Читать книгу The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge - Paul Preston - Страница 13

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.