Democracy and Civil War in Spain 1931-1939

Martin Blinkhorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415006996
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134986330
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the 1930s Spain underwent a period of intense and bloody upheaval that culminated in three years of civil war and the triumph of the Nationalist rebels under General Franco. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish - and non-Spanish - people died in their struggle against what was seen as the greatest evil of the time: fascism and its commitment to the defeat of democracy. Fifty years on, with the coming of a new democracy to Spain, previously inaccessible research materials have become available to historians; old orthodoxies have been challenged and the continuing debate concerning the origins of the Spanish Civil War has been lively. In the light of this renewed interest Martin Blinkhorn has provided a lucid and readable introduction to events in Spain in the 1930s.

1
From monarchy to Republic

In 1898 Spain suffered at the hands of the upstart United States a humiliating military and naval defeat in the Caribbean and Pacific. Defeat was followed by a yet greater humiliation: Spain’s loss of the final remnants—Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—of a vast overseas empire, conquered during the sixteenth century and still intact as late as the early nineteenth. The material loss suffered in the ‘Disaster of 1898’ was significant, but the psychological blow was even greater. As Spaniards came face to face with their country’s impotence, backwardness and inescapably second-class status, there arose a confused chorus of demands for the ‘regeneration’ of what was widely seen as a ‘decadent’ nation. For the Spanish monarchy, 1898 signalled the start of a lengthy process of disintegration which culminated in 1931 with its replacement by the Second Republic.

The old regime

Decadent or not, Spain in the early twentieth century was certainly backward in relation to other European states: not merely Britain, Germany and France but also the more obviously comparable Italy. One measure of this was the overwhelmingly rural-agrarian character of her economy and society. Even by 1930, 46 per cent of the active population was still directly involved in agriculture, and at least another 10 per cent in essentially rural industries. Truly ‘modern’ industry was largely restricted to the northern periphery—the textile factories of Catalonia and the iron, steel, shipbuilding and paper industries of the Basque country. Only here, and in mining districts like Asturias, could there be said to exist a modern bourgeoisie and an industrial working class. Elsewhere, Spain’s was not only an agrarian economy but also a very retarded and unproductive one, upon which was founded an often staggeringly unjust society. Of Spain’s complex agrarian problems, two are of particular importance to us. Characteristic of large areas of southern Spain, notably the regions of Andalusia, Extremadura and La Mancha, were the vast private estates or latifundios, often owned by absentee proprietors and usually worked by armies of desperately impoverished landless labourers. In many other regions, especially north of Madrid, peasant farming was more typical; here the small farmer, either as proprietor or tenant, struggled under the burden of such problems as poor soil, debt, tiny and often scattered holdings, unavailable or expensive credit, high rents and insecure leases. Not surprisingly, rural unrest, frequently suppressed by the ruthless Civil Guard, was a chronic feature of Spanish life, and the ‘agrarian question’ a major concern of those who sought to make Spain more modern and democratic.

Would-be reformers were also preoccupied by two powerful institutions which seemed to epitomize and reinforce Spain’s general backwardness. The Spanish Church, although forced by nineteenth-century liberal governments to release most of its vast landed wealth, remained during the early twentieth century a rich, powerful and traditionalist institution whose ties with the wealthy classes, moreover, were becoming closer. Through its near monopoly of education the Church instilled into those who did not rebel against it a profoundly conservative system of religious, social and political values. The second institutional prop of conservative Spain was the army: an absurdly over-officered and militarily inefficient body, acutely sensitive to criticism and, after 1900, increasingly inclined towards interfering in politics.

Over Spain’s stuttering economy and unequal society there presided the so-called ‘Liberal Monarchy’. Introduced in 1875 following seven years of political and social instability, this regime brought a generation of political peace based upon the dominance of big landowners, especially the landlords of Castile and the ‘latifundists’ of Andalusia. By the turn of the century the landed class had been joined in a powerful ruling oligarchy by the representatives of ‘new’ economic forces, principally the bankers and heavy industrialists of the Basque country and the manufacturers of Catalonia. Political stability was ensured by a superficially representative electoral system—Spain received universal manhood suffrage in 1887—which in reality was far from democratic. By subjecting voters to a combination of bribery, economic pressure and downright coercion, the Ministry of the Interior and, at local level, caciques—bigwigs and political ‘bosses’—constructed pre-arranged governmental majorities for one or other of the two main ‘oligarchic’ parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. For many who in the early twentieth century longed for the ‘regeneration’ of Spain, the phrase ‘oligarchy and caciquismo’ summed up the country’s ills.

The crisis of the monarchy

Between 1898 and 1923 the development of a more complex and less easily controlled society confronted the monarchy of King Alfonso XIII with a series of new challenges. Educated, urban Spaniards demanded institutional and constitutional reforms, some going so far as to favour the monarchy’s replacement by a republic; in Catalonia and the Basque country, where distinctive languages and cultures existed, rising nationalist movements opposed the regime’s centralizing character; in Morocco, Spain and her army became embroiled in what was to be her last colonial war; and two mass forces of the left, socialism and anarchism, emerged to offer organized protest against the injustices of Spanish society. As time passed and urban politics, at least, became more open and genuinely representative, the old, artificial party system began to crumble and the Liberal Monarchy itself to appear insecure. In a major crisis in the summer of 1917, some historians believe, only divisions between its middle-class and left-wing critics rescued the crown from a fate similar to that which only months before had befallen Tsar Nicolas II of Russia. The immediate crisis passed, but during the next six years the monarchy’s problems if anything intensified, with military humiliation in Morocco and social unrest raging in the emerging anarchist strongholds of urban Catalonia and rural Andalusia: all this against a background of chronic governmental instability. By the early 1920s it was evident that the monarchical system in its existing form was ill-equipped to negotiate successfully the difficult transition from ‘oligarchic’ liberalism to genuine democracy.

The life of the Liberal Monarchy effectively ended in September 1923 with the military pronunciamiento (coup d’état) of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. With the King’s acquiescence and in total contravention of the monarchy’s constitution, Primo de Rivera proceeded to establish a dictatorship. While this may have appeared to solve the monarchy’s immediate problems, in the long run it only made them worse. After an early honeymoon period during which he drove underground the anarchist trade union, the CNT, suppressed Catalan nationalism, brought peace to Morocco, and benefited from a shortlived economic boom, Primo de Rivera’s credit gradually exhausted itself. In the face of rising popular hostility, and abandoned during the late 1920s by most of his powerful allies—the wealthy classes, his military colleagues and, crucially, Alfonso XIII himself—the dictator surrendered power in January 1930, bequeathing to the King the task of determining Spain’s future constitutional course. During the next twelve months Alfonso entrusted the premiership first to another general, Berenguer, and then to an admiral, Aznar, each governing without parliamentary restraint. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that continued recourse to dictatorship offered no lasting solution and that a return to representative politics would somehow have to be contrived.

This would not be easy, for beneath the surface of the dictatorship Spanish politics had been undergoing a dramatic transformation. The old Liberal and Conservative parties, moribund even before 1923, failed to re-emerge in recognizable and credible form in 1930. Nevertheless they had not yet been superseded by new organizations capable of combining loyalty to the monarchy with the representation of the socially and economically powerful. Ironically, moreover, the dictatorship, while accelerating the inexorable demise of the ‘oligarchic’ party system, had stimulated the growth of socialism and republicanism. The Spanish Socialist Party and its trade union organization, the UGT (General Workers’ Union), had gained strength both from initially co-operating with the dictatorship and from subsequently opposing it. The rise of republicanism was if anything even more dramatic. A cause in the doldrums following the chaotic experience of the First Republic in 1873, republicanism had begun to revive after 1900, especially in the big cities. Alfonso XIII’s complicity in the dictatorship and undermining of the monarchy’s own constitution tarnished the very principle of monarchy and gave republicanism a tremendous boost, especially once Primo de Rivera’s early popularity had deserted him. During the late 1920s republican ranks swelled not only with members of an expanding, educated urban middle class but also with recently active monarchists. For most of the former, republicanism involved a commitinent to fundamentally reforming Spanish society; for many of the latter, little more than a conviction that a republic, if politically moderate, might prove a sounder guarantor of conservative interests than a discredited monarchy susceptible to outright revolution.

As the King and his ministers struggled to escape the constitutional impasse, the seriousness of the republican challenge became daily more evident. In August 1930 representatives of republican organizations signed a pact at San Sebastián aimed at overthrowing the monarchy; in October the Spanish Socialist Party joined the republicans in a ‘Revolutionary Committee’; and in December a premature and unsuccessful rising of pro-republican army officers in Jaca (Aragon) provided the cause with its first ‘martyrs’. Fearing further unrest Alfonso’s government accepted the need for an electoral strategy and called local elections as the first stage in a gradual return to representative politics. Held on 12 April 1931 the contest turned into a more-or-less direct confrontation between monarchists and an alliance of republicans and socialists. In the countryside comfortable monarchist victories were achieved through the continuing social and political grip of caciquismo, but in the great majority of cities and large towns, where voting was freer, the triumph of the monarchy’s opponents was resounding. To the King and most of his advisers the verdict was clear and, short of risking civil war, irresistible. On 14 April 1931, as Alfonso XIII prepared his departure from Spain, the Revolutionary Committee assumed office as the Provisional Government of the Second Republic.

2
The Second Republic and the coming of civil war, 1931–6.

Political and social forces

The Provisional Government, having assumed power in extraordinary circumstances, lacked strict democratic legitimacy until a general election could take place. The first of the Second Republic’s three general elections was held in late June 1931. In order to weaken caciquismo and encourage broad political alliances, multimember constituencies and a new voting system were introduced. The contest produced a ‘Constituent’ parliament (Sp. Cortes) overwhelmingly dominated by parties sympathetic to the new regime. Out of 470 seats the Socialists won 113, the Radicals 89, the Republican Left 85, the Catalonian and Galician allies of the latter 55, and other assorted pro-republicans around 60. In part this dramatic result reflected a widespread but not necessarily dependable willingness to give the Republic a chance, in part the temporary demoralization and organizational unpreparedness of the anti- and non-republican right, whose fifty or so depuries seriously under-represented its true strength and potential.

Between 14 April 1931 and September 1933, Spain was governed by a succession of governments made up of Republicans and Socialists. Until late 1931 all forces favourable to the new regime were represented in government, ranging from the Socialist Party, through an assortment of Left-Republican parties, to the increasingly conservative Radical Party and the Catholic Republicans on the right. With the resignation of Catholic ministers in October 1931 and the shift into opposition of the Radicals two months later, power reverted to a coalition of Left-Republicans and Socialists led by the Republic’s strongman, Manuel Azaña.

REPUBLICANISM AND THE SPANISH MIDDLE CLASS

The coming of the Republic was not a ‘bourgeois revolution’ involving the seizure of political power by representatives of a ‘progressive’, entrepreneurial middle class. Spain’s financial and industrial bourgeoisie had decades before 1931 thrown in its lot with the monarchy and the landed class; as an immediate and massive flight of capital indicated, business interests substantially shared the suspicion, if not downright hostillty, with which large landowners from the outset regarded the new regime. Most of the Republican politicians who assumed office in April 1931 represented instead that professional middle class and intelligentsia—lawyers and bureaucrats; literati and journalists; academics and schoolteachers; doctors, dentists and vets—which had largely abandoned the monarchy during the 1920s. Although in an economically backward country like Spain these elements played an important cultural role, they lacked economic ‘muscle’, a weakness that was accordingly transmitted to the Republic itself.

As a predominantly middle-class cause, Spanish republicanism, and in particular its more reform-minded elements, suffered from the lack of a truly broad popular base, comparable with that enjoyed by French republicanism, within a numerous and vigorous lower-middle class and peasantry. Throughout much of urban Spain the lower-middle class, whilst larger than is sometimes suggested, was engaged in relatively small-scale economic activities involving little in the way ...

Table of contents

• IN THE SAME SERIES
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chronological table of events
• List of abbreviations used in the text
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 From monarchy to Republic
• 2 The Second Republic and the coming of civil war, 1931–6.
• 3 The Civil War 1936–9
• 4 Interpretations, debates and conclusions
• Suggested Further Reading