Читать книгу A People Betrayed - Paul Preston - Страница 10

The consequence of the turno system was that politics became an exclusive minuet danced by a small privileged minority. As well as the caciques who were committed to one or other of the parties, the Conservative La Cierva or the Liberal Gamazo, there were amenable caciques who would work for both parties. This is illustrated by the oft-related story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local rich men’s club or Casino. Leafing through them, he declared to the expectant hangers-on: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. Their apathy allowed the local authorities to fabricate the results without too much opposition. Violent resistance guaranteed arrest, torture and perhaps execution. From 1876, the electorate consisted of men over the age of twenty-five who could afford to register to vote, by paying a 25 peseta tax on property or a 50 peseta tax on their economic activities. For the elections of 1879, 1881, 1884 and 1886, the electorate numbered approximately 850,000. The introduction of universal male suffrage in 1890 extended the electorate to just under four million for the elections of 1891, 1893, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1901 and 1903. By increasing the threat of the electorate using its votes in its own interests, the reform also intensified the use of electoral corruption in the interests of property.1

However, the electoral list had little to do with those whose votes were actually registered. Control of the local judiciary facilitated the removal of enemies and the addition of friends. In 1879, around 40 per cent of those who voted in Barcelona were government functionaries whose jobs depended on how they voted. In 1881, in Valencia, 75 per cent of those that voted had no right to do so. In 1884, Romero Robledo managed to reduce the potential electorate in Madrid from 33,205 to 12,250. That alcaldes were government nominees ensured that they would be willing electoral agents. Those who refused could simply be removed or forced to resign by threatening them with exorbitant fines for invented or trivial offences such as failure to respond to letters or to introduce the metric system.2

This all worked best in poor rural areas, particularly in Galicia and Andalusia, because the votes of a poverty-stricken and largely illiterate electorate could be falsified easily. Accordingly, the official turnout in rural areas was recorded as an utterly implausible 80 per cent. The cities, where it was so much more difficult for the techniques of caciquismo to be applied, recorded much lower electoral participation. As the century wore on, votes in the cities were increasingly the only ones that could be accepted as genuine. Thus, to neutralize them, the ministers of the interior of the dynastic parties had no compunction about resorting to gerrymandering, flagrantly changing electoral boundaries to swamp towns with the falsified votes of surrounding rural areas. This was possible while the Cortes was small and constituencies large. Even then, backward Galicia was over-represented in the Cortes while industrial Catalonia was dramatically under-represented. Between 1876 and 1887, there were only 210 deputies in the Cortes. After 1891, there were 348. By the turn of the century, urbanization saw an increasing influx of deputies from non-dynastic parties and even republicans.3

The quest for government jobs went on unabated. The queues of place-seekers outside his house obliged Sagasta on occasion to sleep in an hotel. Within two weeks of coming to power, he had replaced all the under-secretaries of all the ministries, virtually all the directors general in the ministries of the Navy, of Overseas Territories, of Finance and of Development, seven in the Ministry of the Interior and four in the Ministry of War, forty-seven civil governors, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and three of the eight captains general of the military regions. Sagasta’s election fixer, Venancio González, emulated Romero Robledo and arranged a substantial Liberal majority in the late-summer elections of 1881. The immediate consequence was that, at provincial and municipal level, the number of sacked bureaucrats was legion.4

Under Cánovas, gambling casinos were illegal but were allowed to function when the appropriate bribes were paid. In Madrid, for instance, each casino paid 35,000 pesetas to the Civil Governor of Madrid, the Marqués de Heredia Spínola. Theoretically, the money was for charitable purposes, but there was no auditing. Heredia’s successor, the Conde de Xiquena, tried to close the casinos, only for the owners to mount a bombing campaign in June 1881 which severely injured a number of children. It was later alleged by Xiquena that Romero Robledo had been one of the beneficiaries of the bribes paid by the gambling bosses. The accusation had to be abandoned when Cánovas threatened to bring the Cortes to its knees by leading a walkout of the Conservative Party.5

While the Liberals failed to introduce significant reform, working-class opposition to the system was growing. The Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (FTRE), the Spanish section of the International Workingmen’s Association or ‘First International’, began to organize openly. It soon had 57,000 members, concentrated mainly in Andalusia and Catalonia, but was split over the relative efficacy of strikes and terrorism. The nucleus of the Socialist movement, the Asociación del Arte de Imprimir, was gaining ground through a successful strike by typesetters in 1882.6 In January 1884, Alfonso XII had brought back Cánovas. His Minister of the Interior, Romero Robledo, presided over notoriously corrupt elections on 27 April that year and secured a Conservative majority of 295 seats against 90. Cánovas’s government faced numerous problems – military subversion, the ongoing concerns about the alleged anarchist secret society called the Mano Negra, a cholera epidemic, unrest in Cuba and the fact that the King was facing a progressively more debilitating battle with virulent tuberculosis. In fact, Alfonso did not look after himself, failing even to wear warm clothing on hunting trips in bad weather.

Armed with such a big majority, the new cabinet’s instinctive response to most problems was reactionary. Cánovas himself was seen as intolerably arrogant. The Cuban situation was worsened by the new Minister of Overseas Territories, Manuel Aguirre de Tejada, refusing to contemplate the abolition of slavery. This was not unconnected with the interests of Romero Robledo, who was the son-in-law of the fabulously rich sugar magnate Julián de Zulueta y Amondo. Known as ‘the prince of the slavers’, the Basque Zulueta had huge plantations and three sugar mills in Cuba and others in Álava.7 That connection explains why Romero Robledo would later, in November 1891, seek to be named Minister for Overseas Territories. Shortly after the 1884 elections, a minor republican uprising at Santa Coloma de Farners near Girona was easily suppressed. However, when courts martial failed to hand out death sentences for the two leaders, a major and a captain, the government went ahead and had them shot despite widespread protests, including from the King. On 20 November 1884, a minor student demonstration in favour of a professor who had been excommunicated for making a speech in favour of the theories of Charles Darwin was repressed with some violence by the Civil Guard. On Christmas Eve, a series of earthquakes in Andalusia left thousands homeless, many of whom died from cold and others from the cholera epidemic. A visit to the affected areas left the King disgusted with what he had seen of government neglect. He also ignored the Prime Minister’s advice and visited areas affected by cholera.

Alfonso XII complained to the German envoy that Cánovas ‘knows everything, decides everything and interferes in everything, even in military matters of which he knows nothing and that he gives no consideration to the King’s views and wishes’. He believed that Cánovas was using funds that were needed to modernize the army’s weaponry in order to fortify harbours because there were more opportunities for graft in construction. On 25 November 1885, Alfonso died, aged just twenty-seven. Apparently, Cánovas had been made aware of the seriousness of the King’s condition by his doctor, who had told him that a warmer climate would probably prolong Alfonso’s life. However, he had sworn the doctor to secrecy lest news of the King’s weakness inflame the republican movement.8 His wife María Cristina became Queen Regent and some months later gave birth to a child, the future Alfonso XIII. To ensure that the system established by Cánovas would endure, the two party leaders met at the Palace of the Pardo and signed a pact that consolidated the so-called turno.

In the south, land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as Andalusian labourers came under the influence of anarchism. This was partly the consequence of the fact that, in November 1868, Giuseppe Fanelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, had been sent to Spain by the First International. His oratory found fertile ground and soon inspired his own evangelists to take anarchism to village after village. Part of the message was that alcoholism, the frequenting of prostitutes and gambling were degrading. Alongside the advocacy of austerity, Fanelli also argued that justice and equality should be seized by direct action. This struck a chord among the starving day labourers or braceros and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fanelli’s eager converts took part in outbreaks of violence, crop burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, these revolutionary outbursts were easily crushed and alternated with periods of apathy.9

Commenting in 1910 on why revolution was slow in developing, Rafael Shaw wrote:

The patient submission of the labourer to conditions which he believes to be unalterable is partly the result of three hundred years of corrupt government, during which he has been steadily squeezed to provide money for the wars, luxuries, and amusements of the governing classes; partly of the terror of the Inquisition and the tradition of silence that it has left behind it; partly of Oriental fatalism; but is certainly not due to the animal indifference and stupidity to which his ‘betters’ attribute it. The peasant refrains from open complaint, not because he is contented and has nothing to complain of, but because long experience has taught him the uselessness and the danger of protest. He may offend his employer and lose his place, or, still worse, he may offend the Church and the Jesuits, in which case he will be a marked man, and can never hope to get permanent employment again.

Another reason for the lack of protest against the ease with which corruption dominated the political system was that, at the turn of the century, around 75 per cent of the population was illiterate. Thousands of villages had no school at all. Even in Madrid and Barcelona, there were fewer than half of the schools required by law. Where there were schools, attendance was not imposed and schoolteachers were poorly paid and often not paid at all. Rudimentary literacy skills were taught in the army.10 At first, hunger and injustice had found their champions in the banditry for which the south was notorious, but the day labourers had not been long in finding a more sophisticated form of rebellion.11 When they came, the inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were repressed violently by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.

The owners of the great estates, unwilling to engage in artificial fertilization or expensive irrigation projects, preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros.12 The latifundios were usually administered by bailiffs, who took every advantage of a mass of surplus labour. When seasonal work was available, the braceros and jornaleros were obliged to work long hours, often from sun-up to sun-down. Work was often available only far from home which meant having to sleep in insanitary huts provided by the landowners. The labourers endured harsh working conditions on starvation wages and lengthy periods of unemployment. When the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age sold up and the common lands were enclosed, most of the social palliatives which had alleviated rural misery were curtailed. The encroachment on the lands of religious orders or the sleepier aristocrats saw the collection of windfall crops or firewood, the occasional hunting of rabbits or birds, the watering of domestic animals, which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval, come to an end. Paternalism was replaced by repression. Thus was intensified the process of the proletarianization of a great army of landless labourers. The powder keg of resentment was kept in check by the institutionalized violence of the Civil Guard and armed thugs hired by the bailiffs.

Other devices were used, such as conspiracies fabricated or wildly exaggerated in order to justify the repression of the principal working-class organization, the FTRE. Its weekly journal, the Revista Social, was subject to censorship and occasional confiscation. In the last week of September 1882, the FTRE’s second congress was celebrated in Seville. A total of 209 sections and nearly 50,000 members were represented, mainly from Andalusia (30,000) and from Catalonia (13,000). The FTRE was portrayed by the authorities as a band of bloodthirsty revolutionaries. In fact, the organization’s immediate objective was the eight-hour day and its long-term ambition the collectivization of agriculture and industry. However, this relative moderation was undermined by the fact that members of the FTRE were being discriminated against by landowners and industrialists. In numerous towns, the alcaldes banned public meetings and the Civil Guard treated private ones as subversive. Accordingly, a breakaway group, Los Desheredados, advocated secret revolutionary action and the use of terrorism.13

A drought in the summer of 1881 led to crop failures across Andalusia but especially in the provinces of Cadiz and Seville. The consequent hunger the following winter saw landless labourers and their families begging in the streets of the towns. There were dramatic increases in the number of deaths from malnutrition and related illnesses such as measles, particularly among children. There were violent attacks on property, crop burning and sheep rustling, thefts from bakeries and other food shops and cases of banditry.14 There were some towns where the authorities vainly tried to raise funds to ameliorate the predicament of the starving labourers and isolated incidents of charitable donations for the poor. In some cases, municipal resources were used to finance road mending or irrigation projects to give work to the unemployed. More often, however, labourers were simply advised to seek work in other provinces. By the autumn of 1882, social tension had intensified notably. A wave of strikes was met by heavy-handed repression at the hands of a substantially reinforced Civil Guard. In Jerez, there were demonstrations by labourers demanding work which soon degenerated into food riots. In December 1892, four murders were registered in the area.15 The panic-stricken authorities seized the opportunity to claim that the killers in Jerez and the perpetrators of numerous other unconnected crimes, brawls and robberies belonged to the Mano Negra (Black Hand), a name referring to the dirty hands of manual labourers. The Mano Negra was said to be conspiring to avenge the crimes committed against the working class by the landowners. Allegedly, it aimed to wage war on the southern rich by means of murder, kidnappings and robbery. Furthermore, it was claimed that this secret organization had over 70,000 members. In this context, many workers were imprisoned on the basis of denunciations by a landlord, a magistrate or a Civil Guard, without any need for proof.

In the words of James Joll, the Mano Negra ‘may never have existed outside the imagination of the police, who were always ready to attribute isolated, unconnected acts of violence to a single master organization’. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that in 1880 some member organizations of the FTRE had agreed to carry out reprisals against the owners. By the spring of 1883, as a result of indiscriminate arrests of members of workers’ societies and readers of (legal) anarchist newspapers, 5,000 prisoners were being held in Cadiz and Jerez. Little or no distinction was made between union activity and crime as confessions of membership of the Mano Negra were extracted by torture. The FTRE denied the existence of the Mano Negra and accused the government of concocting a supposed revolutionary organization out of unconnected criminal elements. In fact, it seems that, while there may possibly have existed since the late 1870s a small criminal mafia called the Mano Negra, the link between it and the transparent and moderate FTRE was an invention to justify the repression of the rural labourers’ movement. Indeed, documents produced at the trial of its supposed members in the summer of 1883 revealed that the decisive ‘proof’ of the existence of Mano Negra just happened to have been provided by the commander of the Jerez garrison of the Civil Guard who had conveniently stumbled across a copy of this secret society’s written constitution under a rock in the countryside. Many were sentenced to life imprisonment, which meant confinement in filthy dungeons, and seven were publicly executed by garrotte in June 1884.16 The repression decimated the membership of the FTRE to the extent that, at a congress held in Valencia in September and October 1888, it was dissolved.17

The Spanish Socialist Party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), was founded in 1879 but constituted little challenge to the anarchist movement. Its trade union strength was largely in the printers’ union in Madrid, the Asociación General del Arte de Imprimir, and the textile union in Barcelona known as the Tres Clases de Vapor. The party’s founder, Pablo Iglesias, admitted that, in the 1880s, the PSOE had only around 200 members. Rigidly Marxist, the PSOE leadership both refused alliances with bourgeois republicans and rejected the violent revolutionism of the anarchists. It thus remained isolated. It was not until 1886 that its newspaper El Socialista was published and only in 1888 that its trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), was established in Barcelona. So poor was its development that, in 1899, its headquarters were moved to Madrid. The key to the strategy adopted by Pablo Iglesias was to achieve political power by electoral means which rendered questionable the refusal to make alliances with the liberal republicans. For Pablo Iglesias, the purpose of strikes was not revolutionary but reformist, the improvement of working conditions, and thus insufficiently combative to attract workers in the miserable conditions of late nineteenth-century industrial Spain. By the end of the decade, the UGT was acquiring substantial support in the mining districts of the Basque Country and Asturias.18

Throughout the 1880s, and indeed beyond, the much larger anarchist movement was divided on tactics and strategy. Broadly speaking, on the one hand, there were the so-called collectivists who favoured the building of economic power through legal trade union activity that could eventually implement the social revolution. On the other, there were the so-called communists, who rejected this reformism as consolidating the capitalist system. In its stead, they advocated revolutionary violence. To replace its collectivist ideology, relative moderation and reliance on legal methods, there was emerging a more individualistic anarchism committed to ‘propaganda by the deed’ carried out by fragmented clandestine cells or ‘affinity groups’ such as those advocated by Los Desheredados.19

Strikes and demonstrations started to give way to acts of terrorism. As anarchism took ever deeper root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage and indiscriminate reprisals from the forces of order. Between June 1884 and May 1890, there were twenty-five bomb incidents in Barcelona. The most frequent incidents came as a result of labour disputes and targeted factories, the homes of the managers or the owners, the offices of the industrialists’ association, the Foment del Treball Nacional, and police stations. There were three fatalities and many injured. From 1890 to 1900, there would be another fifty-nine incidents which caused a further thirty-five deaths. The worst years in terms of violence would be those between 1893 and 1896. The intensification of social violence was not simply a result of the ideology of anarchist revolutionaries. Their ideas spread in the fertile soil of a Catalonia experiencing a profound process of social and economic transformation. Rural workers were being attracted to Barcelona and other cities by the growth of industries, especially in textiles. The recent arrivals, relying on insecure work, were forced to live in appalling shanty towns of unhygienic hovels without basic sanitation or adequate nutrition, resulting in high levels of infant, and indeed adult, mortality. Moreover, there was no schooling available for their children. Radicalization, similar to that taking place in France and Russia, was facilitated by the recent invention of dynamite which was available for purchase without restriction in Barcelona. It was not uncommon in the taverns of the poorer parts of Barcelona to encounter men passing the hat for ‘a few pence for dynamite’.20

The social conflicts deriving from the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization matched those arising in the southern countryside from the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The rural proletariat existed on the most meagre subsistence diet. There was rarely more than one meal per day, and it was usually poor-quality bread and gazpacho, a soup made from tomatoes, onions, cucumber, peppers and garlic. Such a diet never contained more than secondary sources of protein, since meat, fish and eggs were beyond the means of the day labourer. A common cold could be disastrous.21 The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, both in the urban slums and in rural areas.

The misery of the southern peasantry was the motive force behind direct action. The indiscriminate repression unleashed in the midst of the Mano Negra panic fostered the belief that any direct action up to and including individual terrorism was licit against the tyranny of the state. In a context of poor harvests with the consequent price inflation and mass unemployment, there were increasing levels of social violence in the form of sporadic estate occupations, thefts of livestock and grain and attacks on owners and estate managers. In late 1891, a building worker from Madrid, Félix Grávalo ‘El Madrileño’, preached anarchist ideas in the villages surrounding Jerez. Among his disciples grew the naive idea of seizing Jerez in order to create an anarchist stronghold as the first step to taking control of the entire province of Cadiz. On the night of 8 January 1892, more than 500 braceros from Arcos de la Frontera, Ubrique, Trebujena, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, El Puerto de Santa María and other towns in Cadiz and Lebrija in Seville, gathered on the outskirts of the city. Armed only with sickles, scythes, pitchforks and sticks but driven by hunger, they invaded the city centre. In part, they were intending to free dozens of workers recently imprisoned after the Mano Negra trials. Their battle cry was ‘Brothers, we are coming for you!’ However, parallel uprisings in several other towns of the province of Cadiz suggested Grávalo’s wider revolutionary purpose. The braceros briefly held Jerez, although their belief that the local military garrison would join them was entirely misplaced. Their triumph was short-lived and the police swiftly regained control. Two innocent passers-by, a commercial traveller and an office worker, had been killed by elements of the mob in an outburst of class hatred. Because they were well dressed and wore gloves, they had been assumed to be ‘oppressors’.22 Fear of the spectre of revolution provoked by the Jerez events ensured that the consequent repression would be severe and extend right across western Andalusia. In subsequent military trials, despite lack of concrete evidence, other than the testimony of Grávalo obtained under duress, four labourers were condemned to life imprisonment. Four more were sentenced to death and executed by garrotte in the market place of Jerez.23

One of the consequences of the repression was the creation of an anarchist martyr in the form of the saintly Fermín Salvochea. He was accused of being the brains behind the entire event in Jerez despite already being in prison. In 1873 he had been Alcalde of Cadiz and had long been a target of the authorities who were frightened by his immense popularity. In April 1891, they had shut down his newspaper La revolución social and, after the May Day celebrations, arrested him. While in jail, he had been visited by the organizers of the Jerez invasion whom he had tried to dissuade from what he saw as a suicidal project. It was claimed that he was behind the assault on Jerez via ‘El Madrileño’ who was deemed to be his puppet. Several prisoners were taken out and tortured so that they would declare that Salvochea had offered the support of the anarchists of Cadiz for the Jerez operation. He was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour but was amnestied in 1899 after serving for eight years.24

The knowledge that confessions had been obtained by torture intensified the spread of anarchism in other parts of Spain. In particular, in Barcelona there were numerous acts of solidarity with the Andalusian labourers which in turn provoked state violence in the form of indiscriminate arrests, torture and executions in the Catalan capital. Initially, anarchist efforts to emulate the terrorist campaigns taking place in France and Russia were notable for their incompetence.25 On 24 September 1893, as a direct response to the repression in Jerez, there was a failed attempt on the life of the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, who, it will be recalled, had led the military coup that had restored the monarchy in December 1874. He was noted for his open hostility to the workers’ movement. The bomb attack during a parade in honour of the patroness of the city, the Virgin of Mercy (La Mare de Déu de la Mercè) was the beginning of three of the bloodiest years of terrorism in Barcelona. One Civil Guard and several horses were killed and sixteen people badly injured. Although Martínez Campos was thrown from his horse and had shrapnel in his leg, he was otherwise unharmed. The would-be assassin, a thirty-one-year-old printer and father of three, Paulí Pallàs, a member of an affinity group, made no attempt to escape and was arrested on the spot.

It is an indication of the inefficiency of the police that Pallàs was the first author of a bomb outrage to be caught. He was arrested and tried five days later. He declared that his only regret was not to have succeeded in killing ‘that reactionary representative of the abuse of power’. He was sentenced to death on 30 September 1893 and executed by firing squad on 6 October. A huge crowd gathered and some of those present were heard to shout, ‘Long live dynamite!’ and ‘Long live anarchy!’ Pallàs’s execution was the beginning of a major repression. In subsequent years, the police persecuted his wife, who had known nothing of his plans. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, sixty anarchists were arrested and six innocent men were executed on 21 May 1894, on the grounds of a non-existent complicity with Pallàs in the attack on General Martínez Campos. Two of them had been in prison at the time and one of those, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, would be avenged years later by his son Ramón in the assassination of the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato. Over the next two years, more than 20,000 men and women were imprisoned, many to be tortured. The blind lashing out by the police confirmed the working-class view that the state had declared war on them. At the same time, Pallàs was regarded in anarchist circles as a martyr. His last words were allegedly ‘Vengeance will be terrible!’ and calls for his death to be avenged began to be heard in anarchist circles. The bloodiest possible revenge would soon be carried out in the temple of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Gran Teatre del Liceu.26

Terrorism was facilitated by the fact that, until 1895, the poorly paid and inadequately led police in Barcelona lacked a photographic archive and even a basic filing system. Its consequent incompetence was compensated for by its brutality. Despised by the working class, it was known as the ‘muddle’ or the ‘stink’. It was not until September 1896, after one of the most extreme terrorist attacks, in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous, that the Conservative government of Cánovas del Castillo responded to the protests of prominent citizens and created a specialist unit or brigade for the investigation of political and social crimes. Given the inefficiency of the police, the government relied increasingly on the army. The high command considered that the only valid response to the threat of anarchist terrorism was blanket repression. Indiscriminate brutality hit those elements of the anarchist movement that condemned violence. The anarchists were already virulently anti-militaristic for both theoretical reasons and in response to the appalling experience of conscripts and their families who paid the cost of unjust colonial wars. As one anarchist newspaper declared: ‘If the bourgeois want war, all they have to do is enlist and go to Cuba.’ Repression exacerbated anarchist hostility to the army.27

Within one month of the execution of Paulí Pallàs, one of the most dramatic outrages took place on 7 November 1893, at the Gran Liceu de Barcelona, the opera house frequented by the wealthy bourgeoisie. Since there had been various warnings of an anarchist attack, to attend the opera in evening dress was an act of provocative irresponsibility. Before a packed house of 3,600 people, a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell opened the season. At the moment in Act 2 when William Tell swears he will free his country from oppression, the anarchist Santiago Salvador i Franch hurled two Orsini bombs from the fifth-floor balcony into the high-priced stall seats. Fortunately, only one exploded but, even so, twenty people died including a fourteen-year-old girl and nine women and a further thirty-five were injured by shrapnel, shards of glass and flying splinters from smashed seats. It was estimated at the time that had both bombs gone off, the death toll would have been massive.28

The subsequent repression was carried out implacably by the fifty-eight-year-old General Valeriano Weyler, who was appointed Captain General of Catalonia on 5 December 1893.29 After more than 400 virtually indiscriminate arrests, six innocent men were put on trial. They were condemned to death after confessions of complicity in the attack on Martínez Campos had been secured by torture. Those death sentences were meant as a warning to the anarchists of the serious determination of the authorities to clamp down on terrorism. Santiago Salvador was not captured until 1 January 1894. A petty criminal of violent tendencies, he had previously been arrested for robbery and fighting. His family background was murky. In 1878, when he was thirteen, he had tried to murder his father, a notoriously violent man who was subsequently shot by the Civil Guard in 1891. In early 1893, Salvador had been badly beaten by the police in Valencia after which he is alleged to have said: ‘every blow that I received would cost tears of blood’. He denied that his action was meant as revenge for the execution of Pallàs. Yet, at another time, he claimed that ‘The death of Pallàs had a terrible effect on me and to avenge him, as a tribute to his memory, I decided to do something that would scare those who had derived pleasure from his death and thought that they no longer had anything to fear. I wanted to disabuse them and also enjoy myself.’

Salvador told a journalist that, after the explosion, he had remained in the street outside the Liceu to rejoice in the panic of the bourgeoisie. He had hoped to go to the funeral of the victims on 9 November to throw more bombs into the crowd of mourners, but his alarmed comrades refused to supply him with the necessary explosives. He and two others were not tried until 11 July 1894. While in prison, he faked reconciliation with the Catholic Church as a device to secure a more comfortable existence. In his well-appointed cell, he was surrounded by devotional books, holy pictures and crucifixes. He dropped the pretence when his sentence was confirmed and claimed that he had merely been playing one last joke on the bourgeoisie. When on 21 November, before a large crowd, he was executed by garrote vil, he died shouting, ‘Long live anarchy and social revolution’ and ‘Down with religion’. Despite having murdered numerous innocents and then fled, he was hailed as a hero by some elements of the anarchist press, although severely condemned by others. Like Pallàs before him, Salvador seemed oblivious to the fact that, in addition to causing so many innocent deaths, his actions brought down a fierce repression on the anarchist movement, many of whose members were opposed to terrorism.30

The Liceu bombing came in the midst of a series of catastrophes which, taken together, did nothing to consolidate public confidence in the political establishment. In October 1893, small-scale conflict had broken out in Morocco. The military governor of the garrison town of Melilla, General Juan García Margallo, had initiated fortification works on land considered sacred by local Berber tribesmen. When the tomb of a Rifian saint was desecrated, 6,000 Rifeño tribesmen armed with Remington rifles attacked Melilla on 3 October. They were driven back by artillery fire which destroyed a mosque and so escalated the initial conflict into a jihad which necessitated considerable Spanish reinforcements. Then a strategic error by Garcia Margallo occasioned numerous Spanish losses in an action in which he himself was killed. It was rumoured that he had been shot with a revolver by a young lieutenant, Miguel Primo de Rivera, who in 1923 would establish a dictatorship. Primo was allegedly indignant that the rifles with which the Moors were armed had been sold to them by the General. No proof was ever found, but the rumour exposed the entirely justified belief that the military administration was corrupt. Incidentally, Primo de Rivera was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, and promoted to captain. The campaign was ended only by a massive show of force that Spain could ill afford.31

Four days before the Liceu atrocity, there had taken place the greatest civilian disaster in nineteenth-century Spain. On 3 November 1893, the cargo ship Cabo Machichaco carrying dynamite caught fire in the harbour of Santander. While crew members from nearby ships and local firemen tried to extinguish the fire, a vast crowd gathered to watch. When the ship blew up, the explosion threw up a huge column of thousands of tons of water which hurled many people into the sea. The shock wave destroyed many buildings in the town and fragments of iron and body parts were blown immense distances. Five hundred and ninety people died and a further 525 were seriously injured, nearly 2 per cent of the population of the city. Among the dead were the principal military and civilian authorities including the Civil Governor whose baton of office was found several kilometres away.

In the wake of the Liceu attack, there were many demands for suppression of the anarchist movement. On 9 November, the government initiated a suspension of constitutional guarantees in the province of Barcelona which remained in force until 31 December the following year. For a brief period, vigilante groups patrolled the streets of bourgeois neighbourhoods. In July 1894, the law was strengthened to make the placing of bombs in public places or causing loss of life punishable by life imprisonment or death. It also widened the penalties against those suspected of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. The exceptional measures did not just limit the rights of those of anarchist ideas but were also used to justify the arrests of republican workers, teachers from lay schools and other freethinkers. General Weyler’s ruthless application of these measures provided Barcelona with nearly two years of tranquillity in large part because the horror provoked by the attack on the Liceu silenced any criticism of police methods.32

Posted to Cuba, Valeriano Weyler was succeeded in Barcelona in January 1896 by the somewhat more moderate General Eulogi Despujol i Dusay. Nevertheless, mass arrests followed a further terrorist outrage on 7 June that year. A bomb exploded in the midst of the Corpus Christi procession moving towards the beautiful Gothic church of Santa Maria del Mar in the Born district of Barcelona. This spectacular annual ceremony was a local tradition that was an excuse for dressing up and it always attracted large crowds. Unusually for a religious ceremony, the monstrance with the host and the ecclesiastical dignitaries did not lead the procession but came after the principal banner. This was always carried by the Captain General with its ribbons held by the Civil Governor and the Alcalde. As the banner was entering the basilica, an explosion was heard at the rear of the procession. The bomb exploded in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous as the crowd was kneeling before the monstrance. Because, a few moments earlier, it had started to rain, the bishop and the other clerical dignitaries had hastened into the church. The bomb killed twelve people including a six-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy and seriously injured a further fifty-four people. Since the bishop and other dignitaries were unhurt and all the victims were working-class citizens, there were suspicions that the perpetrator was a police agent provocateur. Another theory was that the culprit, ignorant of the particular arrangements of this procession, had assumed that the military and civil authorities would have been walking behind the monstrance. Whatever the doubts, the atrocity united public opinion in general and the bourgeois press of Barcelona and Madrid, Liberal and Conservative. The entire city of Barcelona declared mourning, the street lights dimmed.33

There were widespread demands for harsh reprisals against the anarchists who were assumed to be the culprits. The almost unanimous calls for revenge were the prelude to a brutal repression which would take place over the next months. Despite international condemnation, there was a hardening of the legal measures open to the Spanish authorities with the introduction that September of the law for the repression of anarchism. A new police squad was created which imitated the techniques of the Russian Okhrana, using bribery, informers, undercover operatives and agents provocateurs commanded by a Civil Guard, Lieutenant Narciso Portas Ascanio.34 The Captain General placed the investigation in the hands of a military judge, Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Marzo Díaz-Valdivieso, who had presided over the trial after the attack on Martínez Campos that had led to the execution of six anarchists. The torture of prisoners was carried out under the supervision of Lieutenant Portas. Admitting that they had no clues, the authorities proceeded to arrest more than 500 anarchists, republicans and freethinkers. Among them were the widows of previously executed anarchists such as Paulí Pallàs, writers, women who took food to those already imprisoned and even the staff of cafés frequented by leftists. Policemen were paid a bonus for every arrest, so local prisons were bursting at the seams. Workers’ centres were closed down en masse. The majority of the anarchist and other leftist prisoners were held and interrogated in the bleak fortress of Montjuïc, the Spanish Bastille, which loured over Barcelona. The fact that among them were prominent anarchist intellectuals such as Anselmo Lorenzo, Federico Urales, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Teresa Claramunt and lawyers such as Pere Coromines ensured that articulate accounts of the abominable treatment of prisoners reached the outside world.35

One of the most effective of those drawing attention to the scandal was Alejandro Lerroux. Born in 1864 in Cordoba, he had started his adult life as a deserter from the army after squandering his Military Academy fees in a casino. As a fluent if rather lightweight journalist, he had acquired a spurious fame in 1893 by dint of an inadvertent victory in a duel with a newspaper editor. Elevated to the editorship of the then scandalmongering and left-wing El País, Lerroux acquired a popular following as a result of his exposés of the tortures in the Montjuïc prison. He achieved further celebrity with a series of revelations of military repression and government scandals. In March 1899, he launched a new weekly, El Progreso, in which he renewed the denunciation of what had happened in Montjuïc.36

It is probable that the explosion in the Carrer del Canvis Nous was the work of a French anarchist called either Jean or François Girault, who subsequently escaped to Buenos Aires after hiding in London.37 The alleged principal culprit, also a Frenchman, Tomàs Ascheri, a police informer, was arrested two days after the bombing. His denunciations led to the arrest of two Catalan anarchists, Josep Molas and Antoni Nogués. After being subjected to intense tortures, they named others. Horrendous cruelties endured by those subsequently arrested included the crushing of bones, the tearing out of fingernails and toenails, the application of red-hot irons to flesh and the cutting out of tongues. Under these torments, one prisoner – Luis Mas – was driven insane, five died and another twenty-eight confessed to having placed the bomb. On the grounds that one of the victims had been a soldier, the accused were tried by court martial between 11 and 15 December 1896. The prosecutor demanded the death sentence for twenty-eight men. In the event, on the basis of the confessions extracted by torture, lengthy prison sentences were imposed on sixty-six and eight were condemned to death. Three death sentences and forty-six prison sentences were commuted by the Supreme Military Court. Among 194 men sentenced to banishment were numerous famous prisoners who then played a part in drawing international attention to the inquisitorial behaviour of the Spanish authorities. Finally, despite the doubts raised about confessions extorted by torture, five were executed. Before a large crowd, Ascheri as the alleged bomber and Molas, Nogués, Mas and Joan Alsina, the alleged bomb maker, as accomplices, were shot by firing squad at dawn on 4 May 1897 in the fortress moat. The four supposed accomplices died proclaiming their innocence. The prisoners condemned to hard labour suffered inhuman conditions in Spain’s African colonies.38

International press exposures of the tortures brought immense discredit on Spain at the same time as the repression of independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines. In particular, the campaign in France likened the Spanish repression to that in Tsarist Russia. In Britain, a Spanish Atrocities Committee organized mass demonstrations. The exiled prisoners participated in mass meetings and provoked indignation when they showed their wounds and recounted the horrors of Montjuïc. Such campaigns stimulated support for the Cuban and Philippine rebels. However, the repression succeeded in putting an end to terrorism in Barcelona for some years at least. Some of the more violent militants had fled. Intellectuals like Tarrida and Anselmo Lorenzo advocated non-violent action. One of the last violent initiatives of this period took place in September 1897. The journalist Ramon Sempau shot and wounded Narciso Portas and his second-in-command, Joan Teixidó, in a public urinal in the Plaça de Catalunya. However, although Sempau was initially sentenced to death two days later by a military court, his case was passed to a civilian court – an indication of the impact on public opinion of the revelations about the Montjuïc atrocities. The following October, to widespread public approbation, he was found to have acted in self-defence. Portas became the target of public loathing. Cafés emptied when he entered them and he was the object of another failed assassination attempt in Madrid. He was obliged to go everywhere with several bodyguards. Alejandro Lerroux, at the height of his popularity in Barcelona, called him an ‘executioner and a hitman’, comparing him to Nero and Caligula. Portas challenged Lerroux to a duel. He refused on the grounds that a gentleman could have nothing to do with a torturer. Finally, Portas bumped into him in the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid. They went at each other with their walking sticks but neither could be said to have won the day.39

The Montjuïc trial and the preceding repression opened a new phase in the history of the anarchist movement. A direct consequence of the Montjuïc affair was the revenge assassination, on 8 August 1897, of the then Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, by a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist journalist, Michele Angiolillo. It had been widely rumoured that the tortures had been carried out on the direct orders of Cánovas. This was suggested during demonstrations held in Paris and London in protest against the mistreatment of the prisoners. Angiolillo had attended a huge rally in Trafalgar Square at which some of the victims showed the burns and scars that they carried from Montjuïc. After meeting them, he travelled to Spain. He went to Santa Águeda near Mondragón in the Basque Country where Cánovas was taking the waters. He shot him three times. When Cánovas’s wife Joaquina de la Osma shrieked ‘assassin’ at him, he bowed courteously and said: ‘I respect you because you are an honourable lady but I have done my duty and I am calm. I have avenged my brothers from Montjuïc.’ In fact, the savage violence inflicted on the anarchists was successful in curtailing individual terrorism and inclining the movement towards the use of the general strike.40 Cánovas was replaced by the now seventy-two-year-old Sagasta, who immediately put an end to the strategy of total war in Cuba. In this sense, the assassination may have boosted the liberation movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

According to Joaquín Romero Maura,

the most significant factor of the Montjuich repression lies perhaps elsewhere. For the excesses committed by the police did not occur simply because the men in charge of the investigation happened to be heartless and brutal. The Spanish Administration was top-heavy, cumbersome, undisciplined and often corrupt. Scrupulous civil servants had only their conscience to restrain them from abuses. The legislation regarding civil service responsibilities was confused and rarely applied, and no efficient control mechanisms existed. Under these circumstances, with the police force as badly paid as most other lower grade civil servants, its recruitment totally haphazard and providing no security of tenure, scrupulousness could hardly be expected. But the conditions which in other branches of the civil service gave rise to bribery and tiresome delays, resulted in the police harassing individuals and making unwarranted arrests; arbitrariness was accentuated by a lack of self-assurance bred of inefficiency.41

The proliferation of social violence within Spain was matched and indeed intensified by the deterioration of the situation in what remained of the empire. The Cuban rebellion had resurfaced in 1895 and, despite the despatch of large numbers of troops, remained an immense drain on Spanish resources. Swift-moving and flexible guerrilla forces, known as the mambises, were more than a match for the Spanish garrisons. They were supported by consignments of arms, ammunition and other supplies from sympathizers in Florida. By the beginning of 1896, they had virtually won the war. The appointment of the ruthless General Weyler was Madrid’s response. To deprive the mambises of the logistical support of the peasantry, Weyler adopted the policy of reconcentración. Large numbers of peasants were forcibly moved to concentration camps where, without adequate food, sanitation and medical care, around 160,000 died, nearly 10 per cent of the island’s population. Weyler’s brutal strategy intensified hatred of the colonial power and increased American support for the rebels. In October 1897, thanks to international censure and Sagasta’s desire for conciliation with the rebels, Weyler was obliged to resign. However, it was too late for his departure to make a difference.42

In 1897, the Philippines were also in revolt with their defence an additional drain on Spanish resources. To make matters worse, on 15 February 1898 the battlecruiser USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour, killing 266 American sailors. The explosion may well have been accidental or possibly the work of Cuban anarchist provocateurs hoping to see the blame placed on Spain. This was certainly the consequence and it pushed American popular opinion further in favour of the Cuban rebels. Outrage in the United States at Weyler’s measures together with their impact on American trade with Cuba forced President William McKinley to reiterate a demand first made in 1848 that Spain abandon Cuba, albeit by selling the island to the US. In Spain, a wide spectrum of jingoistic sentiment, excluding only the conscripts who had to go and fight, was in favour of war.43

On 25 April, President McKinley, egged on by Theodore Roosevelt, declared war on Spain. Spain’s troops in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico numbered more than the entire United States army, nearly a quarter of a million to 28,000. However, they were scattered across many garrisons. In Cuba, the more efficient American forces, in alliance with powerful local guerrilla movements, quickly targeted key strategic objectives. Armed with rapid-fire Gatling guns, they seized the advantage over the demoralized Spanish conscripts. Moreover, the Americans had dramatically shorter supply lines and were favoured by British command of the seas. In naval terms, the difference was not just of superior resources but rather that the US strategy of heavily armoured battleships with long-range firepower had exposed the weaknesses of the Spanish option of swift cruisers with lighter guns. On the morning of 1 May 1898, at the Cavite naval station in the Bay of Manila, Commodore Dewey annihilated the Spanish Pacific fleet. On 3 July, the Spanish Atlantic fleet was also wiped out just outside the bay of Santiago de Cuba. The war had lasted less than three months. It was the end of Spanish naval power and prestige. The subsequent peace treaty in December 1898 saw Spain lose all its colonies apart from Morocco.44

Despite the reality that a vastly more numerous Spanish army had been defeated, there grew the myth cherished by General Franco that Spanish heroism had held out against overwhelming odds and been ‘cheated’ by technological superiority. Contemporary imagery about the greasy capitalist pig trampling on the dying Spanish lion contrasted with the American view that moral superiority and technical know-how had overcome a decadent enemy. Franco’s perception would continue to reverberate through his career. He was five and a half when the great defeat at the hands of the United States occurred. Although, at such an age, he cannot have been aware of the significance of what was happening, he saw the coffins and the wounded being landed in the small naval garrison town of El Ferrol where he lived. Thereafter, the disaster had an ongoing effect that influenced him profoundly. Many of his schoolmates wore mourning, having been orphaned or lost relatives. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. Living in a military family, he heard the indignant conversations that his father had with colleagues from the naval base in which the defeat was blamed on dark forces such as freemasonry. An essentially middle-class intellectual movement, freemasonry was vilified by the Catholic Church for its anti-clericalism and by army officers because of its foreign links. Subsequently, when Franco became a cadet in the Military Academy, he encountered an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Just as in Ferrol, in Toledo defeat was attributed to the machinations of American and British freemasonry and to the treachery of Spanish politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources.45

The aftermath of defeat saw private grief and public chagrin at the destruction of the illusion of Spanish great-power status. Newspaper editorials, intellectuals and politicians raked over the so-called ‘dying nations’ speech made on 4 May 1898 by the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to the Conservative Party’s Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall. Salisbury had stated that ‘the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’. His words were taken as an accurate prophecy of the future of Spain.

While the agonized inquest went on, the economic ruin that had been expected to follow the loss of empire failed to materialize. There was a minor economic boom as the return to peace brought lower inflation, less public debt and a higher level of capital investment. The drop in the value of the peseta occasioned by defeat stimulated an export boom to other European countries. Some products, such as footwear, olive oil and garlic, were still in demand in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Moreover, there were unexpectedly good harvests in both 1898 and 1899 which increased rural demand for industrial goods, as did the return of 200,000 colonial troops flush with wage arrears to spend on new clothes. Most importantly, there was a massive repatriation of capital from Spanish America. The return of colonial settlers brought both investment and entrepreneurial expertise to the areas, such as Galicia, from which they originated. Nonetheless, although the consequences of 1898 were less dramatic than might have been feared, they were still deeply damaging for the Atlantic ports and the Catalan textile industry. Already inefficient, built on a proliferation of small family firms with out-of-date machinery, Catalan textiles had survived on protection from foreign competition and a guaranteed overseas market. Both advantages disappeared with the loss of Cuba.46

Moreover, the few favourable circumstances that followed the disaster were short-lived. The troops had soon spent their back pay. With subsequent harvests poor, domestic demand slumped. By the autumn of 1900, more than thirty factories in Catalonia had been closed and, in others, workers were being laid off. Industrial militancy was on the increase. Accordingly, the loss of Cuba fostered resentment of Madrid and accelerated the development of Catalan nationalism. Government measures to balance the budget and pay off the war debt provoked a taxpayers’ strike, the so-called tancament de caixes, shop closures and riots. It also fostered the growth of the independence party, the Lliga Regionalista. Eventually, Catalan industry would find new markets, especially in Argentina, and would also diversify into automobiles, electricity and chemicals. However, there remained the problem that the army was assuaging its guilt by concentrating its anger on Catalonia. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish army had known nothing but defeat at the hands of foreign enemies, its only successes being chalked up in domestic civil wars. It was hardly surprising that, when the last significant remnants of empire were lost, the army would cling to a determination that the final battle that would not be lost was the defence of national integrity. Ironically, the defeat which thus fed the flames of Spanish nationalism also breathed life into its greatest enemy.47

The reaction to this monumental humiliation, known thereafter as the ‘Disaster of 1898’, was a national examination of conscience. Regenerationism, as it was known, was an introspective analysis of what was wrong with Spain carried out by intellectuals and politicians in meetings, articles, books and private correspondence. The ‘generation of 1898’ grappled with the so-called problema nacional. The turmoil of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, the revolution of 1868, the chaos of the First Republic in 1873 and the loss of Cuba in 1898 had stimulated an endless poking through the national entrails. The progressive republican intellectual Ricardo Macías Picavea denounced the apparently legitimate institutions and democratic parliament of Restoration Spain as merely ‘the wallpaper with pictures of a parliamentary system which hid the wall of brick and plaster, the caciquismo that was the harsh reality of our government’.48 The towering figure of the regenerationist movement was the visionary Aragonese polymath, lawyer and agronomist Joaquín Costa Martínez. It was he who responded to the defeat with the war cry ‘Schools, larders and double padlocks on the tomb of El Cid’ – that is to say, no more military adventures. In 1902, at the age of fifty-six, he presented to the great intellectual club the Ateneo de Madrid his report ‘Oligarchy and caciquismo as the present form of government in Spain’. He denounced caciquismo and the oligarchy, the political system and the political class as the principal problems of Spain. He compared the cacique to a cancer or tumour, an unnatural excrescence on the body of the nation. Accordingly, the political class had putrefied and blighted Spain through caciquismo and its corrupt practices, obstructing the forces of progress and thus keeping the nation in servitude, ignorance and misery. The solution had to be the iron surgeon who would sweep away caciquismo to facilitate democratic reform: ‘That surgical policy, I repeat, has to be the personal burden of an iron surgeon, who knows well that anatomy of the Spanish people and feels for it an infinite compassion … For Spain to be a parliamentary nation tomorrow, she must renounce it today.’49 In fact, Costa insisted that his surgical solution was compatible with parliament and did not imply dictatorship.50 Ultimately, regenerationism was open to exploitation by both the right and the left since among its advocates were both those who sought to sweep away by democratic reform the degenerate political system based on the power of local bosses or caciques and those who planned simply to destroy caciquismo by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’, to put an end to representative politics and restore the values that were thought to have made Spain great – unity, Catholicism and hierarchy.

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflected on Cánovas and the system that he invented: ‘the Restoration, gentlemen, was a panorama of phantasms and Cánovas the great impresario of phantasmagoria … above and beyond being a great orator and a great thinker, Cánovas, gentlemen, was a great corruptor, as we might say, a professor of corruption. He corrupted even the incorruptible.’51