The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge

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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.