In the two decades before the First World War the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilboa and the coal miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Union General de Trabajodores (UGT). However, any possibility of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement was eliminated when the Socialists made the decision, in 1899, to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent this cut off the socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism mediated through the dead hand of the party’s rigid leader, Pablo Iglesias. The party was isolationist, committed to the view that the workers’ party should struggle for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.
The traditional dominance of the political establishment by representatives of the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization but it would not be surrendered easily. In addition to the differing challenges represented by the powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement, a more cerebral opposition to the system came from a small but influential group of middle-class Republicans. As well as distinguished intellectuals like the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibanez, increasingly there were dynamic new political groupings.
In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Alvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchial system, in 1912 created the Reformist Party. Alvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic, most notably the intensely scholarly man of letters Manuel Azana, who would come to represent modernity and the European Spain of the distant future.
The rise of republicanism persuaded some of the
elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio
Prieto of the need for the establishment of a liberal democracy and they
therefore fought for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans.
Prieto had seen in Bilbao that, alone, the Socialist could do little, while,
with the Republicans, they could secure election success. His advocacy of a
Republican-Socialist electoral combination in 1909 opened up the long-term
prospect of building socialism from parliament but also brought him into conflict
with other leaders such as the UGT vice-president
Francisco Largo Caballero, who advocated a strategy of confrontational strike
action. Republican-Socialist collaboration would be the basis of eventual PSOE
success. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias himself was elected to parliament in 1910.
However, Prieto had earned the lifelong hostility of Largo Caballero, whose
rancour would bedevil his existence and, eventually, have devastating
consequences for Spain.
Another Republican movement that seemed to be threatening the system was the
brainchild of the outrageous rogue Alejandro Lerroux. Born in Cordoba, Lerroux
started his adult life as an army deserter after squandering his military
academy fees in a casino. As a journalist he leapt to fame in 1893 by dint of
an inadvertent victory in a dual with a newspaper editor. His exposes of the
Montjuich tortures gained him a popular following. His skills as a demagogue
gave him the leadership of a mass Republican movement in the slums of Barcelona
and his ability as an organizer built a formidable electoral machine. It was
revealed that he was receiving money from the central government, common
practice in a period when politicians paid for the inclusion or suppression of
news in newspapers. This gave rise to the widespread belief that his
rabble-rousing in Barcelona was a Madrid-inspired operation to divide the anarcho-syndicalist
masses and undermine the rise of Catalan nationalism. Probably no government
slush fund could have achieved what he did. To become “Emperor of the
Paralelo’, the Barcelona district where misery, criminality and
prostitution held sway, required more genuine appeal than anything that could
be conjured up in Madrid offices. This was achieved largely by near
pornographic techniques of anti-clerical demagoguery in which he enjoined his
followers, the ‘young barbarians,’ to murder priests, sack and burn churches
and ‘liberate’ nuns. Lerroux tapped into the profound anti-clericalism of
immigrant workers. For them, the Church was the defender of the brutally unjust
rural social order from which they had fled.
The first decade of the twentieth century therefore
tasted an explosive cocktail of intransigence, on the part of landowners and
industrialists, and subversion from an array of Socialists, anarchists,
Radicals, moderate Republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in
which rapid but sporadic industrialization and partial labor organization
coincided with major post-imperial trauma.
A resentful army disappointed in Cuba
turned inward, determined not to lose further battles, and became obsessed with
the defense of national unity and the existing social order. Accordingly, the
officer corps was increasingly hostile both to the left and to the regional
Nationalists who were perceived as ‘separatists.’ Right-wing, centralist and
constantly needled by the Catalan anti-militarist press, in November 1905 the
army shook off its immediate post-war shame with an assault by three hundred
officers on the premises of the satirical journal Cu-cut! And the
Catalanist newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, during which forty-six people
were seriously injured.
To appease the army, the government introduced the Law of Jurisdictions which deemed that any criticism of the army, the monarchy or Spain itself would result in the perpetrators being tried by the military justice system. It was a dangerous step in the process whereby the officer corps came to consider itself the ultimate arbiter in politics. Moreover, the Spanish army was not prepared merely to be the defender of a constitutional regime whose decadence it despised. It hoped to find a solution in a new imperial endeavor in Morocco, made possible by British desires for a Spanish buffer against French expansionism on the southern shores of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, woefully unprepared, the new adventure stimulated massive popular hostility against conscription, thereby intensifying the hatred of the military for the left. At the same time, after 1905 Lerroux began to lose support, precisely because of the fierce sincerity with which he revealed his pro-militaristic and centralist abhorrence of Catalanism.
The volatility of the situation was revealed by the events known as the Samana Tragica which took place in Barcelona in July 1909. The colonial disaster of 1898 had fed widespread working-class pacifism and ensured that, unlike France or Britain, Germany and Italy, Spain could not use imperialist adventures to divert attention from domestic social conflict. Spain’s Moroccan entanglement was popularly regarded as the narrow personal undertaking of the King and the owners of the iron mines. In 1909, the government of the conservative Antonio Maura, under pressure from both army officers close to Alfonso XIII and the investors in the mines, sent an expeditionary force to expand Spain’s Moroccan territory to encompass some important mineral deposits. Large numbers of reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and embarked from Barcelona. Untrained and ill-equipped, the Spanish army was on the throes of being defeated by the Rif tribesmen at the battle of Barranco de Lobo. There were anti-war demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and cities with railroad stations from which conscripts were departing for the war. A general strike broke out in Barcelona on 26 July.
The Captain General
of the region decided to treat it as an insurrection and declared martial law.
Barricades were set up and anti-conscription protests escalated into
anti-clerical disturbances and church burnings. The movement was put down with
artillery. Numerous prisoners were taken and 1725 people were subsequently
tried, of whom five were sentenced to death. In military eyes the repression
was necessary because the disturbances had connotations of anti-militarism,
anti-clericalism and Catalan separatism. In this sense, during the Semana
Tragica the hostility between the military and the labor movement
prefigured the violent hostilities of the civil war.
The Semana Tragica certainly took Spain a step further towards the
conflicts of the 1930s in terms of developments within the anarchist movement.
Lerroux’s pro-militaristic stance had exposed the fraudulence of his radicalism
and saw the bulk of his ‘young barbarians’ drift towards anarchism. In the
summer of 1910, a variety of anarchist groups united to form an anarcho-syndicalist
trade union known as the Confederacion Nacional el Trabajo (CNT). The
new organization reject both individual violence and parliamentary politics,
opting instead for revolutionary syndicalism. This involved a central
contradiction which would hinder the organization throughout its existence. On the
one hand, it would act as a conventional trade union defending the interests of
its members within the existing order while at the same time advocating direct
action to overthrown the system. The involvement of its members in violent acts
of industrial sabotage and strikes meant the new organization was soon declared
illegal.
Surprisingly, however, when the next explosion came it was precipitated not by
the rural anarchists or the urban working class but by the industrial bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, once the crisis started, proletarian ambitions came into play in such
a way
As to ensure the basic polarization of Spanish political life became starker than ever.
The geometric symmetry of the Restoration System –
with political power concentrated in the hands of those who enjoyed the
monopoly of economic power- already under pressure, was shattered by the
outbreak of the First World War. Not only were political passions aroused by a
bitter debate about whether Spain should intervene and on which side,
accentuating growing divisions within the Liberal and Conservative parties, but
massive social upheaval followed in the wake of the war. The fact that Spain
was a non-belligerent put her in an economically privileged position of being
able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and
industrial products. Coal miners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and
shipbuilders, Catalan textile magnets all experienced a wild boom which
constituted the first dramatic takeoff for Spanish industry. The balance of
power within the economic elite shifted somewhat. Agrarian interests remained
pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their
subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June
1916 when the Liberal minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a
tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding
measure to deal with those made by agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it
so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the
industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernization.
The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen them
mount challenges to the Spanish establishment by sponsoring their respective
regionalist movements – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga
Regionalista. The leader of the Lliga, the shrewd Catalan financier Francesc
Cambo, emerged as spokesman for the industrialists and bankers. He believed
that drastic action was necessary if a major revolutionary cataclysm was to be
avoided. Now the reforming zeal of the industrialists enriched by the war
coincided with a desperate need for change from a proletariat impoverished by
it. Boom industries had attracted rural labor to towns where the worst conditions
of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque
Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing
inflation and plummeting living standards. After a number of dramatic bread
riots, the Socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT were drawn together in
the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then
reform. While industrialists and workers pushed for change, the middle-ranking
army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and
political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part
because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the army.
Military discontent was related to a division within the army of those who had
volunteered to fight in Africa – Africanistas – and those who had
remained on the peninsula – peninsulares. For those who had fought in
Africa the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid
promotion, high. The rigors and horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars brutalized
the beleaguered Africanistas, who began to see themselves as a heroic
band of warriors who, in their commitment to defending the Moroccan colony,
were alone concerned with fate of the patria. Long before the establishment
of the Second Republic, this had developed into contempt for professional
politicians, for the pacifist left-wing masses and, to a certain extent, for the
peninsulares. The mainland represented a more comfortable but boring
existence with promotions only by strict seniority. When salaries started to
hit, like those of civilians, by wartime inflation, there was resentment among
the peninsulares against the Africanistas who had gained more
rapid promotion. The peninsulares created the Juntas Militares de
Defensa, rather like trade unions, to protect the seniority system and to
seek better pay.
The Juntas’ complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. The intellectual movement known as ‘Regenerationism’ associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the right or the left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate caciquista system by democratic reform and those who planned simply to crush it by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed empty ‘Regenerationist’ cliché were acclaimed as figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of corruption of the caciquismo. Had the movement been successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the Civil War would not have been necessary. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 merely consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.
Despite a rhetorical coincidence of their calls for
reform, the ultimate interests of the workers, industrialists and officers were
contradictory and the system survived by skillfully exploiting their
differences. The Prime Minister, the astute Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded
the officers’ economic demands and promoted the ringleaders of the Juntas. He
then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers, forcing the UGT to act
before the CNT was ready. Now at peace with the system, army officers- both peninsulares
and Africanistas- were happy to defend it in August 1917 by crushing the
striking Socialists, which they did with considerable bloodshed. Alarmed by the
prospect of militant workers in the streets, the industrialists dropped their
own demands for political reform and, lured by promises of economic modernization,
joined into in a national coalition government in 1918 with both Liberals and
Conservatives. Once again, the industrial bourgeoisie had abandoned its
political aspirations and allied with the landed oligarchy out of fear of the
lower classes. Short-lived though it was to be, the coalition symbolized the
slightly improved position of the industrialists in a reactionary alliance
still dominated by the landed interests.
By 1917. Spain was divided more starkly even than before into two mutually
hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and
workers and landless laborers on the other.
Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this
broad cleavage – the smallholding peasantry. Significantly, in the years before
and during the First World War, efforts were made to mobilize Catholic farmers
in defense of big landholding interests. With anarchism and Socialism making
headway among the urban workers, the more far-sighted landowners were anxious
to stop the spread of the poison to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary
syndicates were financed by landlords from 1906 but the process was
systematized after 1912 by a group of dynamic social Catholics led by Angel
Herrera, the eminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain before
1936. Through is organization of determined social Christian activists, the Asociacion
Catolica Nacional de Propagandistas, Herrera helped set up a series of
provincial Catholic Agrarian Federations which tried to prevent impoverished
farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic
expertise, warehousing and machinery in return for their adoption of virulent
anti-socialism. Many of those recruited were to play an important role when the
landed oligarchy was forced to seek more modern forms of defense in the 1930s
first by voting for the legalist parties of the right during the Second
Republic and later by fighting for Franco.
In the aftermath of the crisis of 1917, however, the existing order survived in
part because of the organizational naivety of the left and even more because of
its own ready recourse to armed repression. The foundation of the Communist
International (Comintern) in March 1919 imbued Spanish ruling classes with the
same fear of bolshevism that afflicted all the European countries. The defeat
of the urban socialists in 1917 had not marked the end of the assault on the
system. Between 1917 and 1921, three years known as the trienio bolchevique,
the anarchist day-laborers of the south took part in a series of risings.
Eventually put down by a combination of the Civil Guard and the army, the
strikes and land seizures of these years intensified the social resentments of
the rural south. At the same time, urban anarchists were also coming into
conflict with the system. Northern industrialists, having failed to invest
their war profits in modern plant and rationalization, were badly hit by the
post-war resurgence of foreign competition. The Catalans in particular tried to
ride the recession with wage cuts and lay-offs. They countered the consequent
strikes with lock-outs and hired gunmen. the anarchists retaliated in kind and,
from 1919 to 1921, the streets of Barcelona witnessed a terrorist spiral of
provocations and reprisals. A split in the PSOE over whether or not to join the
Comintern led to a factional split with the more radical elements forming the
Communist Party in November 1921. The Communists’ influence was immediately felt
in a series of strikes in the Asturian coal mines and in the Basque iron and
steel industry. It was obvious that Restoration politics were no longer an
adequate mechanism for defending the economic interests of the ruling classes.
Moreover, the credibility of the system was rocked by the overwhelming defeat
of the Spanish forces by Moroccan tribesmen at Annual in June 1921.
On 23 September 1923 a coup d’etat was carried out by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Ostensibly, Prima came to power to put an end to disorder and the prevent the King being embarrassed by the publication of an awkward report on the responsibility for Annual. However, as Captain-General of Barcelona and intimate of the Catalan textile barons, Primo was fully aware of the anarchist threat to them. Moreover, coming from a large landowning family in the south, he had also experience of the peasant risings of 1918-21. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the coalition of industrialists and landowners which had been consolidated during the great crisis of 1917. Initially, his dictatorship had two great advantages – a general revulsion against the chaos of the previous six years and an upturn in the European economy. He outlawed the anarchist and made a deal with the UGT whereby it was given a monopoly of trade union affairs. A massive public works program, which involved a significant modernization of Spanish capitalism and the building of a communications infrastructure that would bear fruit only thirty years later, gave the impressive that liberty was being traded in for prosperity.
The Primo de Rivera dictatorship was to be regarded in
later years as a golden age by the Spanish middle class and became a central
myth of the reactionary right. Paradoxically, however, its short-term effect
was to discredit the very idea authoritarianism in Spain. These fleeting phenomena
were born partly of Primo’s failure to use the economic breathing space to
construct a lasting political replacement for the decrepit constitutional
monarchy, but more immediately it sprang from his alienation of the powerful
interests which had originally supported him. A genial eccentric with a Falstaffian
approach to political life, he governed by a form of personal improvisation
which ensured that he bore the blame for his regime’s failures. Although by
1930 there was hardly a section of Spanish society that he had not offended,
his most crucial errors led to the estrangement of industrialists, landowners
and the army. Attempts to standardize promotion machinery outraged army officers.
The Catalan bourgeoisie was antagonized by an offensive against regionalist
aspirations. Northern industrialists were even more enraged by the collapse of
the peseta in 1928. Which they attributed to his inflationary public spending.
Perhaps most importantly, the support of Primo’s fellow landowners was lost
when efforts were made to introduce arbitration committees for wages and
working conditions into rural areas. At the end of January 1930, Primo
resigned.
There was no question of a return to the pre-1923
political system. Apart from the fact that it had fallen into disrepute by the
time Primo seized power, significant changes had taken place in the attitudes of
its personnel. Among the senior politicians, death, old age and, above all,
resentment of the King’s cavalier abandonment of the constitution of 1923 had
taken its toll. Of the younger men, some had opted for the Republican movement,
partly out of conviction that the future lay in that direction. Others,
especially those Conservatives who had followed the authoritarian implications
of “Regenerationism’ to the logical extreme, had thrown themselves
wholeheartedly into the service of the dictator. For them, there was no going
back. Their experiences under Primo had left them entrenched in the view that the
only feasible solution to the problems faced by the right was a military monarchy.
They would form the general staff of the extreme right in the Second Republic
and were to provide much of the ideological content of the Franco regime.
In desperation, therefore, Alfonso XIII turned to another general, Damaso
Berenguer. His mild dictatorship floundered in search of a formula for a return
to constitutional monarchy but was undermined by Republican plots,
working-class agitation and military sedition. When he held municipal elections
on 12 April 1931, Socialists and middle-class Republicans swept the board in the
main towns while monarchists won only in rural areas where the social domination
of the local bosses, the caciques, remained intact. Faced with the
questionable loyalty of both army and Civil Guard, the King took the advice of his
counsellors to depart gracefully before he was thrown out by force. The attitude
of the military reflected the hopes of a significant section of the upper classes
that, by sacrificing the King, it would be possible to contain the desires for change of both the
progressive bourgeoisie and the left. That was to be an impossible ambition without some
concession in the area of land reform.
The conflicts of the trieno bolchevique had been silenced by repression in 1919-20 and by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but they continued to smolder. The violence of those years had ended the uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression had intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and estate managers. By the same token, the landowners were outraged by the insubordinate behavior of the day-laborers whom the considered almost sub-human. Accordingly, the elements of paternalism which had previously mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros lives came to an abrupt end. The gathering of windfall crops or the watering of beasts, even the collection of firewood were deemed to be ‘collective kleptomania’ and were prevented by the vigilance of armed guards. In consequence, the new Republic was to inherit a situation of sporadic social war in the south which was to dramatically diminish its possibilities of establishing a regime of co-existence. Nevertheless, with good will on both sides, everything, even peace, was possible in 1931. Within weeks of the Republic being established, however, it was clear that among the erstwhile supporters of Alfonso XIII and within the anarchist movement there was anything but goodwill to Spain’s new democracy.
