Читать книгу A People Betrayed - Paul Preston - Страница 8

Spain has often been seen through the myths of national character. One of the most persistent has been that of corruption and dishonesty, which owed much to the numerous translations into other European languages of the first and hugely popular picaresque novels, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (o Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos; ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños) (written 1604, published 1626). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spain was a frequent, and conveniently exotic, setting for operas by foreigners. Among the most extreme examples of operas based on myths of national character, especially Spanish, are almost certainly Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Il trovatore and La forza del destino and Bizet’s Carmen. Artists wishing to portray violent passions drew upon a view of Spain, its history and its people as the embodiment of fanaticism, cruelty and uncontrolled emotion. This image went back to the Reformation, when a series of religiously inspired pamphlets had denounced the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Tribunal of the Holy Office and the terrors of the auto-da-fé. Religious hatreds aside, the European perception of Spain was confirmed by the experience of an empire in the Americas, Italy and Flanders built on greed and maintained by blood. The Peninsular Wars, or the wars of national independence, and the subsequent nineteenth-century series of civil wars did nothing to undermine stereotypes which survived into the twentieth century in the literature spawned by the Spanish Civil War.

Collectively, this view of Spain constituted what the Spaniards themselves came to call ‘the black legend’, the most extreme examples of which were collected in the celebrated work by the historian Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra. Combating the notion of universal laziness and violence, Juderías railed against ‘the legend of the inquisitorial, ignorant, fanatical Spain, under the yoke of the clergy, lazy, incapable of figuring among civilized nations today as well as in the past, always ready for violent repressions; enemy of progress and innovations’.1 What Juderías had in mind were definitions of Spain such as that by Sir John Perrot, Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputy of Ireland (1584–6), who observed: ‘This semi-Morisco nation … is sprung from the filth and slime of Africa, the base Ottomans and the rejected Jews.’2 The stereotypes which caused greatest outrage to Spaniards, however, were fundamentally the product of the romantic era. From 1820 to 1850, British and French travellers were drawn to Spain by what they saw as the picturesque savagery of both its landscapes and its inhabitants. Rugged mountains infested by brigands, their paths travelled by convoys of well-armed smugglers, the bloody rituals of the bullfight, the ruins of Moorish palaces and castles, and erotic encounters (probably imagined) with languid olive-skinned beauties became the clichés of romantic literature about Spain. The stereotypes would be maintained even in the 1920s when bar owners in the sleazy Raval district of Barcelona exploited the reputation of the ‘Barrio Chino’ for the benefit of foreign tourists. They would stage ‘spontaneous’ incidents in which ‘gypsies’, apparently inflamed with jealousy by the sight of their women (the waitresses) flirting with the tourists, waved knives, the incidents being settled with rounds of expensive drinks.3

Bizet’s Carmen remains perhaps the most famous ‘Spanish’ opera, largely because of its deployment of most of these Spanish stereotypes. Carmen presents the archetypes of the passionate Andalusian woman, the knife-wielding murderer and the bullfighter set in a context of smugglers, bandits, sex and violence. The notion that the Spaniards were sex-crazed underlay the fact that syphilis was known in France as le mal espagnol. The German writer August Fischer also wrote of the frantic, indeed fanatical, sexuality of Andalusian women – a view shared by Lord Byron, who visited Andalusia in 1809. The French diplomat Jean-François Bourgoing, in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne (1788; expanded in 1803 into the three-volume Tableau de l’Espagne moderne), complained about the open sensuality of flamenco dancing and excoriated the vice-ridden daily life of gypsies.4 Rather more wistfully, Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian sexual athlete, praised the fandango thus: ‘Everything is represented, from the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of love. I could not conceive a woman refusing her partner anything after this dance, for it seemed made to stir up the senses.’5

It was Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832) that really put Spain on the map for romantics. A decade later, he was outdone by Théophile Gautier whose Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) described the dusky, flashing-eyed Andalusian beauties who warmed his blood with their flamenco dancing and the blood-chilling gypsy knife fighters and their fancy cutlery.6 English writers like George Borrow (The Bible in Spain, 1843) and Richard Ford (Handbook for Spain, 1845, and Gatherings in Spain, 1846) portrayed Spaniards’ alleged obsession with honour, their religious fanaticism, their extremes of love and hate, and the proliferation of lawless cut-throats. This was intensified even more by Alexandre Dumas. Massively famous as a result of the success of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas had been invited by the Duc de Montpensier to attend his wedding on 10 October 1846 to the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, daughter of King Fernando VII. Dumas spent two months in Spain on the basis of which he wrote his massive four-volume De Paris à Cadix. Here he described his disgust at Spanish food and at what he saw as the licentiousness and depravity of gypsy dancers in Granada. Yet, in Seville, he was delighted by the voluptuousness of professional flamenco dancers and rejoiced in the flirtations between young army officers and the pretty girls who worked in the great Fábrica de Tabaco.7 Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845) concentrated all the romantic clichés about Seville in one personage. A cigarette factory worker, Carmen was also a flamenco dancer, lover of a bullfighter, accomplice of smugglers and bandits, voluptuous, independent, untamed – just the thing to titillate the Parisian bourgeois who seemed to view Spain as a kind of human zoo.8 Mérimée’s patronizingly anthropological attitude to his characters was popularized even further by Bizet’s opera.

A context of readily familiar assumptions about Spain had long since been established by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy. Her Mémoire de la cour d’Espagne (1690), published in English as Memories of the Court of Spain written by an ingenious French lady, was a prurient account of the allegedly syphilis-ridden royal court in Madrid. Uninhibited by the fact that she had almost certainly never visited Spain at all, this armchair fantasist then quickly produced her immensely influential Rélation du voyage d’Espagne, which was first published in 1691 and was regularly reprinted in several languages well into the nineteenth century. Despite claiming to relate ‘nothing but what I have seen’, Madame d’Aulnoy described a country full of exotic animals including monkeys and parrots. Her cast of invented characters was based on other travel books, diplomatic memoirs and the plays of Calderón and other Spanish dramatists. Her wild exaggerations presented corrupt officials, aristocratic men ever ready to kill or die for questions of honour and promiscuous women invariably in the throes of passion.9 Nevertheless, the caricatures created by Madame d’Aulnoy, including the notion that virtually the entire population was afflicted with venereal disease, allowed Bizet to present the insolent and primeval sexuality of Carmen as somehow typically Spanish.10

In Britain, the image of an exotic, semi-oriental Spain of crumbling cathedrals and mosques, castles and bridges, inhabited by colourful, passionate and sensual people, drew on the exquisite paintings and drawings of David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis in the 1830s and of Charles Clifford in the 1850s. Many of their most characteristic works became immensely popular through collections of best-selling lithographs. Their views of Spain were confirmed by many Spanish painters of the romantic era, particularly Genaro Pérez de Villaamil, whose work was exhibited and published in Paris.11 Nothing symbolized the Spain of the romantic era more than Andalusian beauties and bandit-infested sierras. Foreign travellers returned home to dine out on stories of the risks they claimed that they had undergone.12 Virtually all travellers to Spain, whatever their nationality and whatever they thought of the sex, the bandits, the bulls and the Inquisition, complained about the rutted tracks which passed for roads. They often declared confidently that Spain would never be penetrated by railways.13 In fact, it was the introduction of railways from the late 1850s onwards that dramatically changed the stereotypes. As Spain enjoyed an extremely uneven industrial revolution, foreign investment increased. Thereafter, observers and travellers were concerned less with romantic stereotypes than with political instability, corruption and social violence.

In fact, the fundamentals of Spanish society had little to do with the steamy erotic stereotypes beloved of foreign travellers. The reality was altogether more mundane, its central characteristics the linked factors of social inequality and violence and political incompetence and corruption. In 1883, the Tribunal Supremo entitled part of its annual report on criminality ‘On the Violent Customs of the Spanish People’.14 It was symptomatic of Spain’s dysfunctional society that, between 1814 and 1981, there were more than fifty pronunciamientos, or military coups. That crude statistic provides a graphic indication not just of the divorce between soldiers and civilians but of the extent to which the Spanish state did not adequately serve its citizens. A tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. The year 1833 saw the outbreak of the first of four civil wars with the battlefield hostilities of the last coming to a close in 1939. In fact, to some extent, the civil war of 1936–9 is the war that never ended. Indeed, in some respects, Spain still suffers today from some of the divisions of 1936.

The early 1830s experienced both the loss of the bulk of the once great Spanish empire and the beginning of dynastic conflict. The death in 1833 of Fernando VII, succeeded as queen by his infant daughter, Isabel, and the attempt by his brother Carlos to seize power provided the spark that ignited what came to be called the first Carlist War, which raged until 1840. Carlos sought support among deeply reactionary landowners and extreme ultramontane Catholics and was opposed by modernizing liberals led symbolically at least by Isabel’s mother, the Queen-Regent María Cristina. Carlist forces were commanded, even more symbolically, by the Vírgen de los Dolores, a commitment to theocracy that guaranteed the support of the Church hierarchy. A second, rather more sporadic, Carlist war was fought from 1846 to 1849 and a third from 1872 to 1876. The active role of the Catholic Church in these Carlist Wars, with some lower clergy even taking up arms, contributed to the subsequent popular perception of priests as deeply reactionary.15 In the 1860s, there had been fewer than 50,000 secular priests, monks and nuns in Spain. In the period between the monarchical Restoration of 1874 and the end of the century, the numbers would increase to more than 88,000. When the Primo de Rivera dictatorship fell in 1930, the clergy had swelled to over 135,000.16 In the view of the anarchists, the Catholic Church commercialized religion but did not practise morality. They saw it as a corrupt and rapacious institution which exploited the people and also blocked social progress.

Thus, even though black, reactionary Spain was startled by the French revolution and was shaken out of its lethargy by the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, many of the European stereotypes of Spain lamented by Juderías, certainly those based on the violence of its political life, were confirmed rather than shattered by the cycle of nineteenth-century civil wars. The notion that deep social and political problems could be resolved by violence was to afflict Spain well into the twentieth century. The Franco regime which followed the civil war was a regime built on terror, plunder and corruption. None of these elements was the invention of Franco. Indeed, it is the central thesis of this book that the violence, corruption and incompetence of the political class have betrayed the population at least since 1833 and almost certainly before. There are many possible historical reasons to do with religion and empire but perhaps the most potent and enduring has been the lack of a state apparatus popularly accepted as legitimate. After a state of near civil war between the death of Franco in 1975 and the military coup of 1981, it looked as if Spain was witnessing the creation of a legitimate state. The prosperity of the late twentieth century masked the extent to which the new polity was as mired in corruption and incompetence as its predecessors. An especially vibrant economic boom fuelled by the cheap credit facilitated by Spain joining the euro drew a veil over rampant corruption that reached as far as the royal family. The recession that followed saw the veil torn away, the political establishment lose legitimacy and problems such as regional nationalism divide the country in, rhetorically at least, violent terms.

In the nineteenth century, the Spanish state was weak in the face of geographic obstacles, poor communications and historical and linguistic traditions utterly opposed to a centralized state. Unlike, say, France or Italy after 1871, Spanish governments failed to create an all-embracing patriotism and sense of nationhood. In other countries, this task was largely assumed by the armed forces. However, in Spain, the army was an engine of division, above all because of the appalling conditions faced by conscripts in overseas wars. By the early twentieth century, army officers were ripe for persuasion by extreme conservatives that it was their right and duty to interfere in politics in order to ‘save Spain’. Unfortunately, that ostensibly noble objective actually meant the defence of the interests and privileges of relatively small segments of society. The armed forces were thus not the servants of the nation defending it from external enemies but the defenders of narrow social interests against their internal enemies, the working class and the regional nationalists. In the hundred years before 1930, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocs. Accordingly, popular hostility to the armed forces grew as deep-rooted social conflicts, at a time of imperial decline and military defeat, were repressed by the army. A further layer of the dialectic between violence and popular discontent was the way in which regional nationalism was crushed in the name of a patriotic centralism. Military resentments of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular were the other side of the same coin.

Ironically, it was in 1833 that the biggest step towards creating a state had been taken. This was the adoption of a highly centralized French territorial model with fifty broadly uniform provinces under the control of a civil governor appointed by Madrid. This systematized the distribution of patronage and therefore fostered corruption. Although the idea of Spain had long existed, the country seemed to be a flimsy collection of virtually independent provinces and regions whose languages and dialects were often mutually unintelligible. The 1833 definition of regions and provinces has subsequently been modified but, broadly speaking, it still holds good and can be recognized in the current system of so-called autonomies into which Spain is now divided. Similarly, further measures taken in the 1840s saw the beginnings of something resembling a central state with a crude and divisive taxation system and the creation of local and national police forces. However, with the exception of the Civil Guard, it was an inadequately implemented process. Taxation did not finance the state because wealth was not taxed, whereas consumption was. Ancient forms of politics, social influence and patronage, caciquismo or clientelism, took precedence over any kind of modern political machinery, poisoning what falteringly developed as electoral politics and leaving the state underfinanced and weak, other than in its coercive capacity.

After the process known as the disentailment or desamortización, Spain ceased to be a feudal society in legal and economic terms. However, it remained so in social and political terms. Traditional rural elites retained their power long after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1874 and the attempt to create a modern state by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in his Constitution of 1876. That state worked only in so far as it was in the interests of the local bosses or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’) to allow it to do so. It was only with the growth of industry in the Basque Country, Asturias, Catalonia and Madrid that a different and more modern politics became even a remote possibility. Then, the vested interests of the landed caciques ensured that their superior power was exerted over the reforming bourgeoisie which, itself under pressure from the first signs of working-class discontent, scurried to make an alliance in which it was the junior partner. Loss of empire would lead to a weakening of the alliance but it would always be consolidated when the industrial bourgeoisie needed the protection of the repressive machinery that was the state’s principal asset. Pressure for political change and social development was simply dismissed as subversion.17

Richard Ford wrote in the 1840s: ‘I once beheld a cloaked Spaniard pacing mournfully in the burial ground of Seville. When the public trench was opened, he drew from beneath the folds the dead body of his child, cast it in and disappeared. Thus, half the world lives without knowing how the other half dies.’18 In a land in which oppressive poverty coexisted with an equally parasitical government and Church, the law was not respected and smugglers and bandits were the objects of hero worship. When Ford enquired of Spaniards where brigands hid, he was frequently told that ‘it was not on the road that they were most likely to be found, but in the confessional boxes, the lawyers’ offices, and still more in the bureaux of government’. Of the Civil Guard, Ford wrote that they were nothing but rogues ‘used to keep down the expression of indignant public opinion, and, instead of catching thieves, upholding those first-rate criminals, foreign and domestic, who are now robbing poor Spain of her gold and liberties’.19

Founded by two royal decrees of 28 March and 13 May 1844, the Civil Guard was intended to be a disciplined nationwide police force, staffed by men seconded from the army. The corps was organized by the Inspector General of the Army, the Duke of Ahumada.20 Between 1844 and the 1860s, the Civil Guard established itself as a dour and brutal army of occupation protecting the great estates and mines against the resentment of their workers. It became part of the army in 1878. Banditry was gradually eliminated, but the Civil Guard’s ominous ubiquity forced the peasants to direct their rebelliousness against it and therefore against the state. ‘Every Civil Guard became a recruiting officer for anarchism, and, as the anarchists increased their membership, the Civil Guard also grew.’21 In fact, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the death of General Franco, many Civil Guards were actually recruited from the sons of men who had served in the corps.

The sense that the Civil Guard was a hostile institution imposed from outside was intensified by the fact that social interaction was forbidden between the rank and file and the inhabitants of the area where they served. Needless to say, this prohibition did not extend to the officers, who usually maintained cordial relations with the local clergy and those who owned the land, the mines and the factories. In small towns and villages, Civil Guards and their families lived in fortified barracks known as the casa-cuartel. In Asturias, the casa-cuartel was often paid for by the mining companies. In many places, it was common for the local fuerzas vivas (notables) and employers’ organizations to subsidize the casa-cuartel with gifts of food, wine and, sometimes, furniture. Such gifts were publicized in the local press as well as in the official publications of the Civil Guard, which intensified the sense that the corps was a force at the service of the wealthy.22 This perception was reinforced by the fact that a Civil Guard could not serve in the area where he or his wife had been born. In a country of fierce localism (patriotismo chico), where any stranger could be seen not just as an outsider but virtually as a foreigner, this increased the hostility towards the Civil Guard. In Asturian mining villages, for instance, the hatred of the Civil Guard was intense both for political reasons and also because they were often from Galicia. Guards were not permitted to move about unarmed or alone and so were usually in pairs (la pareja). Thus ‘their relations with the working classes were of open hostility and suspicion. Living as they did among their enemies, they became unusually ready to shoot.’23

The Civil Guard responded to any social upheaval with aggression. In particular, signs of anarchist ideology were perceived as an especially pernicious and barbaric foreign doctrine. Anarchists were seen as ‘harmful beasts’, worse than common criminals because of their utopian ambitions for society. So the destructive influence of ‘those who have ideas’ had to be eliminated. Anarchists were the enemies of society and especially of the Civil Guards.24

Ford believed that bad government and poor communications were the principal cause of poverty and economic backwardness.

It has, indeed, required the utmost ingenuity and bad government of man to neutralise the prodigality of advantages which Providence has lavished on this highly favoured land, and which, while under the dominion of the Romans and Moors, resembled an Eden, a garden of plenty and delight, when in the words of an old author, there was nothing idle, nothing barren in Spain – ‘nihil otiosum, nihil sterile in Hispania’. A sad change has come over this fair vision, and now the bulk of the Peninsula offers a picture of neglect and desolation, moral and physical, which it is painful to contemplate.

He added, ‘Spain is a land which never yet has been able to construct or support even a sufficient number of common roads or canals for her poor and passive commerce and circulation.’25

For Ford, the essence of bad government in Spain was corruption. ‘Public poverty’, he wrote,

is the curse of the land, and all empleados or persons in office excuse themselves on dire necessity … Some allowance, therefore, may be made for the rapacity which, with very few exceptions, prevails; the regular salaries, always inadequate, are generally in arrear, and the public servants, poor devils, swear that they are forced to pay themselves by conniving at defrauding the government; this few scruple to do, as all know it to be an unjust one, and that it can afford it; indeed, as all are offenders alike, the guilt of the offence is scarcely admitted. Where robbing and jobbing are the universal order of the day, one rascal keeps another in countenance … A man who does not feather his nest when in place, is not thought honest, but a fool; es preciso, que cada uno coma de su oficio. It is necessary, nay, a duty, as in the East, that all should live by their office; and as office is short and insecure, no time or means is neglected in making up a purse …

He offers an example:

We remember calling on a Spaniard who held the highest office in a chief city of Andalucia. As we came into his cabinet a cloaked personage was going out; the great man’s table was covered with gold ounces, which he was shovelling complacently into a drawer, gloating on the glorious haul … This gentleman, during the Sistema, or Riego constitution, had, with other 1oyalists, been turned out of office; and, having been put to the greatest hardships, was losing no time in taking prudent and laudable precautions to avert all similar calamity for the future. His practices were perfectly well known in the town, where people simply observed, ‘Está atesorando, he is laying up treasures,’ – as every one of them would most certainly have done, had they been in his fortunate position … Donde no hay abundancia, no hay observancia. The empty sack cannot stand upright, nor was ever a sack made in Spain into which gain and honour could be stowed away together; honra y provecho, no caben en un saco o techo; here virtue itself succumbs to poverty, induced by more than half a century of misgovernment, let alone the ruin caused by Buonaparte’s invasion, to which domestic troubles and civil wars have been added.26

For all that Spanish intellectuals resented the belittling of their country by foreign writers, there were those who did it themselves, albeit in a different way. There was a substantial literature that lamented Spain’s loss of empire, uninterrupted military failures, deep-rooted political instability and economic backwardness.27 In November 1930, the intellectual Manuel Azaña, a future prime minister and president of the Second Republic, echoed Richard Ford’s judgement. He described the political system as functioning with two mechanisms, despotic authoritarianism and corruption. The great practitioner of the first was the reactionary General Ramón María Narváez, who was seven times Prime Minister between 1844 and 1868. He was notorious for remarking on his deathbed: ‘I have no enemies. I have shot them all.’ The wizard of electoral falsification was Luis José Sartorius, who, in the 1840s and 1850s, according to Azaña, ‘elevated political corruption into a system and became a master in the art of fabricating parliamentary majorities’. During their collaboration, in Azaña’s view, ‘the most illustrious elements of Spanish society applied themselves to squeezing profit out of politics’.28

The civil war of 1936–9 represented the most determined effort by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reforming project which might threaten their privileged position. The enduring dominance of reactionary forces reflected the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. The painfully slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain accounted for the existence of a numerically small and politically feeble commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were broken. The power of the monarchy, the landed nobility and the Church remained more or less intact well into the twentieth century. Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth-century Spain did not see the establishment of an incipiently democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. The legal basis for capitalism was established albeit without there being a political revolution and with the survival of elements of feudalism. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that its industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the political pattern established by Prussia.

Within this authoritarian model, until the 1950s capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian except for Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country in the north. Spanish agriculture is immensely variegated in terms of climate, crops and land-holding systems. There have long existed areas of commercially successful small and medium-sized farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the most politically influential sectors were, broadly speaking, the large landowners. In the main, the latifundios, the great estates, are concentrated in the arid central and southern regions of New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, although there are also substantial latifundios to be found scattered throughout parts of Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy saw occasional tentative challenges by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes. However, reliant on the repressive power of the oligarchy, their efforts met with little success. Until well into the 1950s, the urban haute bourgeoisie was obliged to play the role of junior partner in a working coalition with the great latifundistas. Despite sporadic industrialization and a steady growth in the national importance of the political representatives of the northern industrialists, power remained squarely in the hands of the landowners.

In Spain, industrialization and political modernization did not go hand in hand. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were diverted. The desamortización (disentailment) saw the expropriation of great swathes of Church and municipal lands and the lifting of mortmain, feudal restrictions on land transactions. The process had begun piecemeal in the late eighteenth century but was speeded up in 1836 by the Liberal Prime Minister Juan de Dios Álvarez Mendizábal. He had changed his name from Álvarez Méndez to hide the fact that he came from a Jewish family that sold second-hand clothes in Cadiz. He was a self-made businessman who had acquired a reputation as a financial genius as a result of having made a fortune in London. He saw the expropriation, and sale, of the lands of religious orders as a way of resolving royal financial problems created by the Carlist Wars of the 1830s. Mendizábal believed that he was thereby laying the basis for the future prosperity of Spain by creating a self-sustaining smallholding peasantry, ‘a copious family of property owners’.29 However, in the interests of the crown, the confiscated properties were sold at auction in large blocks, which meant that they were far beyond the means of even existing smallholders. Moreover, the fact that the lots were sold well below their market price, and often on credit which could be obtained only by the wealthy, ensured that one of the consequences was the consolidation of great estates. The other was that the privatization of property brought into cultivation land that had previously been idle or poorly cultivated. However, this was not enough to meet the needs of a steadily growing population, especially in the south.30

In 1841, General Baldomero Espartero extended the expropriations to all Church properties. Huge tracts of entailed ecclesiastical and common lands were liberated to pay for the Liberal war effort. This process was intensified after 1855 by the Ley Pascual Madoz which opened the way to the acquisition of common lands by private individuals, often simply by a combination of legal subterfuge and strong-arm tactics. The landed aristocracy benefited because their lands were taken out of mortmain but not expropriated. Thus they could buy and sell land and rationalize their holdings. By 1875, three-quarters of land that forty years previously had belonged to the Church or municipalities was in private hands. This not only diminished any impetus towards industrialization but, by helping to expand the great estates, also created intense social hatreds in the south. The newly released land was bought up by the more efficient among existing landlords, and also by lawyers and members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie who were attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and, unlike their inefficient predecessors, the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment and saw land as a productive asset to be exploited for maximum profit. Having said that, neither the old nor the new landowners were prepared to invest in new techniques. The judgement on the ‘general dilapidation’ made by Richard Ford in the 1840s would still be valid ninety years later: ‘The landed proprietor of the Peninsula is little better than a weed of the soil; he has never observed, nor scarcely permitted others to observe, the vast capabilities which might and ought to be called into action.’31 One obvious consequence was an increase in thefts of domestic animals and assaults on bakeries and other shops. That is not to say that all crimes of violence were responses to social deprivation. Many others were sexual and honour crimes.32

The capital of the merchants of the great seaports and of Madrid bankers was diverted away from industry and into land purchases both for speculative purposes and also because of the social prestige that came with it.33 Investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy weakened their commitment to reform. The weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was exposed during the period from 1868 to 1873, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. Population growth in the middle of the century had increased pressure on the land. Unskilled labourers from country districts flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who survived on the edges of society. This was especially the case in Barcelona, in large part because of the collapse of the wine industry as a result of the phylloxera crisis after 1880. Its population more than doubled between 1860, when it constituted an eighth of the Catalan total, and 1900, by which time it had swelled to more than a quarter. The living standards of the urban lower-middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers were almost as wretched as those of the unskilled labourers. One of the most explosive areas was the Catalan textile industry where the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding in insanitary living conditions and starvation wages – produced acute social tensions and, soon, anarchist terrorism. When cotton supplies were choked off by the American Civil War in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment was exacerbated by a depression in railway construction that saw the urban working class pushed to desperation. Until well into the twentieth century, Madrid governments, representing as they did agrarian interests, had little or no understanding of the problems of a growing and militant industrial proletariat in Catalonia. Consequently, the social problem was dealt with entirely as a public order issue. Of the eighty-six years between 1814 and 1900, for sixty of them Catalonia was under a state of exception, which effectively meant military rule. Moreover, a quarter of the nation’s military strength was stationed in Catalonia, a region containing approximately 10 per cent of the Spanish population. This was directed as much at rural Carlism as at urban anarchism.34

In 1868, growing working-class discontent linked with middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy as well as financial and sexual scandals involving Queen Isabel II. In September 1868, a number of pronunciamientos culminating in one by General Juan Prim coincided with urban riots. This led to the overthrow and exile of the Queen. The two forces driving the so-called glorious revolution were ultimately inimical. The liberal middle classes and army officers had aimed to amend the constitutional structure of the country. Now, they were alarmed to find that they had awakened a mass revolutionary movement for social change and opened the way to the six years of instability known as the sexenio revolucionario. To add to the instability, between 1868 and 1878 Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba, was riven by a rebellion against the metropolis. In November 1870, Prim finally offered the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Amadeo had neither the political nor even the linguistic skills to cope with the problems that he faced. On 30 December, the very day of the new King’s arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated. From the beginning, Amadeo faced opposition from republicans, from supporters of Isabel II’s thirteen-year-old son Alfonso and from the Carlists. In 1872, there began the third Carlist War. A successful rebellion across the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the establishment of a kind of Carlist state, disorganized and based on religiously inspired banditry.

In the Catalan countryside, the majority of small landowners and farmers were Carlist, not just because of the movement’s clericalism but also because of its commitment to local freedoms and ultimately devolution. Thus in Catalonia, and also in the Basque Country, the Church’s links to the Carlists fed into support for independence movements in both regions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a revival of Catalanist sentiment, of Catalan literature and of the language whose official use had been banned since the eighteenth century. This was intensified by the federalist movement from 1868 to the collapse of the First Republic. Nowhere was federalism as strong as in Catalonia. Another factor was almost certainly resentment of the lack of Catalan influence on the central government. Between 1833 and 1901, there were 902 men in ministerial office. Only twenty-four of them, 2.6 per cent of the total, were Catalan. In consequence, Catalanism was to be found not just in the rural areas but also in Barcelona, where it found enthusiastic adherents among the wealthy upper-middle classes. A loose federation of middle- and upper-class Catalanist groups formed the Unió Catalanista in 1892. Its programme, known as the Bases de Manresa, called for the restoration of an autonomous government, a separate tax system, the protection of Catalan industry and the institution of Catalan as an official language. With the exception of a brief period from 1906 to 1909, from 1868 until the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s Catalan nationalism would be a largely conservative movement.35

Faced with civil war, a colonial revolt and a deeply divided political establishment, Amadeo abdicated in despair on 11 February 1873. With the establishment divided, elections in May saw a republican victory and the proclamation of the First Republic on 1 June. Under the presidency of the Catalan Federalist Francesc Pi y Margall, a decentralized structure was adopted and Spain was divided into eleven autonomous cantons. A series of bold reforms were proposed, including the abolition of conscription, the separation of Church and state, the provision of free compulsory education for all, the eight-hour day, the regulation of female and child labour, the expropriation of uncultivated estates and the establishment of peasant collectives. The combination of rapidly established cantons, land seizures, a violent revolutionary general strike in Alcoy, the Carlist rebellion, the Cuban unrest, an outburst of anti-clericalism and the alarm provoked by the planned reforms ensured that Pi y Margall’s federal regime was perceived as an intolerable threat to the established order. The republican government was overthrown by the artillery General Manuel Pavia y Rodríguez de Alburquerque, who crushed the Cantonalist movement and established a more conservative government under General Francisco Serrano. Although the Carlists were on the verge of defeat, Serrano was unable to consolidate a conservative republic. On 29 December 1874, in Sagunto, the dynamic young Brigadier General Arsenio Martínez Campos proclaimed as King of Spain the now seventeen-year-old Prince Alfonso. One of the least scurrilous rumours concerning the sex life of his mother Queen Isabel II was that Alfonso’s father had been Enrique Puigmoltó, a Valencian captain of the Engineers. Subsequent to his mother going into exile, Alfonso was educated, successively, in Paris, in Vienna and at Sandhurst.36

On 26 June 1878, Alfonso XII’s wife María de las Mercedes de Orleans died of typhus two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was devastated and his consequent plunge into drink and sexual adventures did little for his own precarious health. Indeed, his wife’s death was merely one of a series of misfortunes. Efforts to quell rebellion in Cuba would eventually lead to the loss of 200,000 lives and an unsustainable drain on state resources. In August 1878, there was a minor republican uprising in Navalmoral de la Mata in Cáceres. It was easily suppressed, but the fact that it had happened at all hinted at underlying problems. On 15 October that same year, Alfonso XII was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Joan Oliva i Moncasí, an anarchist cooper from Labra in the province of Tarragona. Oliva fired twice with a double-barrelled pistol but missed. He was executed by garrote vil on 4 January 1879. Fourteen months later, on 30 December, there was a second assassination attempt. The King had remarried only a month before, on 29 November. He was returning from a walk in the Retiro with his new wife, Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena, when a twenty-year-old pastry chef from Galicia, Francisco Otero González, shot at them. Although he also missed, on 14 April 1880 Otero was similarly executed by garrote vil.37

For now, Arsenio Martínez Campos was achieving some success against the Cuban insurgents. By dint of a combination of energetic counter-guerrilla tactics, bribery and conciliatory negotiations, he had achieved the Peace of Zanjón. As Governor General, he urged thoroughgoing reform of education and the economy and especially of the Cuban tax burden and of Spanish tariffs on sugar, tobacco and coffee imports from the island. Cánovas was seriously alarmed because the proposed measures constituted a major threat to the Spanish economy. His solution was to invite Martínez Campos in June 1879 to form a government which he intended to control from the shadows. Cánovas’s electoral fixer, Francisco Romero Robledo, had friends among the Cuban plantation owners who were bitterly opposed to Martínez Campos’s proposed reforms and did everything possible to undermine the new Prime Minister. Deeply frustrated, Martínez Campos resigned a mere six months later on 7 December and was replaced by Cánovas. In the course of 1880 and 1881, only a few of Martínez Campos’s reforms were implemented, which guaranteed that the Cuban War would be reignited. On 7 February 1881, Alfonso XII exercised his royal prerogative by withdrawing confidence from Cánovas and effectively making Práxedes Mateo Sagasta Prime Minister by giving him a decree to dissolve the Cortes and call new elections.38 Little changed with the fall of Cánovas. Spain’s domestic economic problems ensured that Martínez Campos, who had become Sagasta’s Minister of War, remained unable to implement his proposed reforms. In addition to the plantation owners, wheat growers feared the loss of Cuban markets to North American producers. Catalan industrialists and the footwear manufacturers of Valencia and Alicante also relied on protected Cuban markets.

In many respects, the chaotic period 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order and establish a short-lived Republic, the liberal bourgeoisie was frightened out of its reforming ambitions by the spectre of proletarian disorder. When the army restored the monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, the middle classes abandoned their reformist ideals in return for social peace. The subsequent relation of forces between the landed oligarchy, the urban bourgeoisie and the remainder of the population was perfectly represented by the so-called Restoration political system created in 1876. Indeed, it would differ little in composition from what had gone before except that parties would alternate in power peacefully rather than by a combination of insurrections and military coups. A provisional government was established under the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who quickly set about drafting a new Constitution. After sixty years of civil wars, disastrous rule by generals and political corruption, he was convinced that what was necessary was a period of tranquillity in which industries might develop.

Cultured and widely read, Cánovas believed that the prosperity enjoyed by the dominant power of the day, Great Britain, was the result of the stability provided by its two-party system. His admiration of the British parliamentary system allegedly extended to learning by heart some of the speeches of Gladstone and Disraeli. In a bid to emulate British success, he had set out to copy, outwardly at least, what he believed to be its secret. He was determined both to exclude the army from political power and to run no risks of a radical electorate undermining his plan to consolidate the recently restored monarchy. Thus an apparent working model of the British system was elaborated whereby the Conservative Party under Cánovas and the Liberal Party under Sagasta would take turns in power. The tool necessary for this to function without interference by the electorate was electoral falsification.39 The system came to be known as the turno pacífico, that is to say the peaceful alternation in power of the two monarchist or ‘dynastic’ parties. Thus the turno, in the words of the liberal reformer Gumersindo de Azcárate, far from replicating the British system was merely ‘a ridiculous parody in which everything is a farce and a lie’.40 Salvador de Madariaga wrote that Cánovas ‘relied on force and fiction’ and described him as ‘personally honest and honourable’ but ‘the greatest corrupter of political life which modern Spain has known’.41

The micro-managing of elections ensured that, for the next half-century, power would remain in the hands of the same families that had held it before 1876. Entire dynasties, fathers, sons and sons-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law would monopolize parliamentary seats. Such would be the case of the family of Álvaro de Figueroa, the Conde de Romanones, in Guadalajara with tentacles in Baeza and Úbeda in Jaén, Castuera in Badajoz and Cartagena in Murcia. An equally striking example was the family of Eugenio Montero Ríos, the main cacique of the four provinces of Galicia, who was Minister of Development from 1885 to 1886, Minister of Justice between December 1892 and July 1893 and eventually Prime Minister in 1905. From his base in Lourizán in Pontevedra, he used his influence to promote the political careers of his sons and sons-in-law. Sagasta was equally watchful of the parliamentary welfare of his sons-in-law. Francisco Silvela y de Le Vielleuze, Cánovas’s eventual successor at the head of the Conservative Party, was the all-powerful cacique of Ávila. Although he criticized the electoral falsification of the turno pacífico, he placed members of his family in some of the most important government positions. Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, the omnipotent cacique of Murcia, similarly promoted his family. Indeed, it was not uncommon for parliamentary seats, senior government administrative posts and sometimes even government ministries to be virtually bequeathed from father to son.42

The two political parties did not have strongly defined ideologies or policies but were rather groups of notables representing the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy. The Conservatives looked mainly to the concerns of the wine and olive growers of the south while the Liberals protected the interests of the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were known as the ‘dynastic’ parties because they were both committed to the monarchy and were not divided on issues regarding the social order or the sanctity of property. As their name suggested, the Liberals were less authoritarian and, unlike the firmly Catholic Conservatives, inclined to be rather more critical of the Church. The main differences were to do with trade. The Conservatives favoured the free trade required by their constituency of export fruit growers and wine producers while the Liberals represented the needs of the inefficient wheat growers who wanted protection from the great international producers of Canada, Argentina and Australia. To give an example of the problem – in Barcelona in 1884, some 60 per cent of all wheat consumed came from Castile, yet two years later it was a mere 10 per cent. The various components of the northern industrial bourgeoisie were barely represented within the system but, for the moment, were content, as Cánovas had hoped, to devote their activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the early twentieth century, they began to organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers tended to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, in their case to protect the Spanish market against cheaper British and Indian competition. In contrast, the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders. Nevertheless, because of its lack of representation, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was forced to act as little more than a pressure group. Thus, despite having interests in common with the agrarian protectionists, they could be attacked by Liberals and Conservatives alike as the mouthpieces of Catalan nationalism.43

It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression unless they were in the interests of the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. Rafael Shaw, an English journalist who lived in Barcelona, wrote in 1910:

Ministerial changes in Spain are the outcome of a tacit arrangement made some thirty years ago between Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the then leaders of the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and continued by their successors, that each side should have its fair share of the loaves and fishes. After one party had been in office three or four years it was agreed by common consent that the time had come for the other side to have a turn. Thus, as Major Martín Hume says: ‘Dishonest Governments are faced in sham battle by dishonest Oppositions, and parliamentary institutions, instead of being a public check upon abuses, are simply a mask behind which a large number of politicians may carry on their nefarious trade with impunity.’

Shaw explained the impotence of the electorate to change this system as the consequence of ‘the tentacles of the octopus of corruption which holds the whole country in its grip. The simple fact is that the great mass of the people have no voice at all in the election of their representatives. Nominally voting is free: actually it is not.’44

In theory, governments were in power for five years but in practice would resign because of defeat on a particular vote, hostile public opinion, the loss of party support for the Prime Minister or some intractable social or economic problem on the horizon. The King, in theory, as the mouthpiece of public opinion or, in reality, on the basis of his prejudices or caprice, had the power to change governments because he could force an administration to resign. He could then decide to whom to grant a royal decree of dissolution of the Cortes. The rather frivolous Alfonso XIII would abuse this power.45 The newly chosen Prime Minister, often but not always the leader of the other party, would form a government. Then, he and his Minister of the Interior would spend the next few months arranging an electoral victory that both justified his party’s presence in power and gave the outgoing party a decent presence in the Cortes. When the petitions of both parties had been examined, lists of candidates would be drawn up that would ensure a substantial majority for the new Prime Minister. This process was known as the encasillado, each candidate who was selected to win a seat placed in the pigeonhole (casilla). The agreement of both parties was forthcoming. Sometimes results were faked in the Ministry of the Interior but more often they were fixed at the local level. The task of ensuring the election of the selected candidates fell to the provincial governor of each province. He would then negotiate with the local town bosses or caciques. They would deliver the vote for the government’s candidates in return for government patronage. The candidates chosen in Madrid, who were then ‘parachuted’ into the constituency, were known as cuneros. On average about half of successful candidates were cuneros, that is to say with no links to the area that they would represent. Nevertheless, sometimes the local oligarchs would accept a cunero willingly because his political influence boded well for the area.46

The two parties thus lived within a non-aggression pact which made a mockery of the apparently democratic system because the formation of governments had nothing to do with the will of the electorate. Only after governments had been appointed by the King were elections held. The results were then carefully arranged by the party in power and produced, on average, 65 per cent majorities. Such apparently humiliating defeats for one side were rendered acceptable by the certainty of an equally spectacular victory next time. Between them the two dynastic parties held 98 per cent of parliamentary seats in 1884 and 83 per cent in 1901. The republicans and the Carlists had relatively little representation. The relatively even alternation was illustrated by the fact that, between 1879 and 1901, of all the deputies ‘elected’ 1,748 were Conservatives and 1,761 were Liberals.47 Electoral falsification ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened. The system rested on the social power of local town bosses or caciques. In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique could be a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. The threat of foreclosure could secure votes. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was usually the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore whose family did not starve. The cacique thus could acquire the votes of individuals by many means, ranging from the intimidation that came from ruthless control of the local labour market to the granting of favours and bribes.

Control of the local administrative and judicial apparatus enabled the cacique to provide favourable judgements in land disputes, jobs, reduction of tax bills or exemptions from military service for someone within the clientelist network. Each change of government would see a massive changeover of jobs from the most humble doormen and roadsweepers to civil governors, judges and senior civil servants, all of whom were expected to vote as instructed.48 After the elections of 1875 had been arranged by Cánovas’s Minister of the Interior, Francisco Romero Robledo, Sir Austen Henry Layard, the British Ambassador to Spain from 1869 to 1877, reported to the Foreign Office that virtually every salaried placeholder had been replaced by a supporter of Alfonso XII.49 There was no permanent civil service or judiciary owing its service to the nation. The system itself fostered corruption by ensuring that public service was for private benefit. Thus the tradition which endures to this day was established whereby few of those who become mayors (alcaldes) leave the town hall poorer than when they entered.

General Eduardo López de Ochoa wrote in 1930 that the majority of judges and magistrates owed their places to political intrigues and passed sentences in the interests of their patrons. The same applied right down to secretaries and court clerks. It was said of the great cacique Juan de la Cierva that no leaf fell in the province of Murcia without his permission. López de Ochoa claimed that La Cierva had several judges of the Supreme Court in his pocket and could always count on judgments favourable to himself or his friends. López Ochoa quoted a law professor who had stated that ‘larceny and robbery existed in Spain only in regard to amounts lower than one hundred thousand pesetas. Above that figure, they were called financial affairs.’ In any issue, civil or criminal, that went through the courts, a sum had to be put aside to grease the wheels of ‘justice’.50

Similar accusations to those made about Juan de la Cierva were made regarding numerous other powerful caciques who also controlled entire provinces: Álvaro de Figueroa y Torres, the Conde de Romanones in Guadalajara; the wheat baron Germán Gamazo in Valladolid; Juan Poveda and Antonio Torres Orduña in Alicante; Carlos O’Donnell, Duque de Tetuán, in Castellón; Pedro Rodríguez de la Borbolla in Seville; Manuel Burgos y Mazo in Huelva; Gabino Bugallal in Orense or Augusto González Besada in Lugo.51 With the tax collector, the alcalde and the judge at his command, the cacique was able to take over parcels of common lands, let his cattle graze on his neighbours’ lands, divert water away from the land of his enemies and towards his own or that of his friends and have works done on his property at the expense of the municipality. A landowning lawyer from Almería commented: ‘Four pickpockets in top hats and four thugs usually make up the top brass of a party.’ In a similar vein, the one-time Minister of Justice Pedro José Moreno Rodríguez claimed that ‘those that the Civil Guard used to pursue now work as bodyguards for the authorities’. It was a symptom of how openly the system worked that despite the press publishing the most corrosive accounts of caciquismo, the outrage of public opinion changed nothing. The general view was that the lower orders of the caciquismo system, the alcaldes and secretaries, had often spent time in prison and, if they had not, their liberty had been maintained through the influence of the caciques that controlled the local judiciary.52

At a provincial level, the cacique was a highly privileged middleman between the government and the local vote. The incoming Minister of the Interior chose the provincial civil governors and he squared the caciques.53 The influence that permitted the cacique to supply the required votes to the government depended in part on the distribution of patronage that was provided by the public purse. This might take the form of the rerouting of a road or railway or the building of a bridge that would extend his influence over a town or even an entire province. The loyalty of the cacique’s clientele also depended on the protection of family and friends from the law, from taxation or from conscription. It has been calculated that the more than a third of the correspondence written by the principal politicians of the Restoration period consisted of requests for votes or letters of recommendation for those whose votes were required. Moreover, the bulk of such correspondence was written just before or just after elections. It is said that the homes of Sagasta and Cánovas in Madrid were besieged on a daily basis by aspirants for government jobs or favours such as public works in their district. So frequently were roads built for the convenience of local caciques that they came to be known as parliamentary highways.54

On occasion, over-zealous local officials would produce majorities comprising more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, after the introduction of universal male suffrage, casual falsification became ever more difficult and, if the requisite number of votes could not be mustered, the caciques sometimes registered the dead in the local cemetery as voters. In Madrid in 1896, fictitious voters, known as Lázaros, used the names of deceased electors. More frequently, they sent gangs of paid voters from village to village to vote for the government party. In 1879, Romero Robledo used the technique of ‘flying squads’ – 200 Aragonese raced around Madrid from polling station to polling station using their votes. It was said that one man had voted forty-two times. The alteration of the electoral list or the addition or subtraction of votes was known as pucherazo or tupinada, the packing of the pot. Sometimes, announcements were placed in the local press announcing, falsely, that a rival had withdrawn his candidacy. More common was to change the timing of elections so that hostile voters would not arrive in time or having thugs present to intimidate rival voters. At other times, the voting urns were placed where voters would not want to go, in a fever hospital, a pigsty or on a high roof. In 1891, in one voting station in Murcia, the supervisor obliged voters to pass their voting slips through a window so that he could change them at his convenience. Advantage could also be taken of some who simply did not bother to vote. If the vote was not going as planned, there were thugs on hand to raid the polling station and seize the voting urns. Sometimes, those likely to vote for the unofficial candidate would be thrown in jail or else threatened with investigation of their tax status. Most common of all was simply the falsification of the count.55