Читать книгу A People Betrayed - Paul Preston - Страница 14

The relatively brief honeymoon of Solidaritat Catalana came to an end in May 1909 when its essentially contradictory composition saw it divide and suffer defeat at the hands of Lerroux in local elections. The organization’s fate was sealed by the events that took place in Barcelona two months later in July. The popular violence and the church burnings seen during that critical week hardened the conservative instincts of the Lliga which in turn generated working-class support for Lerroux. The origins of the Semana Trágica lay in the working-class pacifism that had been deepened by the disaster of 1898. This rendered it even more difficult for Spain to follow the example of France, Britain, Germany and Italy in using imperialist adventures to divert attention from domestic social conflict. Few poor families had not suffered one or more of their menfolk being killed or disabled during the long years of colonial war in the Philippines and Cuba. The survivors had brought back gruesome accounts of their experiences which had provoked widespread hostility to the governing classes held responsible for the disasters. The belief that conscripts were merely the cannon fodder of political corruption was based on knowledge of how the army had been poorly fed, inadequately armed and badly led. Nevertheless, many army officers were eager for an enterprise that could compensate for the colonial humiliation of 1898. Spain’s consequent Moroccan entanglement was widely seen as being driven by the King and the owners of the iron mines, including, it was rumoured, the Jesuits.1

In the first week of July 1909, Rif tribesmen attacked the railway link from Melilla that was being built to facilitate commerce with what were wrongly believed to be important mineral deposits. The Minister of War in Maura’s government, General Arsenio Linares, under pressure from army officers close to Alfonso XIII, from the King himself and from investors in the mines, reluctantly sent an expeditionary force and claimed that this was merely ‘a policing operation’ with no intention of it being extended into a military aggression. The Cortes was closed to prevent awkward questions being asked. From 11 July, large numbers of reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and embarked from Barcelona with no provision being made for the upkeep of their families. For the rich, it was possible to buy exemption via a procedure known as cash redemption for 1,500 pesetas, the equivalent of a year’s wages for a workman. It was a deeply unpopular privilege among those who could not afford to pay. The Socialist Party launched the slogan ‘Everyone or No One’ and there were waves of protest in the anarchist and republican press.2 In fact, the scale of evasion of military service can be deduced from the fact that before 1895 and after 1898 the device brought into the exchequer between 9 and 12 million pesetas annually. During the three years of the Cuban War, it brought in 40 million pesetas per year.3

With no time for adequate preparation of the expedition, the reservists were being sent to a probable death. They had no wish to die to further the interests of what they considered to be a corrupt oligarchy or to satisfy the desire of the army to erase the memory of 1898. In Barcelona, on Sunday 18 July 1909, as the conscripts were marched towards the port, a pacifist demonstration pressured the Maura government into announcing that no further embarkations would take place. Nevertheless, a republican press campaign instigated by Lerroux’s Radicals and the Catalan nationalists led by Antonio Rovira i Virgili kept anti-war sentiment at boiling point. The Radicals’ youth wing, the Jóvenes Bárbaros (young barbarians), were noisily militant in nightly demonstrations that the police could not control. Within two days, similar disturbances took place in Madrid and in other cities with railway stations from which conscripts were being transported to Barcelona. Meanwhile, a broad spectrum of Catalan politicians sent a telegram to Maura demanding that he put a stop to the war, and the Socialist Party planned a general strike. Maura refused point blank and tension was heightened by news that ten of the reservists who had taken part in the Sunday demonstration had been court-martialled and might be executed. The Socialist plans were seconded by the anarcho-syndicalists. The Civil Governor Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo refused to deploy the hated Civil Guard, a stance which brought him into conflict with Maura’s brutal Minister of the Interior, Juan de la Cierva, who believed that what was being planned was all-out revolution that must be crushed.4

On that same Sunday, Rif tribesmen intensified their resistance against the Spanish expeditionary force. Ill equipped and virtually untrained, the Spanish conscripts were subjected to constant harassment by an infinitely more skilful force. Over the course of the next week, anti-war sentiment spread within a population convinced that corrupt politicians were responsible for the deficient weaponry of the troops. The Spanish commander in Morocco, General José Marina Vega, successfully requested more reinforcements, but his troops were defeated on Tuesday, 27 July at the battle of Barranco del Lobo.5 On the previous day, a general strike had broken out in Barcelona and lasted until 1 August, seven days that came to be known as the tragic week (the Semana Trágica). Having decided to treat it as an insurrection, La Cierva instructed the Captain General of the region to declare martial law. In response, workers dug up thousands of paving stones and set up barricades. What had started as anti-conscription protests escalated into anti-clerical disturbances and church burnings. The maintenance of order was initially rendered difficult because many troops were fraternizing with the strikers. Twenty-one churches and thirty convents were set alight, but assaults on clergy were rare. It was noteworthy that public buildings, banks and the mansions of the rich were left untouched. By Thursday, 29 July, the tide had turned with the arrival of additional troops and Civil Guards. As working-class districts were bombarded by artillery, the movement was put down by what Rafael Shaw called ‘the terrorism exercised by the priest-ridden Government of Señor Maura’. In the course of the week, 104 men and six women were killed and around 300 treated for injuries. Five soldiers and two Civil Guards lost their lives. Three monks were killed during the rioting, one of them asphyxiated as he hid in the monastery cellar, although most of the violence was directed not at individual clerics but at the symbols of ecclesiastical power. Inflamed by Lerroux’s lurid propaganda, the rioters burst into convents convinced that they would liberate nuns from torture and sexual servitude. Elsewhere in most Catalan towns, the strike went on and, in some, the Republic was declared.6

The Semana Trágica had serious consequences for Spanish politics. The officer corps of the army, determined to mask its feeble performance at Barranco del Lobo, became an ever more aggressive colonial lobby. The high command of the African Army successfully pushed for an expansion of military operations in Morocco, the costs of which quickly escalated, not just in financial terms. As both Liberal and Conservative governments had to turn to the army to suppress proletarian discontent, much of which was related to the human costs of the Moroccan adventure, the officer corps became increasingly intolerant of any civilian supervision.7 Moreover, the events of July and August were followed by a fierce repression which moulded future working-class strategies. In Barcelona, the thoughtful Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo was replaced as Civil Governor by the hard-line Evaristo Crespo Azorín, who imposed martial law, banned most left-wing organizations and was particularly harsh on Solidaridad Obrera and the Radicals. Around 3,000 prisoners were taken and 1,725 cases were subsequently brought to trial by court martial. Seventeen men were sentenced to death, of whom five were actually executed. They included Francesc Ferrer and a charcoal burner whose crime was to have danced in the street with the desiccated corpse of a nun.

Ferrer’s lay schools, like Spain’s few Protestant schools, were subjected to furious and ceaseless abuse by the Catholic press. Ferrer himself was found guilty of masterminding the events in Barcelona despite there being only the flimsiest of evidence. Nevertheless, he had been involved in the planning and funding of both failed attempts on the life of Alfonso XIII. For the government and the military high command, the repression was deemed necessary because the disturbances combined elements of anti-militarism, anti-clericalism and Catalan separatism. In this sense, during the Semana Trágica the hostility between the military and the labour movement prefigured the violent hostilities of the civil war. Ironically, the Semana Trágica also saw the Catalan bourgeoisie scurry back to the protection of the Madrid government.

The execution of Ferrer on 13 October 1909 unleashed massive protest demonstrations across Spain and in several European capitals. The campaign with the slogan ‘Maura No’ was strengthened by the bullying policies of La Cierva. When the Liberal leader Segismundo Moret protested in the Cortes about the repression and called for Maura’s resignation, La Cierva aggressively suggested that Moret’s opposition to his methods was responsible for events such as the assassination attempts against the King. His tone was widely condemned, but Maura congratulated him on his speech. Although Maura had a substantial parliamentary majority, on 21 October Alfonso XIII seized the opportunity to get rid of Maura by precipitately accepting what the devastated Prime Minister had intended as merely a symbolic offer of resignation.8 The King therefore ensured that the Conservative Party would henceforth be in the hands of elements opposed to substantial reform.9 Alfonso then offered the government to Moret, who, unable to unite the faction-ridden Liberal Party, was replaced in February 1910 by José Canalejas, leader of the left wing of the Liberals and a politician genuinely concerned with social justice. There was an assassination attempt on Maura in Barcelona in the summer of 1911.10

In October 1908, to avoid imprisonment for his involvement in the assassination attempt on Alfonso XIII, Lerroux had gone to Argentina, where he remained until August 1909. Greeted by cheering crowds, he had returned a changed man. While in Argentina, he had received considerable gifts, including shares in meat-export companies and amusement parks as well as cash. In consequence, he began to invest in service companies that were then granted lucrative contracts by town councils controlled by the Radicals. The corruption of party members with positions in local administration helped Lerroux both to become a very rich man and to finance his party. And as he accumulated possessions, cars, jewellery and an estate in San Rafael, his rhetoric became ever more conservative. He was also involved in corrupt activities in the cement and building-supplies trade.11

The first elections called by Canalejas, on 8 May 1910, saw for the first time the election to the Cortes of a Socialist deputy. It has been suggested that Canalejas was, in his heart of hearts, a republican whose acceptance of the monarchy was purely pragmatic.12 Certainly, he came to power determined to implement a regenerationist programme in the hope of weaning the working class away from anarchism and socialism. He was prepared to countenance state arbitration in wage settlements, to legislate on working conditions and even to contemplate the expropriation of the great latifundio estates on grounds of social utility. He introduced several important reforms including universal military service which put an end to the divisive practice whereby the rich could buy their way out. He also replaced the unjust tax on the consumption of food, drink and fuel known as the impuesto de consumos with taxes on the wealthy.

However, despite his reforming ambitions, he was beset by growing opposition. There was continued anti-war agitation and, in August 1911, some members of the crew of the warship Numancia mutinied and threatened to bombard Malaga in support of a republican coup. The intensification of left-wing and trade union agitation brought out Canalejas’s instincts as a man of order. He used the army to repress strikes, most notably a nationwide general strike in September 1911 after which he suspended the CNT. There was a conviction within the anarchist movement that he was in collusion with Lerroux to destroy Solidaridad Obrera and subsequently the CNT. Indeed, he was the object of a hate campaign by both the left and the extreme right. Canalejas was shot dead by an anarchist in front of the Librería San Martín in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol on 12 November 1912.13

Maura informed Alfonso XIII that he would not work with the Liberals because they were moving too close to republicanism. That decision together with the death of Canalejas left the two dynastic parties in chaos and marked the end of any serious attempt to reform the Restoration system. In 1913, when a government led by the Conde de Romanones fell, Alfonso XIII ignored the fact that Maura was leader of the Conservative Party and opened discussions with the lacklustre lawyer Eduardo Dato who, in contrast, was prepared to work with the Liberals. In protest at what they regarded as disrespect for their leader, Maura’s more dynamic followers formed a group called Los Jóvenes Mauristas. Rather like the broader regenerationist movement, Maurismo would divide into two incompatible wings. On the one hand, led by Ossiorio y Gallardo, were those who shared their leader’s desire to carry out political reform by putting an end to caciquismo. On the other hand, the majority, led by Antonio Goicoechea, would eventually develop into a key right-wing anti-republican group.14

The Liberal Party also divided into two major factions led respectively by Manuel García Prieto, the Marqués de Alhucemas, and Álvaro de Figueroa, the Conde de Romanones, the canny cacique of Guadalajara, an expert more in the exploitation than in the reform of the system. Nevertheless, in 1915, Romanones did bring the dynamic Santiago Alba into his government as Minister of the Interior. Alba was determined to reduce the size of the bureaucracy and the army in order to finance investment in both agriculture and industry. This seduced the Reformist Republicans of Melquíades Álvarez away from their alliance with the Socialists.

The CNT was becoming more radical as, gradually, the Socialists and Republicans became more moderate. In the course of the bitter industrial conflicts during the First World War, it became an exclusively anarcho-syndicalist movement. It mushroomed from its initial 15,000 members to over 700,000 by 1919, a reflection of the country’s burgeoning industrial base. The number of workers engaged in non-agricultural activities had quadrupled from 244,000 in 1887 to 995,000 in 1900.15 The leaders of the new organization rejected both individual violence and parliamentary politics, opting instead for what was called revolutionary syndicalism. This involved a central contradiction which would bedevil the organization until the Spanish Civil War. As recruits flooded in, the CNT had to act as a conventional trade union defending the interests of its members within the existing order while at the same time advocating direct action to overthrow that order. The involvement of its members in violent acts of industrial sabotage and revolutionary strikes meant the new organization would frequently be declared illegal.

Surprisingly, however, when the next challenge to the Restoration system came, it was not mounted by the rural anarchists or the urban working class but by the industrial bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, once the crisis started, proletarian ambitions came into play in such a way as to ensure that the basic hostilities within Spanish politics became more acute than ever. The social problems faced by the Restoration system, with political power concentrated in the hands of those who also enjoyed the monopoly of economic power, had been intensifying for decades. They were pushed to breaking point by the coming of the First World War. Given Spain’s near bankruptcy and the parlous state of its armed forces, the Conservative government led by the wealthy lawyer Eduardo Dato had little choice but immediately to declare strict neutrality. Nevertheless, in a letter to Maura explaining his decision, Dato revealed his sympathies for the Austro-German Central Powers.16 Political passions were aroused by an ongoing acrimonious debate about whether Spain should intervene and, if so, on which side. The army, most Conservatives, the Mauristas and the Carlists admired what they saw as Prussian discipline and efficiency and so supported the Central Powers. The Liberals, Lerroux’s Radicals, the left and most intellectuals equated Germany with barbarism and so supported the Western Allies, whose cause they associated with civilization. The fiercely pro-Allied Romanones inspired a controversial article entitled ‘Fatal Neutralities’, although he quickly accepted that there was no alternative to neutrality. Heated polemics in the press (much of it owned or lavishly subsidized by Germans) and in mass meetings intensified the ever growing divisions within the Liberal and Conservative parties. Despite the lack of options, the political system would be torn apart by the economic consequences of the war, by the massive social upheaval that came in its wake and by the reverberations of the Russian revolution.17 Within the polemics about Spain’s possible participation in the conflict could be discerned the personal interests of some politicians. Needless to say, where there was corruption, Alejandro Lerroux could usually be found. His enthusiastic espousal of Spanish military intervention on the Allied side saw him attacked by pro-German gangs. While probably sincere, his stance was not unconnected with the exports by his companies, particularly of meat, to the French Republic.18

As a non-belligerent, Spain was in the economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Anglo-French Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products. Manufacturers benefited from import substitution in the domestic market and from the possibility of filling the gaps left in their own export markets by the belligerent powers. Coalmines in Asturias, iron-ore mines and the shipping industry in the Basque Country, the Catalan textile and chemical industries, the Valencian and Mallorcan leather industries all experienced a frenetic boom which stimulated a dramatic take-off for the Spanish economy. The profits of Basque shipping lines increased from 4.43 million pesetas in 1913 to 52.69 million in 1915. In Bilbao, investment in new companies went up from 14.5 million pesetas in 1913 to 427.5 million by the end of the war.19

The boom had attracted rural labour to mines and factories in towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed, especially in Asturias and the Basque Country. The increase in the numbers of industrial workers would soon constitute a daunting challenge to the Restoration system. Between 1910 and 1918, the numbers of miners would rise from 90,000 to 133,000, of metallurgical workers from 61,000 to 200,000 and of textile workers from 125,000 to 213,000. At the same time, massive exports created domestic shortages, galloping inflation and plummeting living standards. Per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs, such as wheat, rice, chickpeas and potatoes, fell dramatically as prices rocketed during the war years. The Catalan bourgeoisie did not plough back profits into modernizing their factories. Rather, they frittered them away on building spectacular residences, buying luxury cars and frequenting the casinos, cabarets and brothels that sprang up. Working-class militancy was provoked by popular resentment of such conspicuous consumption together with the reluctance of the newly enriched bourgeoisie to concede wage increases.20 As a result, in December 1915, the Dato government collapsed and the King called upon Romanones to replace him. Despite promises of clean elections, the contest of 9 April 1916 was rigged and saw Romanones gain a substantial majority. The new parliament was known as ‘the Cortes of the relatives’ since all the principal Conservative and Liberal leaders had managed to secure the election of family members. In fact, it was well known that party leaders maintained their position by nepotism, patronage and turning a blind eye to the plundering of state resources. The Socialist press revealed that the same political grandees sat on the boards of the country’s most prosperous companies, citing this as proof that Spain was controlled by a small privileged elite.

Government ministers were actively involved in corruption. During the war, the Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, made substantial sums of money from his alliance with the Mallorcan robber baron Juan March, who was making colossal profits from exporting food to both belligerents, as well as from his key business, tobacco smuggling. In this, March exploited the widespread nicotine addiction of Spaniards. Nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, Richard Ford had noted that ‘a cigar is a sine qua non in every Spaniard’s mouth, for otherwise he would resemble a house without a chimney, a steamer without a funnel’.21 So successful was March’s smuggling operation that government revenue from tobacco duty was plummeting to such an extent that it was decided to grant him the official monopoly for a fee.22 Alba’s reputation for venality was such that when he was appointed minister, some journalists said to March, ‘Now you will have the doors of the Ministry wide open.’ He smiled and replied smugly, ‘I won’t be the one visiting him. He will come to see me when I decide that the time is ripe.’23

The ‘extreme friendship’ that March demonstrated towards the young Liberal politician was expressed in many ways. On one occasion, March organized a banquet in Palma de Mallorca for him and presented Alba’s wife with a bouquet of flowers in which were concealed ten 1,000-peseta notes. A striking example of how Alba expressed his gratitude for the friendship arose out of the introduction in 1915 of the Subsistence Law, the purpose of which was to bring under control the massive and highly profitable export of necessary foodstuffs to belligerent powers. Alba secured for March several exceptional export licences which allowed the Mallorcan plutocrat legally to bypass the restrictions imposed by the law. In 1916, the government prohibited the export of rice from Valencia. March’s agents in the Valencian region began to stockpile huge quantities of rice and applied for an extraordinary licence on the grounds there was a surplus beyond the market’s capacity to absorb. Without requiring any proof or instituting any inspection, Alba secured for March the necessary licence to allow him to sell the rice in Europe at inflated prices, having previously bought it at extremely low prices. Alba and the Conde de Romanones endeared themselves further to March by failing to make any serious effort to challenge his massive tobacco-smuggling activities. Alba’s political ambitions received substantial financial support from March, especially in Mallorca. In return, Alba arranged for March to have a parliamentary seat in 1923. A number of extremely senior and influential government officials were alleged to be in March’s pocket. It is hardly surprising that Alejandro Lerroux was also on the payroll of March, who contributed substantially to his electoral expenses as well.24

Romanones was no more successful than Dato in dealing with the social problems provoked by the world war. In 1916, a total of 2,415,304 working days were lost in strikes, more than six times as many as in the previous years, and there were also a number of dramatic bread riots.25 Strikes secured some wage rises but these were not sufficient to keep up with the inflation of food prices. From 1913 to 1917, prices increased by 50 per cent, profits by 88 per cent and wages by only 10 per cent. Under pressure from the rank and file, the twelfth congress of the Socialist UGT on 12–13 May decided to call on the anarcho-syndicalist CNT to undertake joint action to resolve the social problems. The agreement was enshrined in the Pact of Zaragoza, signed on 17 July 1916, which coincided with a successful strike of Socialist railway workers in favour of recognition of their union. After more revolutionary proposals from the CNT had been rejected, the success of a one-day UGT strike in December 1916 encouraged hopes that a joint general strike might lead to free elections and then reform. The economic crisis thus brought about a remarkable alliance of the reformist UGT and the revolutionary CNT. Nevertheless, there was friction between the essential caution of the UGT and the militant élan of the CNT.26 The survival of the alliance was facilitated by the fact that the CNT at the time was led by the thoughtful duo of the watch-mender Ángel Pestaña and the house painter Salvador Seguí. Known as El Noi del Sucre (the Sugar Boy) because of his sweet tooth, the affable Seguí was always elegant in public, usually wearing a hat and a starched collar and sporting a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. The gruff Pestaña was more outspoken than his more subtle friend. Although later regarded as moderates, by 1917, believing that the monarchy was about to fall and that revolution was imminent, both countenanced violence to further those aims.27

As a result of the boom, the balance of power within the economic elite was beginning to shift. Although agrarian interests remained pre-eminent, industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June when Romanones’s Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, proposed paying for radical economic reforms by means of a tax on the notoriously spectacular war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with the profits made by the agrarians. Accordingly, the measure was denounced by Basque, Catalan and Asturian industrialists as a tyrannical attempt to punish the productive classes. In fact, the outrage expressed on their behalf by Cambó and the Basque industrialist Ramón de la Sota was largely to do with the challenge to their profits. Largely at the hands of Cambó, Alba’s initiative was blocked in December in the Cortes and thereby the possibility of alleviating the desperate situation of a substantial part of the population was frustrated.28 Nonetheless, Alba’s initiative so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it would precipitate a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to implement political modernization. In the meantime, Romanones was coming under increasing pressure from the left for his inability to resolve the economic crisis and from the right for his pro-Allied stance. With Spanish shipping under attack from German submarines, he had proposed breaking off relations with the Central Powers. In response, the Germanophile Alfonso XIII forced him to resign and invited García Prieto to form a government.

In 1917, the working class, the military and the industrial bourgeoisie would all mount challenges to the existing order. Seemingly linked by their temporal coincidence, their aims were, however, starkly contradictory. The opposition to the Restoration system of Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen the emergence of powerful regionalist movements backed by industrialists – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga Regionalista. The equivalent in Asturias was the Reformist Party led by Melquíades Álvarez. While there was a revolutionary air to these groups’ opposition to the economic inertia and political incompetence of the rural oligarchy, they also pursued reactionary and oppressive policies against their own workforces. The leader of the Lliga, the shrewd financier Cambó, emerged as spokesman for the northern industrialists and bankers. He was convinced that drastic action was necessary to prevent the Restoration system being engulfed by a revolutionary cataclysm. His vision of a controlled revolution from above was based on the idea of an autonomous Catalonia as the dynamo of a new Spain.29 Ironically, the reforming zeal of industrialists enriched by the war saw them ally briefly with the proletariat that was being impoverished by it. While industrialists and workers with significantly different agendas were agitating for change, middle-rank army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A deceptive and short-lived alliance between all three was forged in part because of a misunderstanding on the part of the first two regarding the political stance of the army.

By 1916, already exiguous military salaries were being hit by wartime inflation, even more so than those of industrial workers who could secure some wage increases by means of strike action. Junior and middle-rank officers in Spain had to take on civilian jobs to maintain their families. This in turn fed a division within the army between those who had volunteered to serve in Morocco, the so-called Africanistas, and those who had remained in the Peninsula, the peninsulares. For the Africanistas, the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. Brutalized by the horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars, the Africanistas had acquired a sense of being a heroic band of warriors alone in their concern for the fate of the patria. They felt contempt for professional politicians, for the pacifist left-wing masses, for Catalanists and, to a certain extent, for their peninsular comrades for whom the mainland signified a less well-paid but more comfortable, sedentary existence with promotion only by strict seniority. Inevitably, there was resentment among the peninsulares for the Africanistas who enjoyed the higher pay that came with quick promotion for battlefield merit.30 They responded by creating the Juntas Militares de Defensa, a form of trade union, both to protect their rigid seniority system and to seek better pay as an escape from what they called ‘the drip-feed of misery’. In the words of Cambó, ‘the Juntas Militares de Defensa appeared, like frogs and mosquitoes in stagnant pools’.31

The Juntas’ complaints were couched in the fashionable language of regenerationism, although the entire movement would turn out to be merely a significant step towards military dictatorship. In late May 1917, García Prieto ordered the dissolution of the Juntas Militares de Defensa and the arrest of the leaders. On 1 June, the Juntas threatened to launch a coup d’état if their comrades were not released and their movement not recognized as a legal military trade union. On 9 June, García Prieto was forced from power. The King, endlessly meddling, had toyed with the idea of a coalition government built around Santiago Alba and Francesc Cambó, despite the pair’s mutual loathing. However, he replaced García Prieto with Dato, whose Conservative government recognized the Juntas.32 Mouthing empty regenerationist clichés, they were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement when, in fact, they were merely consolidating the army’s belief that it was the ultimate arbiter of political life. For a brief, illusory moment, workers, capitalists and the military seemed to be united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. In the unlikely event of that three-pronged movement being successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the civil war might perhaps have been avoided. In fact, the events of the crisis of 1917 simply gave slightly more power to the industrial and banking bourgeoisie without undermining the dominance of the entrenched landed oligarchy.33

The lengthy denouement of the crisis began when Dato suspended the Cortes. Cambó was also using a regenerationist rhetoric, claiming that a progressive Catalan capitalism could modernize backward agrarian Spain. His project guaranteed the hostility of Santiago Alba. To push it forward, and in response to Dato’s closure of the Cortes, Cambó organized an alternative Assembly of Catalan deputies which met on 5 July 1917 in the Ajuntament de Barcelona and called for the reopening of the Cortes. They announced that if the government did not agree, a wider Assembly, with reforming parliamentarians from all over Spain, would meet in Barcelona as a kind of shadow Cortes. Dato declared the first Assembly seditious. Cambó went ahead with the threat and arranged the meeting of the Assembly for 19 July. Ossorio y Gallardo believed that it could carry out Maura’s revolution from above. Cambó was anxious to secure the support of Maura himself to prevent the Assembly being smeared as a separatist and revolutionary initiative. Because it was illegal under the Constitution, Maura had refused to cooperate with the Assembly, denouncing it in a letter to his son as ‘grotesque’ and its members as ‘a professional flea-market’.

Had Maura agreed, it would have brought the Juntas aboard and the momentum of the reform movement might have overthrown the monarchy. However, Maura had already denounced the Juntas as ‘a monstrous freak of vintage depravity’. Despite maintaining a correspondence with Cambó, the leader of the Juntas, Colonel Benito Márquez, and his comrades were not prepared to collaborate with the Assembly movement because of its Catalanist emphasis and were certainly not ready to countenance any kind of revolutionary strike. Their hope was to see a government presided over by Antonio Maura, but, to the disappointment of his followers, he was not prepared to come out of retirement. In a letter to Ossorio, Maura referred to Cambó’s plan as ‘the subversive way’ and went on to say: ‘but I’m not one of those who have the vocation for such exploits’. Dato took an authoritarian approach. Much of the Catalan press was banned and he obliged the Madrid press to portray the Assembly as a Catalan separatist initiative. Extra reinforcements of the army and the Civil Guard were sent to Barcelona and a battlecruiser docked in the port. Nevertheless, projected as the progressive parliament that Spain would have if clean elections were possible, the Assembly met in the Palau del Parc de la Ciudadela. It called for an end to the dominance of the corrupt centralist oligarchy. Dato ordered the Assembly dissolved. The members were symbolically arrested by the Civil Governor placing his hand on their shoulders and immediately releasing them. They left the building to the cheers of a large crowd.34

Despite the apparent coincidence of their reforming rhetoric, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and army officers were contradictory and Dato skilfully exploited their differences. Despite the popular support for the Assembly movement, there were already significant differences between it and the Juntas. The UGT and the CNT had been preparing for a revolutionary strike, under the impression that they would enjoy the support of both the Lliga and the Juntas. This was highly unlikely since the fears provoked during the Semana Trágica had been reawakened by the February revolution in Russia. It was even more improbable that army officers would view a revolutionary strike with any sympathy. In any case, UGT–CNT collaboration was difficult. While the anarchists nurtured unrealistically extreme ambitions such as the dissolution of the armed forces and the nationalization of the land, the maximum aim of the Socialists was a provisional government capable of ending political corruption and dealing with inflation and food shortages. Nevertheless, in March 1917, a CNT delegation of Pestaña, Seguí and Ángel Lacort had gone to Madrid for meetings with the UGT. While there, they took part in a public meeting at which they and UGT representatives launched a manifesto that vehemently denounced the failure of the government to respond to the demands made during the UGT’s one-day strike in December 1916. It was meant and was taken as a declaration of war on Dato, who duly had them arrested, but a public outcry forced their early release.35

The intransigence of the government pushed both the CNT and the UGT towards more militant positions, although the Socialists remained the more cautious of the two. Their unease derived from the fact that, from August 1916, extremist action groups on the fringes of the CNT had occasionally resorted to assassination attempts on recalcitrant employers, foremen and strike breakers. The more moderate elements, represented by Pestaña and Seguí, may have disapproved but were unable to disavow these activities. Pestaña wrote: ‘tied by our love of the organization, not only did we not denounce such outrages but, if necessary, we would go out into the street to defend the organization when it was attacked’. The CNT’s sporadic terror was met by a much more organized counter-terror lavishly funded by the industrialists. Over the next seven years, numerous murders were carried out by gangs led by the corrupt ex-police chief Manuel Bravo Portillo and a German agent, Friedrich Stallmann, who went by the name Baron de Koenig. The arrogant Bravo Portillo was tall and swarthy, sported a large curly moustache and tried to pass himself off as an aristocrat. He had made a fortune working for the Germans during the war. He had subsequently been dismissed and imprisoned, albeit for only six months, when it was discovered that he had revealed the sailing times of Allied ships from Barcelona, thereby permitting German submarines to torpedo them. The Bravo Portillo and Koenig gang also carried out attacks on industrialists who were exporting to France.36

By the time of their return to Barcelona after the meetings in Madrid, Pestaña and Seguí found their followers feverishly planning an armed uprising. Pestaña wrote later, ‘The unions’ cashboxes were emptied, down to the last cent to buy pistols and make bombs.’ The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge wrote of those days:

At the Café Espagnol, on the Paralelo, that crowded thoroughfare with its blazing lights of evening, near the horrible barrio chino whose mouldering alleys were full of half-naked girls lurking in doorways that gaped into hell-holes, it was here that I met militants arming for the approaching battle. They spoke enthusiastically of those who would fall in that fight, they dealt out Browning revolvers, and baited, as we all did, the anxious spies at the neighbouring table. In a revolutionary side-street, with a Guardia Civil barracks on one side and poor tenements on the other, I found Barcelona’s hero of the hour, the quickening spirit, the uncrowned leader, the fearless man of politics who distrusted politicians: Salvador Seguí …

In long conversations, Seguí and Serge discussed what the latter called the ‘dubious alliance’ between the workers and the Catalan bourgeoisie. Seguí was aware that the CNT was being used by Cambó: ‘we are useful in their game of political blackmail’. Nevertheless, he was optimistic: ‘Without us, they can do nothing: we have the streets, the shock-troops, the brave hearts among the people. We know this, but we need them. They stand for money, trade, possible legality (at the beginning, anyway), the Press, public opinion, etc.’37

In contrast, the Socialists had initially planned only to support the Assembly movement for the establishment of a provisional government under Melquíades Álvarez with the participation of Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias and Largo Caballero. It would call elections for a Constituent Cortes to decide on the future form of the state. Such aims were compatible with those of Cambó. The discrepancies between the Socialists’ limited ambitions and those of the CNT led to increasing tension.38 When the CNT was about to hold an assembly on 20 June to decide on the immediate declaration of a revolutionary general strike, Largo Caballero hastened to Barcelona to try to restrain the anarchists. Used to working openly in Madrid, he was shocked to have to meet clandestinely at Vallvidrera in the hills outside the city. He was even more taken aback when confronted by a crowd of pistol-toting militants, who declared their readiness to use them to fight off the police or the Civil Guard. They accused the Socialists of being in cahoots with bourgeois politicians and demanded the immediate declaration of the strike.

In the event, Largo Caballero managed to persuade the assembly that the strike should not be declared before adequate preparations had been made. Only the intervention of the moderates Salvador Seguí and Ángel Pestaña saved the alliance.39 On the day that the Assembly was about to meet in Barcelona, the Socialist leader Pablo Iglesias, himself en route to the meeting in the Parc de la Ciudadela, met Pestaña, Seguí and two other CNT leaders, Francesc Miranda and Enric Valero. They explained that the CNT was anxious to launch a general strike in support of the Assembly. To their barely concealed annoyance, Iglesias listened to them ‘with contemptuous indifference’. Expressing surprise at how advanced their plans were, and clearly fearful of exacerbating military hostility, he tried to talk them out of strike action. When they argued that the time was ripe, he replied patronizingly: ‘You, the manual workers see things like that but we, the intellectuals, see them differently.’ They left him, utterly disillusioned, not to say disgusted, with the Socialist stance.40

Moreover, the CNT rank and file was suspicious of the Assembly movement, seeing it as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. In particular, there was considerable suspicion of Cambó, who was regarded as representing hated employers. Accordingly, the CNT was holding back, waiting to see if the Assembly would call for the overthrow of the monarchy. The Socialists, too, planned action only if the Assembly was repressed.41 However, in Valencia, the left-wing republicans Marcelino Domingo and Félix Azzati convinced railway workers that the Assembly was the signal for the general strike. There were also agents provocateurs of the government present, stirring up militancy. The subsequent strike was not supported nationally by the UGT and was put down by the authorities at the cost of two dead and several wounded. The railway company took severe reprisals, dismissing hundreds of workers.42

Remembering their success the previous summer, the UGT’s railway union threatened a nationwide strike in support of their demand for the sacked workers to be reinstated. The issue could have been settled easily, but Dato’s government seized the opportunity to drive a wedge between the forces ranged against the establishment. Dato put pressure on the owners of the railway company to refuse to negotiate. Daniel Anguiano, Secretary General of the railway workers’ union, was forced to fulfil the threat and he declared a strike on 10 August. Dato calculated that the intransigence of the railway owners would force the UGT to raise the stakes with a general strike in solidarity with the railway workers. His hope was that this would split off the Juntas and the Lliga from the reform movement. Accordingly, blindly confident of the backing of the Juntas and the Assembly, the UGT leadership optimistically decided three days later to support the railway workers with a nationwide strike. The instinctive politics of the military saw army officers – both peninsulares and Africanistas – happy to defend the established order.43

The manifesto for the strike that broke out on 10 August 1917 could hardly have been more moderate. Drafted by the PSOE Vice-President, the professor of logic Julián Besteiro, it echoed the demands of the Assembly and instructed the strikers to refrain from violence of any kind. Nevertheless, the government presented the strikers as bloodthirsty revolutionaries. With the UGT forced to act precipitately in support of the railway workers, the strike was poorly prepared, did not extend to the peasantry and was met with savage military repression. In Barcelona, the stoppage was total and artillery was used against the anarchists, who suffered thirty-seven dead. It lasted longest in Asturias where it was supported by Melquíades Álvarez who had been chosen to head the provisional government. It was easily crushed in Asturias and the Basque Country, two of the Socialists’ major strongholds – the third being Madrid. Bilbao was occupied by troops who, on the orders of General José Souza, unleashed indiscriminate attacks on the population. In Asturias, the Military Governor General Ricardo Burguete y Lana declared martial law on 13 August. He accused the strike organizers of being the paid agents of foreign powers. Announcing that he would hunt down the strikers ‘like wild beasts’, he sent columns of regular troops and Civil Guards into the mining valleys where they unleashed an orgy of rape, looting, beatings and torture. With eighty dead, 152 wounded and 2,000 arrested, the failure of the strike was guaranteed.44

Manuel Llaneza, the moderate leader of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, wrote of the ‘odio africano’ during an action in which one of Burguete’s columns was under the command of the young Major Francisco Franco. The implication was that the Africanistas treated the proletariat in exactly the way they treated the colonial population in Morocco. In Madrid, Jóvenes Mauristas acted as auxiliary police and workers armed only with stones were fired on by soldiers with machine guns. Dato’s ploy had secured a short-term success but at the cost of intensifying the hatred between the military and the proletariat and the hostility to his cabinet of both. In this way he inflicted fatal damage on both his government and the system.45

In contravention of his status as a parliamentary deputy, Marcelino Domingo was arrested and mistreated by Civil Guards, who were ready to execute him.46 The UGT’s four-man national strike committee, consisting of Besteiro, the UGT Vice-President, Francisco Largo Caballero, Andrés Saborit, leader of the printers’ union and editor of the PSOE newspaper El Socialista, and Daniel Anguiano, the railway workers’ leader, was arrested in a flat in Madrid. Having failed to take adequate security measures, they were blithely having dinner. To discredit them, the Minister of the Interior, José Sánchez Guerra, mendaciously announced that they were hiding – one in a wardrobe, another under a bed, and two others inside large flowerpots – and that vast amounts of Spanish and foreign currency were found in their belongings. Very nearly subjected to summary execution, from their insanitary cells they could hear the gallows being built. All four were tried by court martial. The Juntas demanded that they receive the death penalty, although they were finally sentenced to life imprisonment. In the event, they spent only some months in jail. Dato’s failure to stand up to the Juntas severely damaged his reputation, just as their participation in the repression killed off the popularity that they had gained in previous months. After a nationwide amnesty campaign, the four members of the strike committee were freed when they were elected to the Cortes in the general elections of 24 February 1918 – Besteiro for Madrid, Saborit for Oviedo, Anguiano for Valencia and Largo Caballero for Barcelona. The entire experience was to have a damaging effect on the subsequent trajectory of all four. In general, the Socialist leadership, particularly the UGT bureaucracy, was traumatized, seeing the movement’s role in 1917 as senseless adventurism.47 The defeat of the strike put an end, for some time, to the possibility of reform from below. Nevertheless, it had demonstrated that the challenge of mass politics was something that the dynastic parties could resist only by recourse to the army. In the words of Francisco Romero, ‘the army had stopped the revolution but who was going to stop the army?’48

Realizing that their role in the repression had fatally damaged their public image as a progressive element, the Juntas implausibly denied responsibility for the brutality meted out to civilians. They issued a statement, claiming that they had been put in an impossible position by the government.49 On 26 October, despite Dato’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the Juntas, they sent the King a note denouncing the incapacity of the present system and urging him to form a new national government. In fact, a wide spectrum of public opinion concurred that the turno system had to be replaced.50 Despite defeating the strike, Dato had not resolved any of the social problems facing him prior to August. Alfonso XIII sacked him and shortly afterwards said to him, ‘Teddy, I’ve been a scoundrel with you.’ Despite his humiliation, Dato tried to protect the King, telling reporters that his resignation had not been precipitated by the Juntas’ ultimatum. Romanones declared that the entire episode constituted the end of the turno. Cambó wrote in the press: ‘I firmly believe that this is not the fall of a government but rather the defeat, the collapse of the system of revolving parties.’51 It certainly marked the end of the credibility of Alfonso XIII as a moderating force and confirmed that the real power in the land was the army.

In the midst of the subsequent crisis which saw Spain without a government for eight days, the Assembly met in the Ateneo de Madrid, on 30 October, to demand a new constitution. In the middle of its deliberations, Cambó was invited to an audience with the King. The members of the Assembly believed that their movement had triumphed but Cambó was actually being bought off. To the consternation of the Assembly’s more liberal and left-wing members, Cambó withdrew from the movement when the King offered the Lliga participation in a new coalition government. Negotiations over its composition were complicated by the Juntas’ demand that they be represented, as Minister of War, by La Cierva, who was opposed by the left and the Assembly. Eventually, in return for the inclusion of two Catalan ministers, Joan Ventosa in Finance and Felip Rodés in Education, Cambó dropped the idea of a Constituent Cortes and on 1 November accepted the formation of a national coalition under García Prieto. To his furious critics in the Assembly, Cambó claimed, implausibly, that he was going to be able to reform the system from within, ensuring that Catalonia would be the Prussia of a regenerated Spain. However, already disliked by many for his brusque and imperious manner, he was widely regarded as having betrayed the forces committed to reform. What he had done was to ally the Lliga with the agrarian oligarchy and the army and had therefore put an end to any kind of legal reform of the system. He was convinced that, after the next elections, the Lliga would have between seventy and eighty deputies and he would be made Prime Minister. In the meantime, he boasted to colleagues that he could control García Prieto through Ventosa. However, the Prime Minister ran rings around the inexperienced Ventosa and Rodés. It was not long before Cambó came to believe that he had been deceived and to regret bitterly that he had not joined the government himself.52

In fact, the coalition had no agreed objectives and each of its components pursued their own agendas. Moreover, it would be opposed by every section of the left. According to Romanones, the legacy of the mistakes made by Dato rendered it an impossible enterprise.53 The Juntas’ representative, La Cierva, did everything possible to thwart the reforming intentions of the two Catalan ministers. The elections held on 24 February 1918 were among the most corrupt and venal of the entire Restoration period and demonstrated that the oligarchy’s capacity to fix results was anything but neutralized. There were urban areas where the elections were relatively clean but the power of rural caciquismo remained solid. Thus Cambó’s Lliga, although victorious in Catalonia, was a long way from gaining the number of seats necessary to permit him to implement a thoroughgoing reform. No party had an overall majority. Dato’s Conservatives secured the most seats, but the combined Liberal groups under Romananones and García Prieto had more. Nevertheless, the results produced a deadlock, with the Cortes split into a number of factions. Moreover, a so-called Alianza de Izquierdas, a group led by Melquíadez Álvarez of the Reformist Party (9 deputies) and various Republican parties (20) and the Socialists (6) and the Lliga Regionalista (21) constituted a significant challenge to the establishment.

To the outrage of other members of the government and of Antonio Maura, La Cierva introduced by royal decree across-the-board pay rises for officers and promoted the ringleaders of the Juntas. Without consulting the Cortes, in a starving country he was massively inflating the military budget and undermining civilian sovereignty over the armed forces. His concern was to clinch military support for the monarchy. Constantly touring barracks, at the same time as he praised the patriotism of the Juntas, he banned the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Junta and eliminated the regenerationist elements led by Benito Márquez. When Márquez protested that the Minister’s pandering to the Juntas would eventually lead to the alienation of the army from the political system, La Cierva managed to get him expelled from the army. In February 1918, there began a strike of postal and telegraph workers. With characteristic heavy-handedness, La Cierva responded by militarizing those services and thereby rendering the strikers mutineers. Since the army lacked the expertise to run them, the consequence was total chaos in national communications. There was also public outrage that La Cierva had given in to the army but used force against civilians. La Cierva resigned and brought the government down. There were widespread rumours that he was planning to establish a dictatorship with a group of colonels. He later denied this.54

Alfonso XIII threatened to abdicate if a proper national government was not formed. The serious danger of a dictatorship under La Cierva was averted only when, on 21 March 1918, Maura was persuaded, in large part by Cambó, to preside over a broad national coalition government containing the principal party leaders. Dato, resentful because of the return of Maura, became Foreign Minister, García Prieto Minister of the Interior, Romanones Minister of Justice, Cambó Minister of Public Works and Santiago Alba Minister of Education. The public reaction was ecstatic, as if Spain had been saved and a new era inaugurated. Maura on the other hand was bitterly pessimistic. He wrote to his son: ‘They kept me tied up there for nearly ten years which could have been the most profitable of my life, stopping me from doing anything useful, and now they want me to preside over all of them. Let’s see how long this nonsense lasts.’55

Cambó defended his participation in the government in the Cortes on 17 April by claiming that it was necessary to avert anarchy.56 Alarmed by the sight of revolutionary workers in the streets, the industrialists dropped their own demands for political reform and, lured by Maura’s promises of economic modernization, permitted their leaders to support his administration. Yet again the industrial bourgeoisie had abandoned its political aspirations and allied with the landed oligarchy out of a fear of revolution. The coalition symbolized the slightly improved position of industrialists in a reactionary alliance still dominated by the landed interest.

In the event, despite apparently being a team of all the talents and making a highly promising and conciliatory start, the coalition was short-lived. With La Cierva absent, the strike of the communications workers was swiftly resolved. His military reform bill was revised and amnesty was granted for the events of August 1917. Nevertheless, there was considerable distrust within the government, especially between Dato and Maura and, most damagingly, between Alba and Cambó, who was trying both to further Catalan autonomy and to revitalize the Spanish economy. A crisis was provoked by the intensification of German attacks on Spanish shipping. The government issued an ultimatum to Berlin, but internal divisions were exacerbated by the Germanophile King’s refusal to permit further action. In addition, the growing hostility between Alba and Cambó saw Maura’s government collapse on 6 November 1918, five days before the armistice that brought the Great War to an end. Replaced by Romanones, an embittered Maura seemed to have reached the conclusion that the only solution was a military dictatorship. In fact, the fall of the second national government put an end to any remaining chance of effective reform of the system from above.57