Читать книгу A People Betrayed - Paul Preston - Страница 12

With the humiliatingly swift defeat in an eight-month war against the United States, the effort to crush the rebels in Cuba and the Philippines came to a disastrous end. The shattering of the illusion of Spanish great-power status brought private grief and public chagrin to what had been a bellicose population. Lord Salisbury’s ‘dying nations’ speech was echoed in newspaper editorials and on political platforms. As Sebastian Balfour puts it, ‘the crisis occurred at the highest point in the age of empire, when the possession of colonies was seen as the bench-mark of a nation’s fitness to survive’.1 Yet the constitutional monarchy – which had gone into the war convinced that its own survival was at stake – did not suffer the fate of Napoleon III in 1870 or of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. This was a reflection of the fact that the principal arbiters of politics – the military – were busy licking their wounds and administering the complex process of demobilization. The rest of Spanish society was excluded from a corrupt political system which offered workers and the rural dispossessed only the stark choice of violent resistance or apathy.

The fallout from the disaster of 1898 eventually hit several parts of the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia, for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. The sectors most dependent on colonial trade were badly hit, although a diversification of export targets and technological change eventually eased the difficulties. Uprooted Spanish entrepreneurs came back home with business know-how and substantial capital. Nonetheless, Catalan industrialists were driven to campaign for political change and modernization to increase domestic consumption. Moreover, the disaster of 1898 intensified the pre-existing alienation of the Catalan middle classes from the Spanish state. Already a cauldron of social tension as anarchist labourers migrated from the estates of Andalusia, Murcia and the Catalan hinterland, Barcelona was the scene of strikes and terrorist atrocities by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Although the Spanish economy remained predominantly agrarian, in the early years of the century a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Cataluña, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias.2 Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than that from British mines. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the hesitant growth of these industries led to the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also fostered the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basque and Catalan industrialists paid a very high proportion of Spain’s tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy.

The notoriously corrupt elections of 19 May 1901 saw the machinery of caciquismo move from the exchange of favours for votes to outright purchase of them or the use of violence to force voting in one direction or another or simply to prevent voting altogether. Nevertheless, the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista, won its first electoral victory. It had been established only three weeks earlier by uniting the most conservative elements of Catalan nationalism with the express intention of working ‘by all legitimate means for the autonomy of the Catalan people within the Spanish State’. Its leader was the shrewd banker Francisco Cambó, the President of the industrialists’ association, the Fomento Nacional. Between 1901 and 1905, the Lliga and the republicans destroyed the turno system in Barcelona. In the elections of 1901, all four Lliga candidates and both republicans won their seats. Henceforth, elections would be fought on left–right lines, between the various left-wing republican groups and the conservative and Catalanist Lliga.3

Elsewhere, the corrupt system of the Restoration survived, with the increase in electoral competition being met by an intensification of corrupt practices. At the turn of the century, the accounts of the March Hermanos Company of Mallorca revealed substantial payments made in cash, cigars and even cakes (ensaimadas) to secure votes in elections and to bribe frontier guards (carabineros), to turn a blind eye to tobacco smuggling.4 In 1905, electors were abducted off the streets in Alicante. In Guadalajara and other provinces, in 1905 and in most elections of the period, the Conde de Romanones used his immense fortune to establish an arsenal of favours and threats that his agents could use to gain votes.5 The choice between the purchase of votes and the exercise of violence depended in part on the financial resources of the political group in question. Wealthy industrialists and mine owners in the Basque Country frequently resorted to purchase while the wheat growers of Old Castile were more often to be found using compulsion of one kind or another, especially the threat to foreclose mortgages or not to buy the wheat of the small producers. In order for any of this to happen, candidates had first to be authorized by the Ministry of the Interior. There, the encasillado (the list of candidates selected to win a seat) was drawn up according to the political needs of the day and the recommendations of influential figures.6 Thus electoral fraud signified that there would be wild swings of votes from one election to the next, especially in rural areas. In some poor regions, such as Andalusia or Galicia, the government of the day was able to maintain control of the elections. In Andalusia, between 1899 and 1923, some 49 per cent of Cortes seats went to members of the Liberal Party and 44 per cent to members of the Conservative Party. Only 7 per cent of seats were ‘won’ by members of opposition parties and, even then, only because the Ministry of the Interior had included them in the encasillado.7

The impact of 1898 among intellectuals of the right and the left saw unmitigated criticism of the deficiencies of the political system. One response came from the austere Conservative Antonio Maura, who tried to reform Spanish politics between 1900 and 1910 by means of the so-called ‘revolution from above’. Born in Palma de Mallorca in 1853, Maura had arrived in Madrid in 1868 to study law, barely able to speak Spanish. By the time he came to political prominence his eloquence in the language was legendary. He had long been committed to reform of Restoration politics, initially, as the brother-in-law of Germán Gamazo, in the Liberal Party. A rigidly austere Catholic, he would punish himself by renouncing smoking on any day on which an examination of his conscience revealed a sin.8 His scathing oratorical skills could crush opponents and rendered him a divisive figure. In fact, his arrogant and authoritarian manner belied his relatively liberal ideology. Nevertheless, his desire for reform of the political system was inhibited by a fear of the masses.9

Maura would be Prime Minister five times, the first from December 1903 to December 1904; the longest (with a brief one-month interruption in March 1907) from January 1907 to October 1909 and finally for three short periods during the death agony of the Restoration system: March to November 1918, April to July 1919 and August 1921 to March 1922. His successes, and even more his failures, illustrate the problems of the Restoration system. If he was the great white hope of the system in his first governments, by 1918 he would be called upon, in the words of his friend César Silio, to be ‘the fireman of the monarchy’.10 After the death of Gamazo, he had taken the remnants of his faction into Francisco Silvela’s Conservative Party in 1902. He had gradually come to believe that Silvela was more open to ideas of national regenerationism than the Liberals. In 1899, Silvela had underlined ‘the need for a real revolution carried out from above with a determination to change profoundly our political, administrative and social way of being’. In July 1901, Maura declared in the Cortes that there had to be a revolution imposed by the government in order to forestall a more catastrophic revolution from below.11

In April 1903, as Minister of the Interior in Silvela’s cabinet, Maura supervised ‘clean’ elections for the first time in the history of the Restoration. He undermined the networks of clientelism by appointing provincial civil governors without links to the local caciques. He also curtailed bribes to the press and refrained from using the encasillado, the imposition of governmental candidates on constituencies. His lifelong contempt for the press was reciprocated, which would always be a serious handicap. Since his speeches were often distorted, he declared that ‘the diary of parliamentary proceedings is my newspaper’. Although, thanks to the entrenched power of the caciques, the Conservatives achieved a healthy majority, with government intervention limited, in the 1903 elections, thirty-four republican candidates were returned in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. The Queen Regent was furious, convinced that Maura had endangered the monarchy with what she regarded as self-indulgent moralism. Still having enormous influence over her recently enthroned son, she mobilized him against Silvela. The young King told Silvela that he must either oblige Maura to use the full arsenal of electoral chicanery or sack him. He refused. In fact, suffering ill health, he was more than ready to resign and, ironically, his departure saw Maura become leader of the Conservative Party.12 This tension with the Royal Palace and Maura’s austere manner explain why he was the only minister whom Alfonso XIII did not address with the informal tú form, but rather with the more respectful usted and ‘Don Antonio’. This accounts for the underlying contradiction whereby, in the words of Maura’s protégé Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, ‘the King would regard him with profound respect and uncontrollable antipathy’.13

From the beginnings of their relationship, the young Alfonso XIII resented Maura’s attempts to make him act with the dignity becoming his role. The eighteen-year-old King was becoming obsessed with fast French cars. In early September 1904, several ministers expressed in cabinet their concern that Alfonso was risking his life with such powerful vehicles. Maura had declared: ‘We have only him and, if anything happens to him, no one else.’ The King bore a grudge. When Maura’s Minister of War tried to name a new chief of the General Staff, Alfonso insisted on his own candidate, General Camilo García de Polavieja. Opposing the view of the entire cabinet, he refused to back down and forced the resignation of Maura’s government. That his behaviour resembled an infantile tantrum was revealed when Alfonso took Maura’s successor, the seventy-one-year-old General Marcelo de Azcárraga Palmero, to watch him driving a car over blazing logs and then told him to make sure that he told Maura what he had seen. General Azcárraga’s government lasted little more than a month.14

After this brief hiatus, Maura returned to power following the election of 21 April 1907, managed by the Minister of the Interior, the thuggish Juan de la Cierva. It was one of the most corrupt in Spanish history. Maura disliked La Cierva’s open espousal of electoral corruption yet came to rely on him. The relationship would consistently undermine his own career. Although the anarchists eschewed establishment politics, the Socialists and Republicans were slowly becoming ever more effective in mobilizing working-class votes in order to secure representation in the Cortes. Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Republican Party had also had some success in this regard in Catalonia in the elections of 1901 and 1903.15 In consequence, La Cierva’s ‘skills’ came to seem indispensable.

Elections aside, in the two decades before the First World War the principal challenges to the system came from a burgeoning anarchosyndicalism and the more slowly growing Socialist movement. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), saw their ranks swelled by the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao, and the coalminers of Asturias. Given the ideological differences between anarchism and socialism, there was never much likelihood of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement. The possibility was definitively eliminated by the decision, in 1899, of the party’s rigid leader Pablo Iglesias to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent, this cut off the Socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was further hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism, mediated through the dead hand of Pablo Iglesias. He rendered the party isolationist, committed to the view that the Socialists should work legally for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.16

The differences between the Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists were illustrated by the general strike that paralysed Barcelona in mid-February 1902. In May 1901, the government had responded to a strike of tram workers by declaring martial law. So many workers were arrested that there was no room in the city prison and many were detained in the hold of the battlecruiser Pelayo.17 This was followed in December by a strike of metalworkers in favour of a reduction of the working day from ten to nine hours. The metalworkers had faced fierce obstacles. They had no strike funds, and widespread unemployment made it easy for the factory owners to recruit blacklegs. Nevertheless, 10,000 workers managed to stay out for the next eight weeks. Then on 17 February 1902, the anarchist unions declared a general strike in solidarity with the metallurgical unions. Within a few days, it involved around 80,000 of Barcelona’s workforce of 144,000. The city was without public transport, newspapers, shops, banks and cafés for a week. The response of the authorities was brutal. Martial law was declared within a week. Strike leaders were arrested and pickets broken up with cavalry charges. At least twelve workers were killed and several dozen injured. The strikers were defeated and returned to work on 24 February. The organized workers’ movement in Catalonia was dramatically weakened. Trade unions were suppressed and the anarchist movement forced underground. The Socialist leadership had urged its militants to stand aside for fear of such consequences. Pablo Iglesias later denounced the anarchists for their irresponsibility and the party newspaper El Socialista accused the anarchists of being ‘auxiliaries of the bourgeoisie’. Although it was a failure, the 1902 strike ultimately strengthened the anarchists and consolidated their hostility towards the Socialist movement.18

The long-standing monopoly of political power by the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization, but it would not be surrendered easily. Industrialization brought with it challenges from powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement. The system was also opposed by an increasingly influential group of middle-class republicans. As well as distinguished individuals like Joaquín Costa, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic. The most notable among them was the intensely learned man of letters Manuel Azaña, who would eventually become Prime Minister and later President of the Second Republic.

Some elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio Prieto, recognized that the non-violent triumph of socialism required the prior establishment of liberal democracy. The rise of republicanism inclined them to fight for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans. Anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and opposition to the Moroccan adventure was bringing the two closer together. Prieto’s experiences in Bilbao had shown that, alone, the Socialists had little chance of electoral success while, with the Republicans, it was possible. His advocacy of a Republican–Socialist electoral combination in 1909 opened up the long-term prospect of building socialism legally from parliament. However, it also brought him into conflict with local leaders such as Facundo Perezagua, who advocated an exclusively syndicalist strategy of confrontational strike action. After a long and bitter struggle within the Federación Provincial Socialista de Vizcaya, Prieto eventually defeated Perezagua, and thereafter Bilbao became a stronghold of Republican–Socialist collaboration. That was enough to earn Prieto the lifelong hostility of the UGT Vice-President, Francisco Largo Caballero, who shared Perezagua’s distrust of bourgeois Republicans. Republican–Socialist collaboration would be the basis of eventual PSOE success. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias himself was elected to parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the unrelenting animosity of Largo Caballero would bedevil Prieto’s existence and eventually, in the 1930s, have devastating consequences for Spain.19

Another Republican movement that seemed to be threatening the system was the brainchild of the outrageous rogue and virtuoso carpetbagger Alejandro Lerroux. After his success on the back of the Montjuïc tortures, his popularity was consolidated by his exposure of a series of provocations by a Civil Guard named Captain Morales. In 1903, Morales fabricated a supposed anarchist conspiracy to set off bombs in Tarragona. Having then ‘discovered’ a cache of bombs and thus ‘foiled’ the plot, he had numerous workers arrested who, after being tortured, confessed their involvement. Lerroux played a leading part in exposing the farce and securing the release of the prisoners and the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Morales.20 His skills as a rabble-rousing demagogue propelled him to the leadership of a mass Republican movement in the slums of Barcelona and his ability as an organizer built a formidable electoral machine. He was receiving money from the central government, a common practice in a period when politicians paid for news to be inserted in or excluded from newspapers. This gave rise to the widespread belief that he had been sent to Barcelona by Segismundo Moret, the Minister of the Interior in Mateo Sagasta’s government, in order to deploy his rabble-rousing skills to divide the anarcho-syndicalist masses and undermine the rise of Catalan nationalism.

Probably no government slush fund could have achieved what he did. His links to anti-monarchical terrorist conspiracies would also have made him far from suitable as an agent of Madrid. He had been called to Barcelona to be a republican parliamentary candidate in the 1901 general elections. To become ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’, the Barcelona district where misery, criminality and prostitution held sway, required more genuine appeal than anything that could be conjured up in Madrid ministries. His sincere concern for the injustice suffered by the working class did not need bribery. His popularity would be built on the Radicals’ provision of urban services, including libraries and ateneos (debating clubs) and, less salubriously, the near-pornographic techniques of his anti-clerical demagogy. Lerroux shared the profound anti-clericalism of immigrant labourers for whom the Church was the defender of the brutally unjust rural social order from which they had fled. It was only later that his venality saw anti-Catalanism and pro-militarism coming to the fore in his oratorical repertoire.21

The rural and urban proletariats believed that the Church was the ally and legitimizer of economic oppression. A factor that fed the notion was a deeply held conviction that priests systematically betrayed the secret of the confessional in the interests of the rich. It was believed that domestic servants were sent to confession so that the mistress might learn from the priest what the maid had been doing wrong and that crimes committed by the illegitimate children of clergymen were immune from prosecution. The religious orders were seen as parasites. Commenting on the ‘silent defiance’ of workmen, Rafael Shaw wrote: ‘For years past I have noticed that no member of the working classes salutes a priest or friar in the streets.’ Another factor in popular hostility was the fact that monasteries and convents undercut small tradespeople engaged in baking, laundry or needlework. Enmity was not one-sided. Through its press and pulpits, the Catholic Church carried out virulent and incendiary campaigns against lay education.22

There were two attempts on the life of the Prime Minister Antonio Maura in 1904, in Barcelona on 12 April and in Alicante two weeks later. Hoping to drive a wedge between Catalan Conservatives and the Republicans and anarchists, Maura had decided that it was time for King Alfonso XIII to visit Catalonia. For fear of terrorism, María Cristina had not been to Barcelona since 1888 and, since his coronation in May 1902, nor had her son. It was an adventurous gamble. On 4 April 1904, Lerroux wrote an article in La Publicidad, urging ‘the poor, the paralysed and the beggars’ to line the route of the King’s procession in their shabbiest rags: ‘Let them approach, let them see him at close range and observe how the monster of history has the face of a child and questioning eyes.’ Tramps and the disabled in rags thronged the centre of the city. The King made some pro-Catalan gestures, such as asking for the members of the landowners’ association, the Instituto Catalán de San Isidro, to address him in the language. Maura’s gamble paid off. Alfonso received a degree of public acclaim and the visit seemed to have passed off without major incident. However, on 12 April, as the royal party was leaving the Cathedral after a Te Deum, a nineteen-year-old anarchist stonemason, Joaquim Miquel Artal, jumped on the running board of Maura’s carriage, shouting ‘Long live anarchy!’ He leaned in and stabbed and slightly wounded Maura with a kitchen knife. He seems to have been acting, alone although he was carrying a copy of the newspaper with Lerroux’s article. He was given a seventeen-year sentence and died in prison in Ceuta in November 1909, allegedly as a result of a savage beating. Maura was not harmed in the second attack in Alicante two weeks later and the unknown assailants were never caught. The attacks and his survival massively consolidated Maura’s prestige.23

After the success of the Barcelona trip, Maura now decided that the image of Alfonso XIII could be improved even more by international visits. For Spanish revolutionaries, especially Lerroux, this constituted a threat to their efforts to present the Spanish monarchy as authoritarian and priest-ridden. It was also seen as an opportunity to kill the King and hasten the advent of a republic. By 1903, Lerroux, whose rhetoric was as radical as that of the anarchists, had managed to unite most republican groups into the Unión Republicana. Spanish revolutionaries exiled in Paris, led by the exiled republican Nicolás Estévanez, who had very briefly been Minister for the Army in the government of Pi y Margall, created a similar group, known as the Junta de Acción y Unión Republicana. Since early 1904, they had been publishing virulent pamphlets denouncing the monarchy as responsible for the tortures of Montjuïc and calling for Artal’s example to be followed. One of the authors was an anarchist medical student, Pedro Vallina, a protégé of Fermín Salvochea. He had suffered some months in prison, having been framed by the police for involvement in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Alfonso XIII during his coronation in May 1902. To avoid further police attention, Vallina had fled to France in October that year with a letter of introduction from Salvochea to Nicolás Estévanez. There, he had acquired some skill in bomb making.

Now, in response to news that Alfonso XIII was to make a state visit to France, the group began to plan his assassination. The mastermind and financier of the conspiracy was the fiercely anti-clerical educationalist Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the wealthy director of the rationalist Escuela Moderna and of a number of lay schools in Barcelona. Ostensibly bookish and respectable, Ferrer was using his fortune to sponsor major acts of terrorism. There were close links between the Paris and Barcelona groups of anarchists and radical republicans. Indeed, Vallina had visited Barcelona in February 1905 where he had persuaded Lerroux that the death of the unmarried and childless King would expose divisions in the army and facilitate a republican coup. To this end, Ferrer had paid for Vallina to set up a laboratory that could manufacture crude Orsini bombs in Barcelona. Lerroux and Estévanez made plans with sympathizers within the army. Lerroux also sent his friend Ricardo Fuente, the one-time editor of El País, to Paris, apparently to cover the royal visit but really so that he could telegraph him with the news of the outcome of the attempted regicide. The bombs to be used in Paris were prepared by Vallina. The bomb thrower was to be Mateo Morral Roca, the austere and highly educated son of a wealthy Catalan textile industrialist. Morral was a close collaborator of Ferrer, working as librarian and in the publishing section of the Escuela Moderna. He was also a devoted admirer of Estévanez whose pamphlet Pensamientos revolucionarios he had published and which Ferrer had paid for. On 25 May, the French police arrested Vallina and several other conspirators. Nevertheless, on the night of 31 May 1905, as Alfonso XIII and President Émile Loubet returned from the opera, Morral threw two bombs at the cavalcade as it passed down the Rue de Rohan. Only one exploded, injuring seventeen people, but the King and the President were unharmed.24

Morral escaped, but the planned coup in Spain came to nothing. The anarchists arrested alongside Vallina included an Italian, Carlo Malato, an Englishman, Bernard Harvey, and a Frenchman, Eugène Caussanel. Although Harvey was a teacher of English, his knowledge of chemistry had helped Vallina and Morral make the bombs. They were held for six months before eventually being put on trial in October 1906. Malato was a senior freemason and had influential political friends in the French establishment. A major campaign was mounted linking the trial to the scandal over the Montjuïc tortures and arguing that the assassination attempt had been a provocation prepared by the Spanish police in order to discredit the republicans in Spain. Among those who made eloquent speeches for the defence, as well as Lerroux and Estévanez, were the French Socialists Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand. Despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement in the assassination plot, Vallina and the three others would be found innocent.25

The first years of the twentieth century thus saw an explosive cocktail of intransigence on the part of landowners, industrialists and the military and subversion from a disparate array of anarchists, Lerroux’s Radicals, moderate republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in which rapid albeit sporadic industrialization and increasing labour organization coincided with a resurgence of terrorism and post-imperial trauma in the armed forces. Disappointed by defeat in Cuba and subsequent budgetary restrictions, a resentful army turned inwards, determined to lose no more battles. Wounded pride turned into a neurotic sensitivity to perceived slurs on military honour. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, General Camilo García de Polavieja, the Minister of War in Francisco Silvela’s Conservative administration, blamed defeat on political incompetence and floated the idea of a military dictatorship.

The army’s inflated sense of its importance in domestic politics was exaggerated by Alfonso XIII who saw himself as a soldier-king. He had been educated as an officer cadet and, like his admired cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, he delighted in dressing up in uniform, presiding over parades and granting audiences to favoured officers. He encouraged senior generals to discuss problems with him directly rather than through the official channel of the Ministry of War. He exceeded his constitutional powers by interfering in military appointments, promotions and decorations, favouring his pet officers to a degree that smacked of corruption. According to one minister, the future President of the Second Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, he behaved as if he was the Minister of War, in which capacity he frequently indulged petty personal caprices. He even charged the expenses of the deposed Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the Ministry’s budget. By his identification with the army and his insistence on his personal prerogatives, the King impeded the modernization of the Restoration system. In a series of clashes between civilian and military power, he undermined the authority of various governments and encouraged military insubordination.26

The officer corps became obsessed with the defence of national unity and the existing social order and thus was increasingly hostile both to the left and to the regional nationalists. There were clashes with both Basque and Catalan nationalists. The military attitude to Catalanism was especially aggressive and bordering on racist. Catalans were denounced as cowardly traitors and misers. The anti-Semitic right frequently described Catalans as the Jews of Spain and this was reflected in the military press. A newspaper that claimed to represent army officers, La Correspondencia Militar, demanded that Catalan and Basque nationalists be forced from the country. ‘Let them wander the world, without a fatherland, like the cursed race of the Jews. Let this be an eternal punishment.’27 Since Cuba had been regarded as simply an overseas part of the patria, its loss was perceived as a diminution of the nation. Thousands of officers had served in Cuba and the Philippines and many had been killed or wounded in defence of Spanish hegemony. Traumatized by their loss, colonial officers saw the rising Catalan and Basque nationalist movements as threats comparable to the Cuban independence movement and thus an intolerable challenge. There was another practical consideration – military ambitions to rebuild the armed forces and regenerate Spain would be fatally undermined if Catalonia’s wealth and its tax revenue were lost. Even if Catalan autonomy could be held off, Catalanists were regarded as anti-militarists keen to reduce the army budget and the size of the inflated officer corps.28

Denounced as ‘separatists’, the Barcelona bourgeoisie responded by mocking as unsophisticated hobbledehoys the officers stationed in Catalonia. Right-wing and centralist, army officers were easily needled by the anti-militarist views of Catalanist politicians and the sarcastic jibes of their press. ¡Cu-cut!, the Lliga Regionalista’s weekly satirical journal, often published derisive cartoons portraying army and navy officers as pompous buffoons. In November 1905, the Lliga celebrated its victory in Barcelona’s municipal elections by hosting a victory dinner for 2,500 guests. The report of the event in ¡Cu-cut! was illustrated with a cartoon in which a soldier asks a civilian what was being celebrated. ‘The Victory Banquet’, replies the civilian, to which the soldier comments ‘Ah, they must be civilians then,’ a clear reference to the 1898 colonial defeat and to the fact that the army had known no triumphs for nearly a century. In revenge, on the night of 25 November, 300 armed officers in uniform assaulted both the printing presses and offices of ¡Cu-cut! and the offices of Lliga’s daily newspaper La Veu de Catalunya. Forty-six people were seriously injured.29 This was merely the most violent of many attacks on newspapers and magazines that had criticized the army, such as those in Madrid in 1895 on El Globo and El Resumen, in Játiva in 1900 on El Progreso and in 1901 on El Correo de Guipúzcoa.30

The reaction to the ¡Cu-Cut! incident of both the high command and the King himself was to celebrate the Barcelona garrison’s indiscipline. Not only were the culprits not punished but they were sent messages of congratulation by units all over Spain and the Moroccan colony. The Captain General of Barcelona, Manuel Delgado Zulueta, made a speech to a group of officers, congratulating them as if the attack on the press had been a heroic act of war. When parliamentary deputies debated what action to take, there were threats that the garrison of Madrid would assault the Cortes. Under the banner headline ‘The Army in Defence of the Fatherland’, La Correspondencia Militar demanded that ‘Catalan deputies and senators be immediately expelled from the Parliament’ on the grounds that there could be no room in the Spanish Cortes for those who represented ideas opposed to national unity.31 The most damaging intervention was probably that of Alfonso XIII. He encouraged military sedition and diminished the credibility of the government in several ways. As ‘the first soldier of the nation’, he sent ‘an affectionate greeting’ and expressed his approval of what he called ‘the legitimate aspirations of the Army’. He was pushing the government of Eugenio Montero Ríos to suspend constitutional guarantees in the province of Barcelona. The military press described the army as ‘the sublime and august incarnation of the Fatherland’. According to Romanones, when the cabinet met in emergency session under the chairmanship of the King, ‘his face revealed that his mind was far from the room where the cabinet had met and much nearer to the meetings being held in the officers’ mess’. In these meetings, increasing numbers of officers were calling for legal prohibition of insults aimed at the armed forces. In fact, such safeguards existed through the civilian courts, but what the officers were now demanding was that perceived offences against the honour of the army, of the monarchy or of the patria should come under the jurisdiction of military tribunals.

Delegations of middle-rank officers came to put pressure on the Minister of War. Montero Ríos was determined to maintain civilian jurisdiction over the armed forces. Romanones commented later: ‘Poor civilian power! We had nothing to defend it with!’ Unprepared to sanction the proposed Law of Jurisdictions, Montero Ríos resigned. His successor, Segismundo Moret, was chosen by Alfonso XIII and given the specific task of introducing the required legislation. Moret’s Liberal coalition government was essentially the puppet of the army. General Agustín Luque, who, as Captain General of Andalusia, had sent one of the most extreme messages in praise of the Barcelona garrison for the attacks on the Catalanist press, was appointed Minister of War. In the event, the Law of Jurisdictions was not as sweeping as had been desired by the military hotheads but it still constituted a dangerous step in the process whereby the officer corps came to consider itself to be the ultimate arbiter in politics. It also had consequences within Catalonia which were hardly what the government had hoped for.32

Support for the military came from an unexpected quarter. On his return from Paris where he had gone to make a statement on behalf of Vallina, Lerroux published a virulent article headed ‘El alma en los labios’ (Speaking from the heart). He attacked Catalan separatism as ‘an overflowing sewer that had infected the city’. He praised army officers for avenging the fatherland declaring: ‘if I had been a soldier, I would have gone to burn down La Veu, ¡Cu-Cut!, the offices of the Lliga and the Bishop’s Palace at the very least’. He called on the republicans of Barcelona not to ally with what he called ‘the vile scum’ of the regionalists. He later tried to row back but it was too late. He had made a serious mistake. The revelation of his pro-militaristic and centralist abhorrence of Catalanism exposed the fraudulence of his radicalism and ended any real chances that he had of middle-class support.33

The Spanish army was not prepared to be simply the defender of a despised constitutional regime. The officer corps wanted to rebuild its reputation with a new imperial endeavour in Morocco. This was made feasible by British desires for a Spanish buffer against French expansionism on the southern shores of the Straits of Gibraltar. The consequences could hardly have been worse for Spain’s political stability. The bloodshed occasioned by the new adventure stimulated massive popular hostility against conscription and thereby intensified military contempt for the working class. Moreover, military failures could be attributed to a woeful lack of preparation, for which in turn officers blamed the political class.

The instability of Spanish politics did not diminish. The anarchist plan to assassinate the King and trigger a republican coup was not abandoned after the failure of May 1905 but revived one year later. This time the plot, in which Ferrer, Lerroux, Estévanez and Morral were again involved, was to kill him on the day of his wedding in Madrid, on 31 May 1906, to the English Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. On the grounds that Estévanez was going to Cuba and unlikely to return to Europe, Lerroux had successfully requested the Civil Governor of Catalonia, the Duque de Bivona, to grant him permission to enter Spain in mid-May and sail to Havana from Barcelona. The 68-year-old Estévanez was thus able to meet the other three conspirators and discuss the assassination and a subsequent seizure of the fortress of Montjuïc as the first step to a nationwide insurrection. It has been suggested that Estévanez brought the bomb that Morral was to use to kill the royal couple.34

There was little or no security presence along the procession route from the Church of Los Jerónimos (San Jerónimo el Real), just behind the Prado, to the Royal Palace. As the parade passed down the Calle Mayor, Morral threw the bomb, hidden in a bouquet of flowers, at the royal carriage. The explosion killed twenty-three people and seriously wounded 108 more, but the royal couple were unhurt. Morral escaped. Later, near the village of Torrejón de Ardoz, he shot an estate guard who confronted him, and he then committed suicide. On the day of the royal wedding, Ferrer had presided over a meeting of anarchists to whom he had given money to buy arms for the hoped-for uprising. In Barcelona, he and Lerroux sat at separate tables in the same café in the Plaça de Catalunya waiting for the news that they fondly believed would be the trigger for a republican uprising. They waited in vain. Ferrer was arrested on 4 June and his property placed under embargo. The authorities had only circumstantial evidence of his involvement in the two assassination attempts. Nevertheless, his numerous influential monarchist and ecclesiastical enemies were convinced that he was responsible and they ensured that he remained in prison for a year under threat of the death sentence. Eventually, the Spanish government surrendered in the face of a huge international campaign in favour of Ferrer. Lerroux played a key role through El Progreso, which he had converted into a daily newspaper. After a four-day trial from 3 to 7 June 1907, Ferrer would be found innocent.35

That the attack on the royal couple had been possible reflected the reality that the Spanish police were hardly more efficient than they had been at the time of the reforms introduced after the bomb attack in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous in September 1896. They lacked technical expertise and modern equipment and were generally undermanned. Moreover, they were underfunded and wages were so low that recruits tended to be uneducated.36 In 1903, La Cierva, recently named Civil Governor of Madrid, wrote in his memoirs, ‘The police force in those days was a foul and dangerous outfit of officers appointed and sacked at the whim of the Governor and the Minister. They had no tenure or any kind of guarantee, although no particular qualifications were required to join. With annual wages of 1,250, 1,500 or 2,000 pesetas, it was easy to imagine what those officers would do in constant contact with every vice and every corruption.’37 The chief of the Barcelona police, Antoni Tressols, nicknamed Vinagret, was virtually illiterate, corrupt and hated for his use of torture and for falsifying evidence against anarchists. Tressols had initially been employed as a rubbish collector before getting a job as a police informer. As he rose within the police force, he made a fortune by blackmailing criminals. A bomb was placed in his house on 18 October 1903 although it is possible that the culprit was not one of his victims but a rival officer who wanted his job. Tressol’s wife died of nervous shock as a result of the explosion.38

Barcelona remained the centre of terrorist activity. This was considered locally to be partly the consequence of the totally ineffective police service. The Catalan nationalist Enric Prat de la Riba wrote in December 1906: ‘The Spanish Police, like all the organs of the Spanish State, is powerless to function in areas of a high density of population. It is a primitive outfit, a useless fossil. To try to deal with the modern evil that Catalonia suffers – that is to say, anarchism – is like fighting with flint-head spears and stone axes against multitudes armed with Mausers and Krups. We cannot rely on the police because the State is incapable of organizing it any better.’ Prat’s complaint was merely one voice within an ever louder chorus of demands for the police to be restructured.39

It has been estimated that, in the streets of Barcelona, between April 1904 and the fall of the Maura government in October 1909 at least sixty-six bombs were placed, which either exploded or were found before they could do so. Eleven people were killed and a further seventy-one seriously injured. In February 1906, the Conservative Civil Governor of Barcelona, the Duque de Bivona (Tristán Álvarez de Toledo y Gutiérrez de la Concha), was approached by a twenty-five-year-old Catalan anarchist named Joan Rull i Queraltó who offered his services as a paid informer. Rull had recently been released from prison where he had been awaiting trial on suspicion of planting a bomb. Originally placed in a public urinal on the Ramblas on 4 September 1904, it had been taken by a policeman to the Palace of Justice where it exploded. The incident coincided with the return, the day before, of Alejandro Lerroux from a propaganda tour in Galicia, thus stimulating rumours that he was somehow involved. After fifteen months in prison awaiting trial, in December 1905 Rull was acquitted despite substantial evidence against him. The prosecution case had been badly drafted, a number of anarchist comrades had sworn that he was with them on the day that the bomb went off and, in addition, the jury had been intimidated. Despite being in prison at the time, Rull was also accused of responsibility for bombs that went off in November 1904 and May 1905.40

The subsequent career of Rull vividly illustrates the relationship between administrative corruption, political incompetence and social violence in Spain. In March 1908, awaiting trial for other subsequent crimes, Rull claimed that the years in prison had changed him, pushing him to conclude that anarchist terrorists were ‘hyenas thirsting for human blood’. Accordingly, he said, he had decided to devote his life to pursuing them. The truth was somewhat different. An acquaintance, Antoni Andrés i Roig, alias ‘Navarro’, had suggested to him that he could make money as an informer. ‘Navarro’ introduced him to the wealthy Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell. Güell reluctantly provided the pair with a letter of introduction to the Duque de Bivona. Wearing a suit bought with money provided by Tressols, Rull, accompanied by ‘Navarro’, went to see Bivona. They told him that they knew who was responsible for the most recent bombs and would be able to predict the time and place of their next atrocity and thus allow the authorities to catch them red-handed. Bivona handed over a substantial sum of money and, until he ceased to be Civil Governor on 28 June 1906, continued to pay Rull. During that time, only one bomb went off in Barcelona; placed on a tram, it harmed nobody. The lack of incidents could not be attributed to anything that Rull might have done – other, perhaps, than refraining from planting bombs himself. Since no actual perpetrators had been apprehended, Bivona was soon complaining about the lack of results. However, he was replaced before he could put pressure on Rull, and his successor Francisco Manzano Alfaro continued to pay Rull for some months.41

It was a period of growing tension in Catalonia. Six weeks before Rull’s initiative, the veteran republican Nicolás Salmerón, in response to the passing of the Law of Jurisdictions, had created Solidaritat Catalana, a coalition of Catalanist parties uniting the Lliga Regionalista, the Carlists, the republican federalists, other Catalan nationalists and part of Unión Republicana. Given Lerroux’s virulent anti-Catalanism, his followers left Unión Republicana and formed the Radical Party. On 20 May 1906, a crowd of around 200,000 people gathered in Barcelona to welcome home the Catalan deputies who had voted against the Law of Jurisdictions in the Cortes. Given its internal right–left contradictions, Solidaritat Catalana would last for barely four years. Nevertheless, its creation marked the beginning of effective Catalan nationalism. In the elections of November 1905, only seven Catalanist deputies had been elected, whereas in those of April 1907 they won forty-one of the possible forty-four seats. They had campaigned for both regional autonomy and national regeneration through honest elections. Lerroux lost his seat, which intensified his hostility to Solidaritat Catalana. Thereafter, the question of Catalan separatism became a much greater preoccupation of Madrid governments. Moreover, the Lliga’s leader, Francesc Cambó, was starting to be seen as a major player in Spanish politics.42

Those April 1907 elections were called by the now 54-year-old Antonio Maura after the collapse of General Azcárraga’s short-lived government. A formidable orator noted for his unflinching personal integrity, Maura had initially come to power in January with the ambition of sweeping away the corrupt electoral system of the Restoration and fostering widespread electoral participation. He planned to end political corruption by means of three laws: a law of municipal justice, an electoral law and a law of local administration. In order to have any chance of getting his projects approved, he needed a parliamentary majority. Given the challenges of the Catalans, the Socialists and the Republicans, that made him a hostage of the great electoral fixer, Juan de la Cierva, a master in the use of the methods that Maura was trying to eliminate. Thereafter, despite unflinching adulation of his boss, La Cierva would be an albatross around Maura’s neck.43 The first of Maura’s projects aimed to separate executive and judicial power and remove one of the most powerful weapons in the cacique’s armoury – the capacity to exert pressure on and even blackmail rival candidates via the ability to appoint judges and magistrates who would then pass sentences in the interests of their patrons. To the outrage of caciques who henceforth would have to resort to bribery, Maura declared ‘the orgy is over’. In the event, the law never got beyond his well-intentioned proposal.44

The electoral law was over-complicated (it had 409 clauses) and riddled with loopholes. Article 29, for instance, permitted the direct election of unopposed candidates, a gift to powerful caciques. In 1910, Article 29 permitted 119 seats in the Cortes, more than a quarter of the total, to be ‘elected’ without opposition; in 1923, the same procedure permitted the ‘election’ of 146 deputies. At a local level, there simply did not exist the machinery to ensure that the law was implemented. Maura’s Liberal opponent, José Canalejas, pointed out that, in a country where, on average, over 40 per cent of the electorate was illiterate, rising to 70 per cent in the rural south, it was necessary first to educate the masses. The levels of illiteracy substantiated Costa’s accusation that caciquismo kept the bulk of the population in ignorant servitude. Maura would face the same problem that had confronted Cánovas when he first elaborated the system in 1876 – what to do if the masses voted for left-wing options. Moreover, like others before him, he was more concerned to control working-class discontent than to open the system to participation by the lower classes.45 The projected law of local administration which aimed to give municipalities independence from central government was weighed down in the Cortes with amendments and was never passed.46

Maura was a firm monarchist and Spanish patriot. Although born in Mallorca, he was hostile to Catalan nationalism. He was confident that he could exploit the divisions within Solidaritat Catalana. His commitment to political reform and determination to put an end to terrorism appealed to the industrialists of the Lliga. He thus established a close understanding with Cambó. Since his draconian law-and-order proposals were opposed by the Republicans within Solidaritat Catalana, they hastened the break-up of the coalition. In fact, the irony of Maura’s ambitious plans to eliminate electoral fraud was that they damaged the interests of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties and boosted the challenges coming from the Lliga, the Radicals and the Socialists. Moreover, La Cierva’s introduction of a fierce anti-terrorist law was abandoned after it provoked massive hostility and, along with opposition to the Moroccan war, inspired an anti-Maura campaign with the popular slogan ‘Maura No’.47

The social conservatism of the dominant elements of Solidaritat Catalana permitted Lerroux to spin his anti-Catalanism into a cynical bid for working-class support. In line with his declaration of support for the army officers who had attacked the Catalanist media in November, Lerroux had been at war with Solidaritat Catalan since its creation. His followers stoned their meetings and smashed the presses of Catalanist publications. On 18 April 1907, the car taking Nicolás Salmerón and Cambó to an electoral meeting of Solidaritat Catalana was ambushed. Salmerón was unharmed but Cambó was shot and badly wounded. It was widely believed that Lerroux or his supporters were behind the attack. Although nothing was ever proved, it is likely that the revulsion against Lerroux’s supporters contributed to the electoral victory of Solidaritat.48

Lerroux was in an ambiguous position. The constituency to which he hoped to appeal was the increasingly militant working class and the recently arrived immigrant population which, like himself, was anti-Catalan. However, as a fervent supporter of the army which was the principal instrument of the repression of the working class, he was vulnerable to losing followers to the anarchists. In a desperate bid to clinch left-wing support, on 1 September 1906, in the Unión Republicana newspaper La Rebeldía, Lerroux published his notorious article ‘¡Rebeldes!, ¡rebeldes¡’ which contained an appeal that was to bestow greater notoriety on him:

Young barbarians of today, enter and sack the decadent and miserable civilization of this unhappy country; destroy its temples, finish off its gods, lift the veil of the novice nuns and raise them up to the status of mothers to make the species more virile. Break into the property registries and make bonfires of its papers that fire might purify the odious social organization. Enter the homes of the humble and raise legions of proletarians so that the world might tremble before its awakened judges.49

It is difficult to know what impact this semi-pornographic appeal had, particularly on illiterate immigrant workers. Henceforth, Lerroux would go to considerable trouble to distance himself, usually physically, from incidents that might have been blamed on his rabble-rousing.

While the three-way struggle between Solidaritat Catalana, Madrid and Lerroux rumbled on, terrorism remained an issue in Barcelona. In the winter of 1906, since no arrests had been made as a result of information from Rull, Francisco Manzano told him that he would pay only on results. Rull was furious and, unsurprisingly, bombs started to be planted not only by Rull but also by his gang, which included members of his family. His main accomplice was his mother, Maria Queraltó. Between Christmas Eve 1906 and late January 1907, six bombs went off, killing one person and injuring eleven.50 When Antonio Maura’s Conservative government came to power in January 1907, his tough new Minister of the Interior, Juan de la Cierva, dismissed Manzano and replaced him with the brilliant young lawyer Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo. Both La Cierva and Ossorio were determined to resolve the terrorist problem. However, they faced two main problems. In the first place, the judiciary was reluctant to give harsh sentences as a result of international campaigns in favour of the accused which were often backed up by threats of violent retaliation. Efforts were made to put pressure on the judges and a more authoritarian anti-anarchist law, known as the Ley Maura, was prepared. However, this produced a welter of opposition and undermined the prestige of Maura’s government. Thus the issue of the laxity of the judiciary remained unresolved.51 The other problem was the inefficiency and corruption of the police.

On 31 January, the day after his arrival in Barcelona, Ossorio wrote to La Cierva that the police force that had awaited him ‘is mainly comprised, not of villains, but of poor devils who haven’t a clue what they are supposed to do. If blind justice were to be carried out, the whole lot should be sacked … Strong measures should be taken soon.’ Despite removing the most incompetent officers and generally raising standards, Ossorio faced internal obstruction from the old guard led by Tressols. Moreover, the daunting task of reforming a corrupt and shambolic police force also involved clearing the ground of networks of informers and parallel organizations.52

Rull offered his services to the new Civil Governor who, desperate for any means to put an end to terrorism, accepted. At this point, the bombs stopped. Rull had assembled a sizeable band of what he claimed were investigators and informers. In reality, it was a gang of hangers-on and potential bombers. He became over-confident in what was essentially blackmail, demanding more and more money for their pay and for travel and maintenance expenses. In early April 1907, Ossorio, tired of the lack of results and beginning to suspect that Rull was behind the bombs, offered only half the amount demanded. Rull responded that he had to pay in order ‘to avoid something really big’. In fulfilment of the threat, two bombs went off on 8 April. In early July, to the delight of many anarchists in Barcelona, Ossorio issued orders for the police to arrest Rull, his brother Hermenegildo, his mother and father and other members of his gang. They were accused of responsibility for the eight incidents in December 1906 and January and April 1907 and for the accompanying blackmail. In fact, during that period, there were other terrorist acts. Accordingly, in addition to the belief that Rull’s gang and other anarchists were responsible, contradictory suspicions circulated.

In a letter to La Cierva, Ossorio listed his suspects:

The anarchists themselves, so as to ruin, without running any risks, a powerful bourgeois society. The lerrouxistas, as a weapon against the Catalan nationalists. The separatists, as a means of wrecking the authority of the State (some distinguished and serious-minded members of the Unión catalanista have long maintained that Catalan national identity cannot be revived until after the present Catalan well-being is destroyed). Renegade anarchists, in order to harm their comrades. Greedy men, like Morales and Rull, for their own convenience. Some of these have been behind the bombs; perhaps several have been; perhaps all. But the hands that held them, the professionals of crime, the experts on explosions, we should seek nowhere but among the anarchist rabble … If these mercenaries did not exist, their paymasters would not find it so easy to hire them.53

Tressols and the Lerrouxistas claimed that the separatists were to blame but no proof has ever been found.54 There were many Catalanists who believed that the Madrid government was paying agents provocateurs in order to justify repression against Solidaritat Catalana. Lerroux mounted a press campaign blaming Rull for the shooting of Cambó in April 1907. It is more likely that the majority of the incidents were the work of the anarchists and possibly the police. There were no further incidents until December, after which two people were killed and a further seven injured. After a trial lasting twelve months, Rull was condemned to death and his principal cronies to long prison sentences. This ‘trafficker in terrorism’, in the striking phrase of Antoni Dalmau, was executed by garrote vil on 8 August 1908. There was an explosion in the port of Barcelona on that day. Nine more bombs went off before the Semana Trágica of July 1909 (see Chapter 4), and a further seventeen in the three months leading up to the fall of the government of Maura on 22 October as a result of the repression that followed the events of July.55 This suggested that Rull was executed both for his own crimes and for those of others unknown.56

From May 1907 there had been six months’ respite; then the bombs began to go off again in December. Leading Catalan politicians had long since doubted the capacity of the police to protect their interests. In April 1907, the President of the Diputación Provincial de Barcelona, the prominent architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, went to London, accompanied by the British Consul in Barcelona. He hired the head of the Scotland Yard CID, Charles Arrow, who took early retirement and signed a three-year contract to set up a secret parallel police force. Known as the Oficina de Investigación Criminal (OIC), it occupied lavishly appointed offices in the city. Arrow and his assistants were promised, but never received, huge salaries. Arrow was compared to Sherlock Holmes, but he was hampered from the first by his inability to speak either Catalan or Spanish. His outfit was undermined by rivalry among his backers and his local staff, and by opposition from the anarchists, republicans and Lerroux’s Radicals, as well as from Tressols, who laughed at the modern methods imported from London. According to the moderate anarchist Joan Peiró, Arrow was inhibited by discovering that some of the activities of the bombers were sponsored by members of the Catalan upper classes who wanted to foment hostility against the central government. Nevertheless, the creation of the OIC strengthened Ossorio’s determination to reform the police force. In a letter to Maura in March 1908, he described the city’s police services as ‘until recently a real dung heap’. He increased pay, improved training and, to the chagrin of Tressols, tried to eradicate the use of torture. Arrow was dismissed in August 1909.57

In mid-1907, a variety of Socialists led by Antoni Fabra i Rivas and anarchist groups led by Anselmo Lorenzo and Tomás Herreros united to form an apolitical trade union known as Solidaridad Obrera. This was succeeded in September 1911 by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). It was initially an umbrella organization that gathered together the whole spectrum of anarchism together with Socialists and Republicans. In the minority, the latter were soon repelled by anarchists’ view that strikes and industrial sabotage were the best weapons against bourgeois society. In consequence, the CNT was soon an exclusively anarcho-syndicalist organization.58 Before long it would be Spain’s largest union.