefe!’. ‘We are an army of citizens ready to give our lives for God and for Spain,’ he cried. ‘Power will soon be ours … No one can stop us imposing our ideas on the government of Spain’.
The young revolutionaries of the FJS were convinced that Gil Robles was aiming to take over the government in order to bring the Republic to an end. Various Radical ministries were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’ Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises by complaining that the cabinet was too liberal. As a result, the Radical government was adopting an ever-more conservative veneer. On each occasion, Lerroux, who was desperate to stay in power, would force the more liberal elements of his party out of the cabinet. Accompanied by like-minded friends, they then quit the party, leaving the rump ever more dependent on CEDA whims. After the first of the reshuffles, in March 1934, Gil Robles found a Radical minister who enjoyed his unalloyed trust. This was Rafael Salazar Alonso, the Minister of the Interior and a representative of the aggressive landowners of Badajoz. One of his first acts as minister was to call in the Inspector General of the Civil Guard, Brigadier General Cecilio Bedia de la Cavallería, and make it clear that his forces should not be inhibited in their repression of social conflicts. Although Lerroux resisted the temptation to declare all strikes unlawful, he delighted the right by announcing that strikes with political implications would be ruthlessly suppressed. For both the CEDA and Salazar Alonso, all strikes were deemed to be political. He provoked a number of strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. The Radical–CEDA determination to undermine the Republic’s most loyal support became clear when the government clashed successively with the Catalans and the Basques.
The sympathy shown by the Constituent Cortes to autonomist aspirations was now dropped in favour of right-wing centralist bias. This was particularly the case with regard to Catalonia. Unlike the rest of Spain, Catalonia was governed by a truly Republican party, the Esquerra, under Lluis Companys. In April, Companys passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de contratos de cultivo, an enlightened measure to protect tenants from eviction by landowners and the right to buy land which they had worked for eighteen years. The law was opposed by the landowners and the Catalan conservative party, the Lliga, protested to the Madrid government with the backing of the CEDA. The right of the central government to intervene in Catalonia over this issue was not clear. Under pressure from the CEDA, the Radical cabinet handed the question to the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, whose membership was predominantly right wing. On 8 June, by a small majority, the Tribunal found against the Generalitat. Nevertheless, Companys went ahead and ratified the law. Meanwhile, the government began to infringe the Basques’ tax privileges and, in an attempt to silence protest, forbade their municipal elections. Such high-handed centralism could only confirm the left’s fears of the Republic’s rapid drift to the right.
Trouble increased during the summer. Rural labourers were suffering immense hardship through increased aggression from employers, which had been greatly facilitated by the repeal in May of the law of municipal boundaries. Coming just before the harvest, this permitted landlords to import cheap Portuguese and Galician migrant workers to undercut local wages. The defences of the rural proletariat were falling rapidly before the right-wing onslaught. The last vestige of protection that left-wing landless labourers had for their jobs and their wages was that provided by the Socialist majorities on many town and village councils. Socialist mayors were the only hope that rural workers had of the local landowners being obliged to observe social legislation or of municipal funds being used for public works that would provide some employment. The Radicals had been systematically removing them, Salazar Alonso using flimsy pretexts such as ‘administrative irregularities’. He ordered provincial civil governors to remove alcaldes who ‘did not inspire confidence in matters of public order’ – which usually meant Socialists.
After much agonized debate within the FNTT, Ricardo Zabalza began to advocate a general strike in order to put a stop to the patronal offensive. Older heads within the UGT were opposed to what they saw as a rash initiative which might squander worker militancy and thus undermine the possibility of a future defence against attempts to establish a reactionary corporative state. The harvest was ready at different times in each area, so the selection of a single date for the strike would lead to problems of coordination. Moreover, a general strike, as opposed to one limited to large estates, would cause hardship to leaseholders and sharecroppers who needed to hire one or two workers. There was also the danger that the provocative actions of the owners and the Civil Guard could push the peasants into violent confrontations which they could only lose. Nevertheless, under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard, the FNTT called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law.
While the strike action could hardly be considered revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was not prepared to lose this chance to strike a blow at the largest section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. Within weeks of taking over the Ministry of the Interior, in meetings with the head of the Civil Guard General Bedia de la Cavallería and the Director General de Seguridad José Valdivia, he had already made specific plans for the repression of such a strike. Accordingly, just as Zabalza’s hopes of compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour were about to be fulfilled, Salazar Alonso issued a decree criminalizing the actions of the FNTT by declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. Liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale, including four Socialist deputies. This was a flagrant violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Constitution. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint onto lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Although most of the labourers arrested were soon released, emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years in prison. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. Salazar Alonso had effectively put the clock back in the Spanish countryside to the 1920s.
The politics of reprisal were beginning to generate an atmosphere, if not of imminent civil war, certainly of great belligerence. The left saw fascism in every action of the right; the right smelt revolution in every left-wing move. Violent speeches were made in the Cortes and, at one point, guns flourished. In the streets shots were exchanged between Socialist and Falangist youths. Juan Antonio Ansaldo, a well-known monarchist playboy and aviator, had joined the Falange in the spring to organize terrorist squads. A plan to blow up the Madrid Casa del Pueblo was thwarted when the police discovered a large cache of arms and explosives. The actions of the Falangist hit squads provoked reprisals by the would-be revolutionaries of the Federatión de Juventudes Socialistas. The government’s attacks on regional autonomy and the increasingly threatening attitude of the CEDA were driving the Socialists to play with the idea of a revolutionary rising to forestall the destruction of the Republic.
The JAP held another rally, on 9 September, this time at Covadonga in Asturias, the starting point for the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. This was clearly a symbol of warlike aggression which foreshadowed the Francoist use after 1936 of the violent crusade imagery of the Reconquista. Gil Robles spoke in violent terms of the need to annihilate the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque Nationalists. Revelling in the adulation of the assembled ranks of the JAP, the supreme Jefe worked himself up to a frenzy of patriotic rhetoric calling for nationalism to be exalted ‘with ecstasy, with paroxysms, with anything; I prefer a nation of lunatics to a nation of wretches’. Behind his apparently spontaneous passion was a cold-blooded determination to provoke the left. Gil Robles knew full well that the left considered him a Fascist. He was also aware that it intended to prevent the CEDA coming to power, although he was confident that the left was not in a position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt.
The preparations for revolution by the young Socialists had consisted largely of Sunday picnics in Madrid’s Casa del Campo during which military manoeuvres, without weapons, were amateurishly practised. Salazar Alonso had had no difficulty in tracking down the few revolvers and rifles that had been acquired by means of expensive encounters with unscrupulous arms dealers. Thanks to informers in the PSOE or to the arms dealers themselves, when the police subsequently raided the houses of militants and on Casas del Pueblo they seemed to know exactly where guns were concealed behind partitions or under floorboards. The most notorious arms purchase was carried out by Prieto, when arms – initially ordered by exiled enemies of the Portuguese dictatorship who could not pay for them – were shipped to Asturias on the steamer Turquesa. In a bizarre incident, the shipment fell largely into the hands of the police although Prieto escaped. Only in Asturias was the local working class even minimally armed, as a result of pilfering from local small-arms factories and dynamite available in the mines.
On 26 September the CEDA opened the crisis by announcing that it could no longer support a minority government. Lerroux’s new cabinet, announced late at night on 3 October, included three CEDA ministers. To the left, it seemed as if this was the first step towards the imposition of fascism in Spain. The reaction of the Republican forces was abrupt. Azaña and other leading Republicans denounced the move and even the conservative Miguel Maura broke off relations with the President. The Socialists were paralysed with doubt. They had hoped that threats of revolution would suffice to make Alcalá Zamora call new elections. Now, the UGT gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a pacific general strike. The Socialists hoped that the President would change his mind but they merely succeeded in giving the police time to arrest working-class leaders. In most parts of Spain, the strike was a failure largely because of the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and bringing in the army to run essential services.
In Barcelona, events were more dramatic. In an attempt to outflank extreme Catalan nationalists, and seriously alarmed by developments in Madrid, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’. It was a protest against what was perceived as the Fascist betrayal of the Republic. The CNT stood aside since it regarded the Esquerra as a purely bourgeois affair. In fact, the rebellion of the Generalitat was doomed when Companys refused requests to arm the workers. Bloodshed was avoided by his moderation, which was matched by that of General Domingo Batet, the officer in command of the Catalan military region (or Fourth Organic Division, as it was called). General Batet employed common sense and restraint in restoring the authority of the central government. He ordered his men to be ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ before any provocations. In so preventing a potential blood bath, he incurred the wrath of General Francisco Franco, who was directing the repression from Madrid. Franco had sent warships to bombard the city and troops of the Foreign Legion. Batet ignored Franco’s recommendation to use the Foreign Legion to impose savage punishment on the Catalans and thus kept casualties to a minimum. In avoiding the exemplary violence that Franco regarded as essential, however, Batet was paving the way to his own execution by the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War.
The only place where the protests of the left in October 1934 were not easily brushed aside was in Asturias. There, spontaneous rank-and-file militancy impelled the local PSOE leaders to go along with a revolutionary movement organized jointly by the UGT, the CNT and, belatedly, the Communists, united in the Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance). The local Socialist leaders of the mineworkers knew that the strike was doomed without support from the rest of Spain but they opted to stay with their men. The Minister of War, the Radical Diego Hidalgo, had given Franco informal control of operations. He made him his ‘adviser’ and used him as an unofficial Chief of the General Staff, by dint of marginalizing his own staff and dutifully signing the orders drawn up by Franco. The Minister’s decision was entirely comprehensible. Franco had detailed knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since his marriage to an Asturian woman, Carmen Polo. What delighted the Spanish right was that Franco responded to the rebellious miners in Asturias as if he were dealing with the recalcitrant tribes of Morocco.
To this end, Franco brought in the hardened mercenaries of Spain’s colonial Army of Africa. Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made other more liberal officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem before him with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. The miners organized a revolutionary commune with transport, communications, hospital facilities and food distribution, but had few weapons. Armed largely with dynamite, they were reduced to submission by both heavy artillery attacks and bombing raids. The Spanish Foreign Legion committed atrocities, many women and children were killed and, when the principal Asturian cities, Gijón and Oviedo, fell, the army carried out summary executions of leftists. Franco commented casually to a journalist, ‘The war in Morocco, with the Regulares and the Legion, had a certain romantic air, an air of reconquest. But this war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’
The Asturian rising demonstrated to the left that it could carry out change only by legal means. It also demonstrated to the right that its best chance of preventing change lay with the instruments of violence provided by the armed forces. In that sense, it marked the end for the Republic. To Gerald Brenan, the great British writer on Spain who lived in Málaga at the time, it was ‘the first battle of the Civil War’. The conflict did not end with the defeat of the miners. As their leader, Belarmino Tomás, put it, ‘our surrender today is simply a halt on the road, where we make good our mistakes, preparing for the next battle’. There could be no going back. The October revolution had terrified the middle and upper classes; and in their terror they took a revenge which determined the left that they must reunite in order to win power electorally. The Socialist movement was, in fact, badly scarred by the events of October 1934. The repression unleashed in the aftermath of the October rising was truly brutal. In Asturias, prisoners were tortured. Thousands of workers were imprisoned. Virtually the entire UGT executive was in jail. The Socialist press was silenced.
Nothing was done in the next fifteen months to reconcile the hostilities aroused by the revolution and its repression. Despite the CEDA’s much-vaunted aim of beating the revolution by a programme of social reform, proposals for moderate land reform and for tax reforms were defeated by right-wing intransigence. Indeed, Manuel Giménez Fernández, the CEDA Minister of Agriculture, encountered embittered opposition within his own party to his mildly reformist plans. He was denounced as the ‘white Bolshevik’. There was room only for the punishment of the October rebels. Gil Robles demanded the ‘inflexible application of the law’. Companys was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. The thousands of political prisoners remained in jail. A vicious campaign was waged against Azaña in an unsuccessful attempt to prove him guilty of preparing the Catalan revolution. The Catalan autonomy statute was suspended.
Then, when the CEDA failed to secure the death penalty for two Asturian Socialist leaders, its three ministers resigned. Gil Robles thus resumed his tactic of provoking cabinet crises in order to weaken the Radicals. He hoped to move crab-like towards taking power himself. He was rewarded in early May when Lerroux’s new government contained five Cedistas, including Gil Robles himself as Minister of War. It was a period of open reaction. Landlords halved wages and order was forcibly restored in the countryside. Gil Robles purged the army of loyal Republican officers and appointed known opponents of the regime to high positions – Francisco Franco became Chief of the General Staff, Manuel Goded Inspector General and Joaquin Fanjul Under-Secretary for War. In a number of ways – regimental reorganization, motorization, equipment procurement – Gil Robles continued the reforms of Azaña and effectively prepared the army for its role in the Civil War.
In response to rightist intransigence, the left was also growing in strength, unity and belligerence. In jail, political prisoners were soaking up revolutionary literature. Outside, the economic misery of large numbers of peasants and workers, the savage persecution of the October rebels and the attacks on Manuel Azaña combined to produce an atmosphere of solidarity among all sections of the left. After his release from jail, Azaña, and Indalecio Prieto, who was in exile in Belgium, began a campaign to ensure that the disunity behind the 1933 electoral defeat would not be repeated. Azaña worked hard to reunite the various tiny Republican parties, while Prieto concentrated on countering the revolutionary extremism of the Socialist left under Largo Caballero. A series of gigantic mass meetings in Bilbao, Valencia and Madrid were addressed by Azaña in the second half of 1935. The enthusiasm for left-wing unity shown by the hundreds of thousands who came from all over Spain to attend these discursos en campo abierto (open-air speeches) helped convince Largo Caballero to abandon his opposition to what eventually became the Popular Front. At the same time, the Communists, prompted by Moscow’s desire for alliance with the democracies, frightened of being excluded, also used their influence with Largo Caballero in favour of the Popular Front. They knew that, in order to give it the more proletarian flavour that he wanted, Largo Caballero would insist on their presence. In this way, the Communists found a place in an electoral front which, contrary to rightist propaganda, was not, in Spain, a Comintern creation but the revival of the 1931 Republican–Socialist coalition. The left and centre left closed ranks on the basis of a programme of amnesty for prisoners, of basic social and educational reform and trade union freedom.
When a combination of Gil Robles’ tactic of erosion of successive cabinets and the revelation of two massive scandals involving followers of Lerroux led to the collapse of the Radicals, the CEDA leader assumed that he would be asked to form a government. Alcalá Zamora, however, had no faith in the CEDA leader’s democratic convictions. After all, only some weeks before Gil Robles’ youthful followers of the JAP had starkly revealed the aims of the legalist tactic in terms which called to mind the attitude of Joseph Goebbels to the 1933 elections in Germany: ‘with the weapons of suffrage and democracy, Spain must prepare itself to bury once and for all the rotting corpse of liberalism. The JAP does not believe in parliamentarianism, nor in democracy.’ It is indicative of Alcalá Zamora’s suspicion of Gil Robles that, throughout the subsequent political crisis, he had the Ministry of War surrounded by Civil Guards and the principal garrisons and airports placed under special vigilance. Gil Robles was outraged and, in desperation, he investigated the possibilities of staging a coup d’état. The generals whom he approached, Fanjul, Goded, Varela and Franco, felt that, in the light of the strength of working-class resistance during the Asturian events, the army was not yet ready for a coup.
Elections were announced for February. Unsurprisingly, the election campaign was fought in a frenetic atmosphere. Already, in late October, Gil Robles had requested a complete range of Nazi anti-Marxist propaganda pamphlets and posters, to be used as a model for CEDA publicity material. In practical terms, the right enjoyed an enormous advantage over the left. Rightist electoral finance dramatically exceeded the exiguous funds of the left. Ten thousand posters and fifty million leaflets were printed for the CEDA. They presented the elections in terms of a life-or-death struggle between good and evil, survival and destruction. The Popular Front based its campaign on the threat of fascism, the dangers facing the Republic and the need for an amnesty for the prisoners of October. The elections held on 16 February resulted in a narrow victory for the Popular Front in terms of votes, but a massive triumph in terms of power in the Cortes.
The left had won despite the expenditure of vast sums of money – in terms of the amounts spent on propaganda, a vote for the right cost more than five times one for the left. Moreover, all the traditional devices of electoral chicanery had been used on behalf of the right. Because the election results represented an unequivocal statement of the popular will, they were taken by many on the right as proving the futility of legalism and ‘accidentalism’. The savagery of rightist behaviour during the last two years ensured that the left’s tactical error of 1933 was unlikely to be repeated. The hour of the ‘catastrophists’ had struck. The CEDA’s youth sections and many of the movement’s wealthy backers were immediately convinced of the necessity of securing by violence what was unobtainable by persuasion. The elections marked the culmination of the CEDA attempt to use democracy against itself. This meant that henceforth the right would be more concerned with destroying the Republic than with taking it over. Military plotting began in earnest.
There was an almost instant return to the rural lockout of 1933 and a new aggression from industrialists. The rural and industrial working classes were equally militant, determined to secure some redress for the anti-union repression of the bienio negro from November 1933 to November 1935. Helpless in the midst of the conflict stood the government, weak and paralysed. Indeed, the central factor in the spring of 1936 was the fatal weakness of the Popular Front cabinet. The weakness was born not just of right-wing hostility but even more of the fact that it was in no meaningful sense representative of the electoral coalition which had voted it into power. In turn, that was the consequence of the ambiguity of PSOE attitudes to the Republic in the wake of the disappointments of 1931–3 and the suffering of the bienio negro. While Prieto was convinced that the situation demanded Socialist collaboration in government, Largo Caballero, fearful of a rank-and-file drift to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, insisted that the liberal Republicans govern alone. He fondly believed that the Republicans should carry out the Popular Front electoral programme until they reached their bourgeois limitations. Then, in his fanciful scenario, they would be obliged to make way for an all-Socialist government. He used his immense influence to prevent the participation in the government of the more realistic Prieto. In consequence, only Republicans sat in the cabinet.
Largo Caballero’s revolutionism was never more than verbal but his rhetoric was enough to intensify the fears of a middle class already terrified by rightist propaganda and increasing levels of disorder on the streets. In the south, demonstrations in favour of amnesty for the prisoners of 1934 frequently turned into acts of vandalism against churches and the property of the rich. The task of pacification and reconciliation facing Azaña was enormous given the simmering hatred left by the previous two years. On 9 March, Falangist gunmen in Granada attacked a group of workers and their families, wounding many women and children. On the following day, during a strike called in protest, the local headquarters of the Falange and Acción Popular, the offices of the right-wing newspaper Ideal and two churches were set on fire. On 12 March, Falangist gunmen tried to assassinate Luis Jiménez Asúa, the architect of the Constitution. On 16 March, Largo Caballero’s house was fired on by another rightist terror squad. Azaña’s cabinet was barely equal to the problems it faced. The likeable Minister of the Interior, Amós Salvador, lacked the will to control the spiral of provocation and reprisal. As long as Azaña remained Prime Minister, the government’s authority could just be maintained.
Unfortunately, in April and May there was to occur a series of events which gave credence to the view that the most malignant of fates presided over Spain’s destiny. In order to put together an even stronger team, Azaña and Prieto plotted to remove the more conservative Alcalá Zamora from the presidency. Alcalá Zamora was constantly meddling in the work of the government and had little liking for Azaña. He had virtually no support since the left could not forgive him for permitting the entry of the CEDA into the government in October 1934 and the right could not forgive him for failing to invite Gil Robles to be Prime Minister at the end of 1935. In the Cortes on 7 April, Azaña and Prieto combined to have him impeached on the grounds that he had exceeded his constitutional powers in dissolving the Cortes. The removal of Alcalá Zamora seemed to open up the prospect of overcoming the difficulties caused by Largo Caballero’s hostility to Socialist participation in government. Prieto and Azaña had the skill and the popularity to stabilize the tense situation of the spring of 1936. With one as Prime Minister and the other as President, it might have been possible to maintain reform on a scale to diminish left-wing militancy while dealing determinedly with right-wing conspiracy and terrorism.
In the hope of putting a strong team at the head of the Republican state, neither man considered the consequences of neither of them being able to lead the cabinet. The first part of the plan worked but not the second. Azaña was elevated to the presidency on 10 May and immediately asked Prieto to form a government. He had detailed plans for social reforms and for a crackdown on the extreme right. However, he needed the backing of Largo Caballero, who controlled large sections of the Socialist movement – he was president of the UGT, of the largest section of the party, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, and also of the parliamentary party which he ruled with a rod of iron. Prieto faced his fellow parliamentary deputies twice, on 11 and 12 May. He knew when he had backed Azaña for the presidency that Largo Caballero and his followers would refuse to support a government under his premiership. He could have formed a government with the backing of the Republicans and about a third of the Socialist deputies. However, when faced with the prospect of splitting the party to which he had devoted his life, he could not do so. It was, at best, a mixture of weakness and decency; at worst, of defeatism and irresponsibility. Azaña had been removed from the cabinet and would now be replaced by a feeble substitute, his friend Santiago Casares Quiroga. Largo Caballero remained naïvely confident that, if what he saw as the inevitable transfer of power from an exclusively Republican to an exclusively Socialist cabinet provoked a Fascist or military uprising, it would be defeated by the revolutionary action of the masses.
The consequences could not have been worse. A shrewd and strong Prime Minister was lost. To make matters worse, on assuming the presidency, Azaña increasingly withdrew from everyday politics. He took enormous delight in his ceremonial functions, in the restoration of monuments and palaces and in being a patron of the arts. His replacement as Prime Minister, Casares Quiroga, suffering from tuberculosis, was hardly the man to provide the determined leadership necessary in the circumstances.
Immediately the election results were known, exuberant workers had set about reaping revenge for the starvation and wage cuts of the bienio negro and for the brutal repression which had followed the Asturian rising. In any case, natural disaster intensified the social misery of the south. After drought in 1935, 1936 began with heavy rainstorms which decimated olive, wheat and barley production. Unemployment was rocketing and the election results had raised the hopes of the braceros to fever pitch. Throughout March, the Socialist land-workers’ union, the FNTT, encouraged its members to take at its word the new government’s proclaimed commitment to rapid reform. In Salamanca and Toledo, Córdoba and Jaén, there were invasions of estates by peasants who stole olives or cut down trees. The most substantial land seizures took place in Badajoz. On 29 May, in Yeste in the province of Albacete, seventeen peasants were killed, and many others wounded, by the Civil Guard. They had attempted to chop wood on land that had once belonged to the village and been taken from it by legal subterfuge in the nineteenth century. In general, what most alarmed the landlords was the assertiveness of labourers whom they expected to be servile but now found to be determined not to be cheated out of reform as they had between 1931 and 1933. Many landowners withdrew to Seville or Madrid, or even to Biarritz or Paris, where they enthusiastically joined, financed or merely awaited news of ultra-rightist plots against the Republic.
Many sectors of right-wing society were anxious to role back the reforms associated with the Spanish Republic. This was most starkly clear in the rural areas where the Republic had raised hopes that challenged the existing social balance. It was also true in terms of the Republic’s concessions to regional nationalisms, which unleashed military centralism, and of Republican efforts to break the educational and religious monopolies held by the Catholic Church. One change initiated by the Republic which was less dramatic in its immediate impact yet ignited deep-seated hostility was the movement towards the emancipation of women. The Republic gave much to women but Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War would take away even more.
In the five and a quarter years before the right-wing backlash culminated in the military coup of 18 July 1936, cultural and educational reform had transformed the lives of many Spaniards, particularly women. Before 1931, the Spanish legal system had been astonishingly retrograde – women were not permitted to sign contracts, to administer businesses or estates or to marry without risk of losing their jobs. The Republican Constitution of December 1931 gave them the same legal rights as men, permitting them to vote and to stand for parliament and legalizing divorce. Pressure for the female vote had come not from any mass women’s movement but from a tiny elite of educated women and some progressive male politicians, most notably in the Socialist Party. Accordingly, much of this legislation was excoriated as ‘godless’ by a majority of Catholic women influenced by their priests. For this reason, the right was far more successful than the left in rallying newly emancipated female voters to its cause. In any case, in the period from 1931 to 1936, women of both the left and the right were mobilized politically and socially as never before. They were involved in electoral campaigns, trade union committees, protest demonstrations and in the educational system, both through the massive expansion of primary schooling and the opening up of the universities.
Nevertheless, public life remained a predominantly male precinct. The woman rash enough to put her head over the parapet and intrude upon the patriarchal territory of politics faced accusations of being brazen and – as happened to both Margarita Nelken and Dolores Ibárruri – from there it was but a short step to being regarded as a whore. Such misogyny was less prevalent in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of the left in Madrid and Barcelona, although even there it was not uncommon. On the right, female independence was heavily frowned upon. The further one travelled from the metropolis, the more acute the problem became.
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