Читать книгу A People Betrayed - Paul Preston - Страница 16

The coming of peace in November 1918 brought an intensification of Spain’s political crisis. The huge profits made in mines, steel production and textiles had not, in the main, been invested in new technology. Indeed, widespread publicity given to spending by the nouveaux riches on luxury items, at a time of food shortages, had intensified working-class resentment of what was seen as a parasitic plutocracy. The return to peacetime production of British, French and American industry plunged the Spanish economy into crisis.1 Thus, while military brutality had permitted the discredited political system to survive the crisis of 1917, mass hunger and unemployment after the end of the war would intensify the pressure on the establishment. Already in 1918, there were strikes, bread riots and looting of shops. Nevertheless, the repression of the August 1917 strike had damaged the relationship between the Socialists and the anarchists and also divided both movements internally. The PSOE, too traumatized by the events of August 1917 to pursue further revolutionary action with the CNT, sought, instead, an electoral strategy in collaboration with the Republicans. This provoked a reaction from more militant elements that would eventually secede to form the Communist Party. While the Socialist leaders were worried by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia, hard-line anarchists were thrilled. Oblivious to the authoritarian elements of Leninism, they believed that the events in Russia heralded the coming of a worldwide anarchist utopia. However, the more thoughtful syndicalists like Ángel Pestaña and Salvador Seguí would have been prepared to countenance joint strike action with the UGT.2

In the immediate aftermath of 1917, while UGT membership stagnated, the CNT grew substantially. One reason for this was the greater militancy of the anarcho-syndicalists. This had hitherto been rendered ineffective because the Catalan working class was dispersed into myriad small federations across individual trades and neighbourhoods. In 1917, there were 475 federations in Barcelona alone. The difficulty of arranging collective action played into the hands of the employers. The situation changed when the congress of the Catalan CNT, the Confederació Regional del Treball, held at Sants from 28 June to 1 July 1918, adopted a much more effective strategy. This was the creation of the so-called Sindicatos Únicos (united unions), in order to gather all the workers in each industry into a single body. It was further decided that all the Sindicatos Únicos in a given area would be grouped together in a local federation. Moreover, to prevent the growth of bureaucracy, union dues were abolished and paid administrative posts reduced to a bare minimum. With the help of some violent coercion of reluctant workers, the 475 small, weak unions in Barcelona were reduced to thirteen powerful ones. Henceforth, there would be fewer but much longer strikes, many of them initially successful. The Sindicato Único provided a channel for the resentments of the thousands of immigrant labourers who had arrived during the war years and were crammed into unhygienic tenements and paid starvation wages. The new union structure effectively imposed the militancy of the majority of these unskilled workers on the labour aristocracy and ensured that trade disputes quickly escalated. The brainchild of Seguí and Pestaña, the Sindicatos Únicos were adopted by the CNT nationally. By the end of 1918, the CNT had 70,000 members in Catalonia and 114,000 nationally. Within a year, this had swelled to 800,000.3

However, helped by the divisions within the working class and reinforced by the collaboration of the Lliga, the turno system was not quite dead yet. After the fall of the second national government, Alfonso XIII appointed a Liberal government under Manuel García Prieto, the Marqués de Alhucemas. It would be merely the first of ten brief administrations between November 1918 and September 1923, some of which would last for only a matter of weeks. La Cierva’s presence was divisive but necessary to keep the army in check, albeit at a high price. By accepting the Juntas as an army trade union, La Cierva was effectively tolerating indiscipline and demands which were a step towards military dictatorship. Riddled with factionalism, incapable of agreeing on a common agenda, one government after another failed to resolve ever-intensifying problems.4

The cracks in the Restoration system were worsened by the machinations of the King. Concerned by the fall of other European monarchies and fearing that his own downfall might be precipitated by the outbreak of revolution in Barcelona, on 15 November Alfonso XIII tried to secure the loyalty of Cambó. He told him that he saw Catalan autonomy as the only certain way to divert the revolutionary threat. Cambó made the mistake of falling for what was simply a cynical ploy and went ahead with a project for autonomy. Although received sympathetically by Romanones, who had formed a new government on 10 December 1918, it was rejected violently in the Cortes by both the Liberals and Maura. Niceto Alcalá-Zamora scored a direct hit when he pointed out the contradiction between Cambó’s two ambitions, autonomy for Catalonia and hegemony of the Spanish state. He said: ‘the problem with Cambó is that he wants to be at the same time the Bolívar of Catalonia and the Bismarck of Spain’ – a phrase later accepted as true by Cambó himself. The defeat of his aspirations for Catalonia deeply embittered Cambó and led to the Catalan deputies withdrawing from the Cortes for six weeks. Cambó himself was moved to break with Alfonso XIII. On 16 December, he made a speech in Barcelona under the title ‘Monarquia? República? Catalunya!’ in which he declared that the Lliga, while not expecting a republic to bring about autonomy, would not abandon campaigning for autonomy out of any concern that it might bring about the fall of the monarchy.5

In 1919, the Liberal senator Amós Salvador, without naming him, compared Alfonso XIII to a naughty child: ‘Dealing with kings is like dealing with children. One is inclined to let them do whatever they want despite being convinced that there is no better way to do them the most damage.’6 In his memoirs, the Conservative Manuel Burgos y Mazo wrote: ‘After 1919, I promised myself that I would not serve again as a minister for a disloyal King who could never be trusted by any one of his advisers.’7 Cambó had a similar perception, believing that the King was behind the creation of the virulently anti-Catalan Unión Monárquica Nacional, a group that would eventually play a key role in the conspiracy to overthrow the Second Republic. Essentially, Alfonso XIII’s meddling would contribute to the definitive break between conservative Catalanism and the monarchy.8

Despite these fissures and the aspirations of the coalition governments, at the end of the First World War Spain was still broadly divided into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the smallholding peasantry. Significantly, in the course of the second decade of the century, the Catholic farmers of Old Castile were mobilized in defence of big landholding interests. As left-wing ideologies captured the urban working classes, the more far-sighted landowners realized that efforts had to be made to prevent the poison spreading to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary agrarian syndicates sponsored by landlords had begun to appear from 1906. The process was systematized by Ángel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain, and founder in 1909 of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP), a group of dynamic, high-flying Catholics in the professions. From 1912, Herrera and the Palencian landowner Antonio Monedero Martín set out to divert the smallholders away from socialism and anarchism by the implementation of the Christian-social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. In the next five years, through the efforts of the determined activists of the ACNP, a series of Catholic Agrarian Federations appeared in León, Salamanca and Castile and tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery. Access to such assistance was made explicitly dependent on adherence to a militantly conservative Catholicism. Taken to its logical extremes, the rhetoric of the federations implied a challenge to the economic interests of big landowners. Only in the more prosperous north was it possible to maintain an uneasy balance between the mitigation of poverty and defence of the socio-economic status quo. By 1917, the various local federations were united as the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria (CNCA), but their implantation was intermittent outside the provinces of León and Old Castile. This was understandable since, in the south, the only palliative that landowners could offer the braceros, possession of the land, involved an unacceptable transfer of wealth.9 The credibility, in the eyes of hungry labourers, of rich landowners arriving in limousines to establish a ‘union’, was necessarily minimal.10

The CNCA would almost certainly have remained confined to the smallholding areas of central and northern Spain had it not been for the massive upsurge in the revolutionary militancy of the rural proletariat of the south after 1917. Social tensions had been intensifying since the desamortización. Both the more ruthless exploitation of church and aristocratic lands by their new owners and the enclosure of the common lands had put an end to many practices that had eased rural hardship. The economic model of southern latifundismo was the exploitation of the labour of the landless rural proletariat.11 For the majority, work was available only at harvest time and involved long hours of backbreaking labour often from sun-up to sun-down on starvation wages. The situation was dramatically worsened during the First World War. While landowners were enriched by the massive export of agricultural produce, the day labourers were impoverished by the inability of wages to keep pace with rocketing food prices.12

The consequence was a wave of strikes, land occupations and bread riots across Andalusia, especially in Cordoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville, between 1918 and 1920. The period was termed the ‘three Bolshevik years’ by the great chronicler of the events, Juan Díaz del Moral, the liberal notary from Bujalance in Cordoba. The initial objectives were wage increases and better working conditions, although, inspired by the Russian revolution, some militant leaders saw the possibility of ‘a red dawn’.13 Even though the intentions of the majority of the strikers were considerably more reformist than revolutionary, the peasant agitations were seen by the big landowners as equivalent to the Russian revolution. Fear of insurrection provoked cursory interest in the CNCA from some latifundistas. That was hardly surprising since, as an acute observer of the revolutionary agitation of the spring of 1919, the distinguished agronomist Pascual Carrión, noted, ‘we cannot forget the extension and intensity of the workers’ movement; the strike in Cordoba, among others, was truly general and impressive, managing to frighten the landowners to such a degree that they were ready to hand over their estates’.14

From early 1919 until late 1920, the CNCA had received financial support each month from Alfonso XIII himself. As the class conflict intensified, however, he switched his support to the more aggressive landowners’ organization, the Liga de Terratenientes Andaluces. There was a vain hope that this organization would collect money to combat ‘the red wave’, but during the trienio bolchevista it resorted to more violent measures. Throughout Andalusia, the sons of landowners formed cavalry units to support the Civil Guard in clashes with the workers.15 In Andalusia, as in Catalonia, the King had little interest in promoting social cohesion, just like the majority of the latifundistas, whose intransigent response to the strikes intensified the social resentments of the rural south. The consequences of the trienio bolchevista would be masked by the imposition of a military dictatorship between 1923 and 1930. Nevertheless, the conflicts of 1919–21 ended the previous uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and their estate managers. What remained of those elements of paternalism that mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros’ lives came to an abrupt end.

The CNCA began an extensive propaganda campaign in Andalusia in January 1919, denouncing the blind egoism of the landowners, who were ‘Catholics who boasted about their charity but then paid lower wages and exacted higher rents than they would ever dare admit to their confessor’. Teams of CNCA representatives toured the southern provinces and were egged on by the ACNP newspaper, El Correo de Andalucía, which declared: ‘Anarchy is spreading amongst those below and is being fomented by the apathy of those above. We live in serious times; either Andalusia will be saved now if she follows you or will die for ever in the clutches of hatred and revolution … If the landowners of Andalusia follow you, they will be saved; if they repudiate you, they will be drowned in their own blood.’ In the first months of the year, the CNCA campaign was extremely successful with the owners, but the orators sent to workers’ centres were booed off the stage. In their panic, a few latifundistas put up money and made available small plots of wasteland for settlement by suitably deferential labourers. However, the majority of landowners were not prepared to make substantial concessions and preferred to paralyse strikers with the unrestrained violence of their estate guards (guardas jurados) backed by the Civil Guard. In some towns such as Puente Genil, the local bourgeoisie created a well-armed militia to assist the Civil Guard in clashes with strikers, a pre-echo of what would happen in many Andalusian towns in the summer and autumn of 1936. Some landowners abandoned their estates and fled to Madrid, while those who stayed bought stocks of weaponry for themselves and their retainers. The CNCA continued to preach the gospel of class collaboration, but its real position was starkly exposed as conflict grew more acute.16

On 18 April 1919, Antonio Monedero Martín was made Director General of Agriculture and his appointment was greeted by El Socialista with the headline ‘Scabs in power’. There was little proletarian faith in the CNCA’s declared ambition of creating a class of smallholding peasants. Monedero soon confirmed the Socialist view that he was the puppet of the landowners when he called for the closure of working-class organizations and for the deportation or imprisonment of strike leaders. In mid-April, the government of Antonio Maura intensified the repression by suspending constitutional guarantees, declaring martial law in Cordoba and sending in cavalry units to reinforce the Civil Guard. The Africanista General Manuel de la Barrera was put in command of the 20,000 troops sent against the landless labourers. He declared that ‘the Andalusian problem will not be solved without a cruel and energetic persecution of the propagandists who organise the masses’.17 There were more than 2,000 arrests. The leaders of all unions, except Antonio Monedero’s Catholic unions, were detained. Republican and Socialist leaders who had had nothing to do with the strike were deported from the province specifically to disrupt their campaigns for the April 1919 elections. With the area under virtual military occupation and the owners free to intimidate strikers, the revolutionary movement was gradually brought under control.18 However, the repression of 1919–20 and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930 did nothing but douse an agitation which continued to smoulder until the Second Republic revived the spectre of land reform.

Indeed, Pascual Carrión noted that the landowners’ instinctive intransigence and ready resort to repressive violence during the trienio bolchevista ensured that peasant rebellion was unlikely to end soon:

Nobody who knows the history of those movements could possibly think that, after that period, the caciques and the landowners would not recover their previous domination. The weight of the government repression, the deportations and reprisals carried out by a well-known general [Manuel de la Barrera] sent by the government in May 1919 to Andalusia, put an end to the proletarian movement. Instead of channelling that movement, it was crushed with cruelty as so often before and, for that reason, it is not surprising that hatred of the latifundistas was fomented among the humble classes and that now [in 1932] there is a resurgence of agitation and revolts with greater violence than ever.19

While the Spanish countryside seethed with conflict, the failures of the two national governments in 1918 were exacerbated by the social crisis in industrial cities that followed the end of the First World War. The Basque iron and steel industry was hit by the dumping of the wartime surpluses accumulated in Britain and the United States. The shipping industry, which relied on transporting ore to Britain, was hit by the post-war slump in the British steel industry. During the war, Asturian mines and the Catalan textile industry had expanded but profits had not been ploughed back into achieving greater efficiency. Everywhere in industry and agriculture, the end of the war saw wages reduced and workers laid off.20 Working-class militancy increased and was met by military intervention. The Spanish state faced similar challenges to those confronting the defeated belligerent nations of Europe. In Madrid, there were strikes and food riots during which trams were set alight. According to significantly understated official figures, the number of strikes mushroomed from 71,440 in 1917 to 244,684 in 1920, while the number of working days lost in those strikes increased from 1.75 million to 7.25 million.21 Already terrified by the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, the Spanish ruling classes were further alarmed by the foundation in Moscow of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. Although defeat in 1917 had traumatized the Socialist leadership, it had not marked the end of the assault on the system. Between late 1918 and the beginning of 1921, industrial workers in northern Spain followed the example of the anarchist day labourers of the south. Industrialists responded to economic recession by limiting production, cutting wages and laying off large numbers of workers. This inevitably provoked greater worker militancy, to which industrialists in Catalonia and landowners in the south reacted by turning to the army.

In Catalonia in 1919, determined to crush the CNT, intransigent industrialists were backed by the hard-line Captain General of the IV Región Militar, Lieutenant General Joaquín Milans del Bosch y Carrió. He in turn enjoyed the support of the Juntas Militares de Defensa. Conflict intensified after a strike broke out on 8 February at the Anglo-Canadian-owned Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company or Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro, known as La Canadiense. It began in protest at the arbitrary dismissal of eight administrative staff for trying to unionize. It mushroomed as successively the sacked men’s department, then the entire factory and finally, in a show of power by the Sindicato Único of Gas, Water and Electricity, all the power workers in Catalonia went on strike. By 21 February, three-quarters of Catalan industry had been forced to close down for lack of power. Trams were stalled in the streets, and cafés and theatres had to close. Milans del Bosch, himself an upper-class Catalan with connections to the industrialists, called for a declaration of martial law. The government of Romanones hesitantly agreed on 1 March. Workers were conscripted, a measure that exposed strikers to the threat of four years’ imprisonment for mutiny. Despite the arrest of 3,000 workers, the strike did not fold. Romanones appointed a distinguished criminal lawyer, Gerardo Doval, as chief of police. He also named a conciliatory Civil Governor, Carlos Montañés, and sent the Under-Secretary of the cabinet office, José Morote, to negotiate with the strikers. Helped by the moderation of Seguí, these mediation initiatives led to the Canadiense agreeing in mid-March to rehire the workers and raise wages. At a mass meeting of nearly 30,000 initially hostile workers on 19 March, Seguí’s oratory secured agreement for a return to work conditional on the release of prisoners. However, it was to be only a brief truce. Within five days, the city was again paralysed.22

Interestingly, in 1919, Lerroux had been placed on the payroll of the Canadiense (in addition to his many other income streams), in the hope that his rabble-rousing skills might help break the strike by undermining working-class solidarity. The company continued to pay him a monthly stipend for at least a further decade and half. In 1934, when he was Prime Minister, he was asked by the London offices of the Canadiense to try to reduce the company’s fiscal obligations. It is not known what action he took.23 Although the strike in the spring of 1919 had not been violent, the employers, shaken by the CNT’s ability to shut down Barcelona, were determined to destroy the union. Moreover, Milans and the Juntas were infuriated by the readiness of Romanones to work for a peaceful solution. Even before the Canadiense strike, confident of the support of the army, the industrialists were becoming more militant. In February 1919, the recently formed Unión Monárquica Nacional had called for action against both strikers and Catalanists. Fearful of losing its conservative support, the Lliga-dominated employers’ organization, the Foment Nacional del Treball, toned down its Catalanist aspirations and threw its support behind the coalition of the army and industrialists determined to destroy the Catalan section of the CNT, the Confederación Regional de Trabajo (CRT). The principal function of the industrialists’ organization, the Federació Patronal de Catalunya, under its belligerent president Félix Graupera, was simply to combat the Sindicatos Únicos. To this end, it emulated the structure and tactics of the Sindicatos Únicos. Against the general strike would be deployed the general lock-out. The Catalan Federation belonged to the nationwide Confederación Patronal Española presided over by the equally militant Francisco Junoy. In Barcelona, as in Bilbao, Madrid and Valencia, the most hard-line members of the Confederación Patronal Española were owners of small and medium businesses in the metallurgical, building and woodworking industries who were badly hit by the post-war economic crisis and the rise in labour militancy.24

With the enthusiastic support of industrialists and businessmen, Milans del Bosch was already going onto a war footing against the CNT. On 22 March, he authorized a citizens’ militia, the Somatén. Originally created in medieval times to repel Muslim raids, its name refers to the bells rung to summon the militia, so emetent, literally ‘emitting sound’ – that is, sounding the alarm. In fact, the revival of the Somatén had been long in preparation as a Guardia Cívica. However, now that it was armed by Milans del Bosch, this 8,000-strong auxiliary military force seriously worried Romanones, but he did not subject the Somatén to civilian authority. On 25 March, Milans decreed that anyone not a member of the Somatén caught carrying arms would be considered guilty of military rebellion.25 The Somatén ran public transport and patrolled the streets, arresting and mistreating strikers and obliging shops and cafés to remain open. Milans also approved the use of a parallel police force financed by the Federació Patronal de Catalunya and led by the recently released Manuel Bravo Portillo. This gang of well-paid gunmen and cut-throats recruited in the underworld carried out assaults on trade union leaders that ranged from beatings to murder. To facilitate these activities, military funds financed the compilation of a huge card index of prominent CNTistas, the so-called Fichero Lasarte, compiled by a Civil Guard, Captain Julio de Lasarte Persino, who had worked with Baron de Koenig. With the encouragement of the recently appointed Military Governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, Lasarte’s often fabricated information was used to facilitate arrests and occasionally murders.26

Neither Milans del Bosch nor the Federació Patronal was interested in conciliation. When Milans refused to release prisoners, undermining the agreement for the return to work, the CNT was provoked into declaring a disastrous general strike on 24 March. With the loud support of the Barcelona garrison, martial law was reimposed, CNT offices were shut down and hundreds of union leaders, including Pestaña, arrested. The assault on the CNT was led by Martínez Anido, a brutal Africanista and a favourite of Alfonso XIII, who had been appointed Military Governor in February. The moderate syndicalists and the Romanones appointees, Montañés and Doval, were outflanked by the military. Milans was furious when Doval called on him to break up Bravo Portillo’s gang. He sent the intimidating Martínez Anido and Colonel Julio Aldir of the Civil Guard to threaten Montañés and Doval that they would be imprisoned if they did not leave Barcelona immediately. With the strike effectively broken, it took the oratory of Seguí to persuade another mass meeting that a return to work was the only way to avoid further disaster. Unsurprisingly, the principal military newspaper denied, in rather vague language, that the Barcelona garrison had had anything to do with the expulsion of Montañés and Doval.27

The treatment of Montañés and Doval demonstrated the impotence of civilian rule. It provoked the fall of Romanones’ cabinet and opened up a major political crisis in which a key role was played by Alfonso XIII.28 Romanones asked the King to dismiss Milans, but Alfonso refused to accept the General’s token resignation. In the light of the King’s unreserved support for Milans, Romanones had no choice but to resign.29 Alfonso’s identification with the most reactionary elements of the army and the Church would consistently undermine any government attempts at conciliatory social policy. Indeed, the King was flirting ever more keenly with the idea of a military dictatorship. He chose to replace Romanones with a reluctant Maura on 15 April. It would be a temporary solution since Maura no longer represented the dominant sector of the Conservative Party, which was now led by Eduardo Dato. The shift in power within the party derived from disquiet at the methods of Juan de la Cierva and his links with the Juntas de Defensa. Dato and others inclined to a policy of negotiation with the moderate trade unionists. Suffering ill health, Dato had favoured a government under his ally, the moderate Conservative Joaquín Sánchez de Toca. However, the King granted Maura the dissolution decree. Despite his reputation as an opponent of electoral corruption, to secure success in the elections of 1 June 1919 Maura opted to exploit the worst kind of caciquismo. It was to no avail. Opposed by much of his own Conservative Party, he failed to win an overall majority. Moreover, his reputation was shattered and he resigned on 20 July.30

Under Maura and persisting after his fall, despite the defeat of the CNT’s ‘general strike’, the dirty war against the organization continued in Catalonia. At the behest of Milans del Bosch, the Bravo Portillo gang maintained its offensive against trade unionists, eliminating moderates in order to disrupt industrial negotiations. Among those murdered had been Pau Sabater (‘El Tero’), a distinguished leader of the textile Sindicato Único, whose bullet-riddled body was found on 20 July. Inevitably, there was a desire for reprisals. Moreover, the scale of the repression undermined the credibility of the moderate trade unionists among their own affiliates. And, as the economic repression bit harder and more workers were laid off, there were more men ready to take a small salary to become gunmen.31 When Bravo Portillo was assassinated on 5 September, his gang would be taken over by the sinister Prussian Friedrich Stallman who, it will be recalled, went by the fake title of Baron de Koenig. He was described by the conservative politician Francisco Bastos Ansart as ‘a prince of rogues’. Koenig was subsidized by the French secret service as well as by the bosses who paid him to murder trade union leaders. In turn, he also blackmailed the industrialists with a protection racket and was finally expelled from Spain in May 1920.32

To the delight of industrialists and landowners, in the twelve weeks that Maura was in government, aided by Antonio Goicoechea, his hard-line Minister of the Interior, he had responded with brutal force to social tension in Catalonia and the south. Constitutional guarantees were suspended and union leaders were imprisoned. As has been seen, he had sent General de la Barrera to Andalusia to smash the rebellion of the agricultural labourers. When Dato once more suggested as Maura’s successor the moderate Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, Alfonso XIII resisted, pushing for Maura, even threatening to appoint the relatively left-wing Melquíades Álvarez. Eventually, Dato was able to secure the appointment he wanted. An enlightened team consisting of Sánchez de Toca, his Minister of the Interior, the devout social Catholic Manuel Burgos y Mazo, and a new Civil Governor of Barcelona, Julio Amado, adopted a conciliatory line towards the unions. According to Burgos y Mazo, there were 43,000 syndicalists in prison. Believing that repression could only encourage the extremist wing of the CNT, the government was inclined to recognize the unions as the legitimate representatives of the workers in dialogue with the industrialists. To this end, prisoners were released, martial law lifted and the eight-hour day introduced. The intelligent application of conciliation resolved strikes in Valencia and Malaga and saw a significant reduction in the number of assassinations in Barcelona. In return, Seguí, Manuel Buenacasa and other moderate syndicalists issued a manifesto declaring that if the CNT was legalized, strikes would be peaceful. They denounced state violence as the cause of left-wing terrorism.33

This coincided with a devastating speech in the Cortes by the thirty-nine-year-old republican deputy for Sabadell, Francesc Layret. The bearded Layret was severely disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of two and needed iron leg braces and two sticks to walk.34 A close friend of Seguí, Layret was a brilliant lawyer and frequently defended syndicalists in court. In his speech on 7 August 1919, Layret denounced the dictatorial role in Barcelona of Milans and the Juntas de Defensa. He revealed the threats made by Martínez Anido and Colonel Aldir to Gerardo Doval and Carlos Montañés and explained how the expulsion of both had precipitated the fall of Romanones. He went on to accuse Romanones of cowardice for resigning rather than sacking Milans del Bosch. Layret may have thereby signed his own death warrant. At the time, the response of Burgos y Mazo, far from attacking Layret, was to confirm his own conciliatory approach.35

The efforts of Sánchez de Toca, Burgos y Mazo and the Civil Governor of Barcelona, Julio Amado, to reach agreement with the unions were not at all what was wanted by La Cierva, the alarmed industrialists or the army. At the second congress of the Confederación Patronal Española, held in Barcelona in the last week of October 1919, it was decided to institute a lock-out of industrial workers (public services and the food sector were excluded) in order to starve the workers into leaving the CNT or provoke them into a reaction that would justify military intervention. The lock-out lasted until January 1920, left over 200,000 men out of work and intensified class hatred.36 The credibility of the moderates in the CNT was undermined and workers increasingly placed their faith in the so-called grupos de afinidad, tightly knit action groups. Led by hard-liners such as Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso and Ricardo Sanz, groups such as ‘Los Solidarios’ and ‘Nosotros’ would eventually coalesce into the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.37 At the same time as extremism flourished on the left, the provocations of the industrialists were matched by the activities of the Juntas. When a number of captains taking a course at the staff college (Escuela Superior de Guerra) refused to join the Juntas de Defensa, they were subjected to an honour court and eventually expelled from the college, with the support of the Minister of War.38

This led to the fall of Sánchez de Toca’s government on 9 December 1919. He was replaced by another Conservative follower of Maura, Manuel Allendesalazar, who was close to La Cierva. He appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona the dour Francisco Maestre Laborde-Bois, Conde de Salvatierra, who had earned a reputation as a brutal Civil Governor of Seville. The outgoing Civil Governor, Julio Amado, bumped into Seguí and other CNT moderates who were returning from a congress in Madrid. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned them, ‘those gentlemen want blood and I wasn’t willing to spill it.’39 With the industrialists’ lock-out still in force, Salvatierra’s repressive policies saw an intensification of street violence. Debilitated by the lock-out and the months without pay, their families and they themselves hungry, unable to pay their rent, the anarcho-syndicalists were weary. This situation discredited the moderate union leaders and ensured the rise of the action groups. The most determined of their leaders was Ramon Archs i Serra, Secretary of the metalworkers’ union. On 4 January 1920, there was a failed assassination attempt on Salvador Seguí. On the following day, the President of the Federació Patronal, Félix Graupera, was wounded. The Conde de Salvatierra had over a hundred union leaders arrested and closed a large number of workers’ centres and the syndicalists’ newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. On 23 January, Salvatierra decreed the closing of all CRT–CNT unions. Without consulting the government, Milans del Bosch backed him by establishing martial law. He then demanded that the Somatén be given full military authority. A reluctant Allendesalazar agreed under pressure from garrisons from all over Spain as well as from the Somatén.40

In February, the publication of correspondence revealing his nefarious activities in previous years saw the dismissal of Milans del Bosch. There were rumours that he was preparing a coup, but he had insufficient ambition. Significantly, he was ‘rewarded’ by the King with the highly prestigious post of head of the royal household. He was replaced briefly as Captain General of Catalonia by the eighty-two-year-old hard-liner General Valeriano Weyler.41

Eduardo Dato took power on 5 May 1920 and Koenig was expelled from Spain. After the repressive interval of Allendesalazar, Dato returned to the moderate policies of Sánchez de Toca. He appointed the moderate Francisco Bergamín as Minister of the Interior and the equally reasonable Federico Carlos Bas as Civil Governor of Barcelona. Bas noted that the majority of assassination attempts were directed against workers. In consequence, he was convinced that it was the vindictive approach of the Federació Patronal that kept terrorism alive. He began to release prisoners and lifted press censorship. The industrialists’ opposition ensured that he was in post for barely six months. Thus Dato’s moderation was to little or no avail. On 4 August, the Conde de Salvatierra, the ex-Civil Governor of Barcelona, was murdered in Valencia while returning from the port in a horse-drawn carriage.42 Dato was forced to replace Bergamín with the hard-line Conde Gabino Bugallal. Tension was rising in Barcelona where a major strike in the metallurgical industries broke out in mid-October. Just as Seguí was bringing the strike to an end, virtually on the employers’ terms, on 31 October, Jaume Pujol, the President of the federation of the employers in the electricity sector, was murdered.

Bas, who was negotiating with Seguí, was visited by the Military Governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido. In an intemperate confrontation, Martínez Anido declared that all social violence in Barcelona was the work of anarchists in the pay of Russia. He presented Bas with a list of seventy-eight anarchists, including Seguí and Pestaña, whom he demanded be shot immediately. Bas responded, ‘I am neither an executioner nor a despot,’ and presented his resignation to Bugallal. On 8 November 1920, Bas was replaced as Civil Governor by Martínez Anido, who was told by Dato: ‘act as you see fit; the Government will put no obstacles in your way’. When Seguí learned of the appointment, he declared, ‘they are going to massacre us’. Echoing the words of his predecessor Julio Amado, Bas asserted on leaving Barcelona, ‘They are throwing me out because I am not prepared to be a murdering governor.’43

The entire operation to get rid of Bas had been choreographed by a group of businessmen and army officers including Martínez Anido himself, the chief of police, Colonel Miguel Arlegui Bayonés of the Civil Guard, and Captain Lasarte. Now Civil Governor, Martínez Anido was incensed by a revealing article by Andreu Nin, an up-and-coming figure in the CNT, who had written: ‘Now we have a murderer as governor; the bosses can be pleased.’44

Despite the brief triumph of the Canadiense strike, already by the beginning of 1920 things were going badly for CNT. In addition to the various offensives being undertaken by the industrialists, the post-war economy was contracting. Wildcat strikes were hardly the best tactic to prevent lay-offs and wage-cuts. The employers’ lock-out had left 200,000 men without work. Matters were made even worse by the promotion of the vicious Martínez Anido to Civil Governor of Barcelona. Now in overall charge of public order and in a position to wage war on the CNT, Martínez Anido, assisted by Miguel Arlegui, instituted a regime of terror. The tall Arlegui, beneath whose aquiline nose grew a small moustache, was even more sadistic than Martínez Anido. He enjoyed torturing prisoners. The upper and middle classes of Barcelona were ecstatic about the pair’s appointment. On the basis of Lasarte’s card index, sixty-four trade unionists and liberals, including Pestaña, Seguí and his friend the journalist Lluís Companys, were identified and arrested. Thirty-six were sent to the prison of La Mola in Mahon, Menorca. Martínez Anido had the gall to suggest that it was for their safety. In Barcelona, prisons were overflowing with a further 1,000 less prominent militants and many had to be confined on ships in the port. There was an increase in street shootings that could not be blamed on the anarchists since most of the likely suspects were in prison. Hundreds of CNT members were deported to distant Spanish provinces, forced to make the long journeys in chains, shod only in rope sandals. They were then left without sustenance to survive as best they could but obliged to report every day to the local Civil Guard post. Two hundred militants fled Barcelona and joined the Spanish Foreign Legion to fight in Morocco. Gunmen from the recently created scab organization the Sindicatos Libres were trained in military barracks.45

Shortly after midnight on 12 September 1920, a bomb exploded in a packed workmen’s music hall, the Cabaret Pompeya in the Paralelo, killing six workers and seriously injuring eighteen more, including many moderates who opposed violence. The CNT, believing that the bomb was the work of assassins in the pay of the employers’ association, declared its readiness to help in bringing the culprits to justice. Nevertheless, the police began to round up members of the Sindicato Único. Nearly 150,000 workers attended the funeral of those killed. It was eventually revealed that the perpetrator was Inocencio Feced Calvo, a diminutive and sickly ex-anarchist from Teruel who had tuberculosis. During the lock-out, in desperate need of money to buy medicine, he had agreed to become an informer. Thereafter, he had been blackmailed into becoming an agent provocateur by the threat of being exposed to his comrades.46

Arlegui implemented the so-called ley de fugas (the shooting in the back of prisoners forced to run but, allegedly, ‘trying to escape’). This tactic enjoyed considerable approval within the army high command. General Miguel Primo de Rivera, at the time Captain General of Valencia, wrote to Eduardo Dato on 21 January 1921: ‘Social disturbers should be rounded up, then, on their way to prison, a few bullets and the problem is solved. There is no other way to deal with this matter since ordinary justice and legislation are ineffective …’47 The principal targets of the gunmen seemed to be the more moderate elements of the CRT. On 17 November, for instance, José Canela, a close friend of Seguí, was assassinated. In the three weeks after Martínez Anido took over, there were twenty-two deaths on both sides. On 30 November, the republican parliamentary deputy Francesc Layret was murdered on his way to request the release of Companys. A huge multitude followed the funeral cortège of Layret.48 It was Feced who later revealed that the assassination had been organized by Martínez Anido and Arlegui in conjunction with the leaders of the Sindicatos Libres, Ramón Sales Amenós and Juan Laguía Lliteras. The three gunmen were paid by the industrialist Maties Muntadas, who had previously financed the activities of Bravo Portillo.49 Muntadas was not the only source of finance for Martínez Anido’s murky activities. Luis Silvela, who held several ministerial posts under Alfonso XIII, including a brief stint as Minister of the Interior in late 1918, alleged that bribes from the owners of illegal gambling dens were used by Martínez Anido to pay pistoleros.50

The Basque novelist Pío Baroja composed a savage portrait of Martínez Anido: ‘General don Severiano, short, stunted, red-faced, with the gloomy air of the true executioner, presented a disturbing image: he had a large head, his hair close cropped, short arms, square hands. Clumsy of speech, with misty eyes, he augured nothing good. He was the bulldog of the monarchy.’ Pío Baroja alleged that Martínez Anido, ‘a satyr like an orangutan’, sexually abused the wives, daughters and sisters of prisoners who came to plead for their release. Once he had had his pleasure, he was as likely to order the execution as the release of the prisoners. It was also suggested that he was corrupt and used his power for ‘dirty dealings’.51

As for Arlegui, Baroja was even more scathing, describing him as ‘uncouth, clumsy, conceited: the typical Civil Guard sergeant raised up to an important post. He was a braggart always boasting about male virility. Deep down he was a cowardly chicken. Don Severiano is rather more interesting. Arlegui was gloomy, jumpy, neurotic, with stomach, heart and nerve problems.’ On 19 January 1921, an action group led by Ramon Archs and Pere Vandellós shot Antonio Espejo, one of Arlegui’s men who had been a member of the Bravo Portillo and Koenig gangs. Arlegui ordered reprisals. He then went to the mortuary where Espejo’s body lay surrounded by a dozen or more of the anarchists shot on his orders. Hysterical, Arlegui addressed the corpse: ‘Espejo, you cannot complain about me. There they are; they are the flowers with which I decorate your body.’ His evil temper was perhaps linked to the pain from his stomach ulcers which caused him frequently to vomit blood.52

One of the most effective weapons at the disposal of Martínez Anido was the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. With the CNT effectively paralysed by the repression orchestrated by the Civil Governor, many workers joined the Sindicatos Libres which, for seven years, would be the second largest union in Catalonia despite its poor labour record.53 The Libres were secretly financed by a group of industrial magnates led by one of the richest men in Spain, Claudio López Bru, Marqués de Comillas. Previously, helped by advice from the Papal Nuncio, Comillas had also financed Catholic mineworkers’ unions in Asturias and railway workers’ unions in Valladolid, both of which had acted as strike breakers in 1917. He had also sponsored the so-called Uniones Profesionales which consisted largely of his employees, mainly shop assistants, never went on strike and were controlled by non-worker, often clerical, elements. Just as they were withering away, there was a revival of Carlism in Barcelona in reaction to the populist anti-clerical demagoguery of Lerroux’s Radicals. Founded in October 1919, the Sindicatos Libres played the role of a scab union of paid thugs acting as terrorist strike breakers for both the Civil Governor and the patronal organizations. Martínez Anido called on the Libres to shoot ten anarchists for every one of their own killed.54 In the course of 1921, casualties among the bosses were four murdered and nine wounded and, among the workers, sixty-nine murdered and fifty-nine wounded. CNT action groups responded in kind. As the more moderate elements were murdered or imprisoned, the action groups, made up of young militants, became more influential within the CNT. Martínez Anido could legitimately boast that he had destroyed the terrorist wing of the CNT, but the consequences would live on. He had ensured the division of the anarchist movement into the more moderate trade unionists and the insurrectionary or terrorist groups which would later do so much damage to the Second Republic.55

In contrast to the CNT, as a result of the severity of the repression, over the next fifteen years the Socialist movement cautiously avoided risking conflict with the state apparatus. The defeat of the 1917 strike reinforced the Socialists’ gradualist, reformist strategy. Indeed, whereas the anarchists greeted the Russian revolution with enthusiasm, the Socialists saw it as dangerously inopportune. The infirm Pablo Iglesias was more concerned with the probability that the Bolsheviks would seek a separate peace with Germany and thus undermine the Allied chances of victory. Shortly after the October revolution, El Socialista declared: ‘The news we are getting from Russia fills us with distress. We sincerely believe, and we have always said so, that the mission of that great country is to put all her strength into the enterprise of crushing German imperialism.’ No favourable comment on the Bolshevik revolution appeared until March 1918. This reflected a division within the movement between those for whom the defeat in 1917 meant that reformism should be accentuated and those who believed that the movement should prepare better for the next revolutionary attempt.56

Between 1919 and 1921, the PSOE was enmeshed in a civil war over its relationship with the Bolsheviks. The Secretary General of UGT since October 1918, Francisco Largo Caballero, was more concerned with the immediate material welfare of the trade union organization than with possible future revolutionary goals. He was determined never again to risk existing legislative gains and the movement’s buildings and assets in a direct confrontation with the state.57 Both Besteiro and Saborit also became progressively less radical. In different ways, all three perceived the futility of Spain’s weak Socialist movement undertaking a frontal assault on the state. In the wake of the Russian revolution, continuing inflation and the rising unemployment of the post-1918 depression fostered a revolutionary group within the Socialist movement, particularly in Asturias and the Basque Country. Anguiano and others saw the events in Russia and the failure of the 1917 strike as evidence that reformism was pointless. In consequence, between 1918 and 1921 the Socialist movement was to be divided by a bitter three-year debate on the PSOE’s relationship with the Comintern. The pro-Bolshevik tendency was defeated in a series of three party congresses held in December 1919, June 1920 and April 192l. In a closely fought struggle, the PSOE leadership won by relying on the votes of the strong UGT bureaucracy of paid permanent officials. Anguiano and the pro-Russian elements left to form the Spanish Communist Party.58 Numerically, this was not a serious loss, but it accentuated the Socialists’ ideological weakness at a time of grave economic and social crisis. The party’s fundamental moderation was strengthened and, under a cautious and pragmatic leadership, there was a plunge in morale which lasted for nearly ten years. The Communists’ influence was immediately felt in a series of strikes in the Asturian coalmines and the Basque iron and steel industry. In the aftermath of the defeat of 1917, the 1921 split left the Socialist leadership without a clear sense of direction and, in many respects, remote from the burning issues of the day. The syndical battles which raged elsewhere attracted less Socialist attention than the parliamentary campaign against the Moroccan war and eventually the King’s involvement therein. In contrast, the essential moderate reformism of the Socialist movement was consolidated.59

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1920 the UGT was inclined to seek unity with the CNT. In the event, the negotiations did not prosper because the CNT leadership regarded the Socialists’ parliamentary strategy as ‘collaboration with the capitalist regime’. However, in early September, a provisional pact was signed in order to respond to the repression. Its manifesto stated:

the government has met every demand of the bourgeoisie and has bent over backwards before the threats made by its organizations. They have suspended constitutional guarantees in order to close unions and dissolve important workers’ groups; they have pursued savagely and, against all justice and in opposition to the law, have kept thousands of men in prison for the crime of having united to defend their right to life. They have agreed to close down our newspapers in those areas where protest against such arbitrary measures could endanger the bastard interests of the political clique that is under the thumb of the employers. They have decreed the shameful measure of deeming the collection of union dues to be the crime of fraud … The government has legalized the arming of the bourgeoisie and has given it privileges which are the equivalent of a licence to commit murder.

The pact came to nothing when the Socialists refused to back CNT calls for a general strike in protest at the repression being carried out in Barcelona by Martínez Anido. This caused bitter resentment within the CNT towards Largo Caballero.60

The most extreme case of reprisal for the murderous policies of Martínez Anido took place on 8 March 1921 when the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato was assassinated in the Plaza de la Independencia in Madrid by three Catalan anarchists. He was the third Prime Minister to be murdered in the Restoration period. However, unlike those of Cánovas and Canalejas, his death was not the work of an isolated individual. There had been considerable debate within the anarchist movement about the need to respond to the repression with ‘the big one’. The original intention had been to kill Conde Bugallal but it was too difficult. The murder was carried out by three militants. A fourth member of their group, who was never identified, dropped out. The car in which Dato was travelling was riddled with bullets from a motorcycle and sidecar ridden by Ramon Casanellas. The notion that a motorbike and sidecar would be the best way to catch Dato unawares came from Casanellas. The gunmen were Pedro Matheu in the sidecar and Luis Nicolau riding pillion.61

This act of revenge for the activities of Martínez Anido and Arlegui was planned by Ramon Archs who, at the behest of Casanellas, also secured the motorbike and sidecar. Archs had previously suffered several arrests and severe beatings by the police. He had an additional motive. When he was only seven years old, his father, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, was one of those executed, in May 1898, in Montjuïc, as a consequence of the failed assassination attempt on the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, in September 1893 by Paulí Pallàs. Ramon Archs, as Secretary of the CNT metalworkers’ union in Barcelona and head of the CNT self-defence groups, had become an active militant in the war against the bosses, the police and the Sindicatos Libres. Ironically, he had come into contact with leaders of the Sindicatos Libres because his mother worked as a cook in the home of Martínez Anido. In late May 1921, Archs and Pere Vandellós were captured. Both were tortured before being shot. Some days later, the disfigured body of Archs was found dumped in the street, riddled with bullets, savagely stabbed and his genitals cut off. It was claimed that Miguel Arlegui boasted of having amused himself sticking a dagger into Archs’s testicles. Of the three known perpetrators, Matheu was arrested on 13 March and Nicolau was detained in Berlin some months later. Both escaped the death penalty as a result of the deal brokered by the German authorities in return for the extradition of Nicolau. Ramon Casanellas, the speed-merchant who had insisted that a motorbike with sidecar be used, subsequently fled to the USSR and joined the Red Army, where he became an airman. He returned to Spain in 1931 to organize the Catalan Communist Party and in 1933 he died in a motorbike accident en route to a Partido Comunista de España (PCE) Congress in Madrid.62

Significantly, it was only during the period from late 1920 to October 1922, when Martínez Anido was Civil Governor, that the Sindicatos Libres took off as a meaningful trade union organization. This was possible after he had smashed the CNT with brutal violence. Martínez Anido authorized mass arrests, the torture of prisoners and Arlegui’s use of the ley de fugas. He put the Sindicatos Libres under his protection. Their ranks provided many hitmen, Seguí and Layret being among their victims.63 After the prohibition of the CNT and the arrest of many militants and the deportation to the south of others, many anarcho-syndicalists, bereft of an organization, began to seep into the Sindicatos Libres. By October 1921, there were 100,000 members of the Sindicatos Libres and, by the following July, 175,000. Only then did they begin to organize real strikes. However, the Libres never seriously challenged the CNT as defenders of working-class interests. That was hardly surprising given their central role in Martínez Anido’s terror campaign. One of its leaders described them as the Governor’s ‘shock troops’, ‘ready to risk all’ to prevent him leaving Barcelona. In the words of the well-informed journalist Francisco Madrid, ‘they had at their right hand the personal power of General Martínez Anido’.64

Their pistol-toting leaders used a rhetoric of violence. The head of the Libres, the Catalan Carlist Ramón Sales Amenós, was short, fat and well known in the brothels of the barrio chino. Despite his unprepossessing appearance, he was an effectively aggressive orator. His deputy, the fanatical ex-Jesuit Juan Laguía Lliteras, was eventually expelled from the Sindicatos Libres in 1925 because of his uncontrollable aggression which had seen him, three years earlier, physically assault Indalecio Prieto in the Cortes. Like Sales, Laguía was a close crony of Martínez Anido. Moreover, the General was honorary President of one of the most numerous of the Libres’ component unions, the cooks and waiters. With his approval, individual union gunmen were protected by the police, who often handed over CNT pistoleros to the Libres for quick disposal.65 The ‘pacification’ masterminded by Martínez Anido was working. So many CNT militants were in prison that the union could barely function. Key leaders were being targeted and assassinated. However, the boasts of Martínez Anido that he could do as he liked without supervision from the government were causing increasing disquiet in Madrid. He was rightly suspected of collusion in the murder of Layret and had refused to do anything to prevent the mistreatment in custody of Vandellós. The influence of the Libres peaked in the summer of 1922 when Martínez Anido was eventually dismissed after being involved in a Libre plot to murder the CNT leader Ángel Pestaña and to mount a fake assassination attempt against himself. With the CNT legalized and the new Civil Governor cracking down on Libre gunmen, the masses left the Libres and the fighting started again.66

The ongoing unrest in Barcelona underlined the extent to which the Restoration political system was no longer an adequate mechanism for defending the economic interests of the ruling classes. In the background, the King, increasingly sympathetic to the hints of military right-wingers, was making ever more hostile comments about the constitutional system. On a visit to Cordoba in May 1921, he dined in the Casino de la Amistad with a group of local latifundistas. In his speech, he revealed his impatience with a parliamentary system in which his task was limited to signing projected laws that never reached the statute book:

the King is not an absolute monarch and all that he can do is put his signature to projects so that they can go to parliament but he can do nothing to get them approved. I am very happy not to have responsibilities. If I cannot have the responsibilities that were long ago taken from the crown and given to parliament, then I prefer to offer my life to the country. But it is very hard to stand idly by while what is in everyone’s interest cannot progress because of the plotting and pettiness of politics. My government presents a project, it is opposed and the government falls. Its members then become the opposition to their own project. How could they want to help those who killed them! … Some will say that I am exceeding my constitutional duties but I have been a constitutional King for nineteen years and I have risked my life too many times for anyone to catch me out in a constitutional fault … I think that the provinces should start a movement of support for your King and the beneficial projects so that Parliament will remember that it is subject to the orders of the people … Then the King’s signature will be an executive order and a guarantee that projects beneficial for Spain will go forward.

To cover up this faux pas, Juan de la Cierva, who was with him, rapidly scribbled an anodyne version of the speech and persuaded the accompanying press corps to use his text. However, the local press in Cordoba reproduced Alfonso’s actual words. In his memoirs, La Cierva excused what the King had said by claiming that he had just got carried away by the enthusiasm of his audience. Of course, the King was right – the parliamentary system was utterly inefficient – but his words were totally inappropriate for a constitutional monarch. He was widely applauded on the right and thus encouraged the drift to dictatorship.67