Spain before 1931: Prelude to Civil War by Paul Preston

 

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.