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ONE
A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931
The origins of the Spanish Civil War lie far back in the countryâs history. The notion that political problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for a thousand years civil war has been if not exactly the norm then certainly no rarity. The war of 1936â9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s. The religious âcrusadeâ propaganda of the Nationalists joyfully linked it with the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. On both sides, heroism and nobility vied with primitive cruelty and brutality in a way that would not have been out of place in a medieval epic. Yet, in the last resort, the Spanish Civil War is a war firmly rooted in the modern period. The interference of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin ensured that the Spanish Civil War would be a defining moment in twentieth-century history. Yet, leaving that international dimension aside, the myriad Spanish conflicts which erupted in 1936, regionalists against centralists, anti-clericals against Catholics, landless labourers against latifundistas, workers against industrialists, have in common the struggles of a society in the throes of modernization.
To understand Spainâs progress to the bloodshed of 1936 it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction between the warâs long-term structural origins and its immediate political causes. In the hundred years before 1931, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocks. However, when the Second Republic was established on 14 April 1931 amidst scenes of popular rejoicing, few Spaniards outside the lunatic fringes of the extreme left and right, the conspiratorial monarchists and the anarchists, believed that the countryâs problems could be solved only by resorting to violence. Five years and three months later, large sections of the population believed that war was inevitable. Moreover, a substantial proportion of them felt that war would be a good thing. Accordingly, it is necessary to establish exactly what happened between 14 April 1931 and 18 July 1936 to bring about that change. Nevertheless, the political hatreds which polarized the Second Republic in those five and a quarter years were a reflection of the deep-rooted conflicts within Spanish society.
The Civil War was the culmination of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had dominated Spanish history since 1808. There is a curious pattern in Spainâs modern history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have attempted to use political and military power to hold back social progress have inevitably been followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, the 1870s, between 1917 and 1923, and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the countryâs social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to introduce fundamental reform, especially on the land, and to carry out redistributions of wealth. Such efforts in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional balance of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General OâDonnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874 and by General Primo de Rivera in 1923.
Accordingly, the Civil War of 1936â9 represented the ultimate expression of the attempts by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reform which might threaten their privileged position. The recurring dominance of reactionary elements was a consequence of the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. A concomitant of the tortuously slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain was the existence of a numerically small and politically insignificant commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien rĂ©gime 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 a democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. That is not to say that Spain remained a feudal society but rather that the legal basis for capitalism was established without there being a political revolution. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that her industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the pattern established by Prussia.
Indeed, even until the 1950s, capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian. 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 farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization, Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the dominant sectors in terms of political influence 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 in Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy was periodically challenged by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes with virtually no success. Until well after the civil war, 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.
There was never any strong possibility in Spain that industrialization and political modernization would coincide. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were irrevocably diverted. The removal of feudal restrictions on land transactions combined with royal financial problems in the 1830s and the 1850s to liberate huge tracts of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and common lands. 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 by members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment. Unwilling to engage in expensive projects of irrigation, they preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros. The departure of the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age together with the enclosing of common lands removed most of the social palliatives which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval. Paternalism was replaced by repression as the Civil Guard was created to form a rural armed police with the principal function of guarding the big estates from the labourers who worked on them. Thus, the strengthening of the landed oligarchy exacerbated an explosive social situation which could only foster the reactionary tendencies of the owners. At the same time, the syphoning into the land of the capital owned by the merchants of the great sea ports and Madrid bankers correspondingly weakened their interest in modernization.
Continued investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy debilitated those forces committed to reform. The feebleness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was underlined in the period from 1868 to 1874, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. With population growth in the middle of the century increasing pressure on the land, unskilled labourers had flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who were highly sensitive to increases in bread prices. Hardly less wretched was the position of the urban lower middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers. Conditions were perhaps worst in the Catalan textile industry which produced all the horrors of nascent capitalism â long hours, child labour, overcrowding and low wages. When the American Civil War cut off supplies of cotton in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment combined with a depression in railway construction to drive the urban working class to desperation. In 1868, this popular discontent combined with a movement of middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy. A number of pronunciamientos by liberal army officers together with urban riots led to the overthrow of Queen Isabel II in September 1868. The two movements were ultimately contradictory. The liberals were terrified to find that their constitutionalist rebellion had awakened a revolutionary movement of the masses. To make matters worse, a rebellion began in Spainâs richest surviving colony, Cuba. The chosen replacement monarch, Amadeo of Savoy, abdicated in despair in 1873. In the ensuing vacuum, the First Republic was established after a number of working-class risings, an intolerable threat to the established order which was crushed by the army in December 1874.
In many respects, 1873â4 was to Spain what 1848â9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order, the 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, reform was abandoned 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 political system of the 1876 monarchical restoration. Two political parties, the Conservative and the Liberal, represented the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy, respectively the wine and olive growers of the south and the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were both monarchist and were divided not on social issues but over free trade and, to a much lesser extent, over religion. The northern industrial bourgeoisie was barely represented within the system but was, for the moment, content to devote its activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the twentieth century, they could organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers were inclined to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, while the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders.
It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression outside the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. When results were not falsified in the Ministry of the Interior, they were fixed at the local level. The system of electoral falsification rested on the social power of local town bosses, or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning âchiefâ). In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique was usually a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore who did not starve. Caciquismo ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened.
On occasion, overzealous local officials would produce majorities by 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, casual falsification became somewhat more difficult and, if the requisite number of peasant votes could not be mustered, the caciques were said sometimes to register as voters the dead in the local cemetery. In consequence, politics became an exclusive minuet danced out by a small, privileged minority. The nature of politics in the period of caciquismo is illustrated by the celebrated story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local casino (club). Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: âWe the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.â A lengthy pause. âIt appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.â Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.
Challenges to the system did arise, however, and they were linked to the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization and to the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, especially in the countryside. Land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as the southern labourers came under the influence of anarchism. Giuseppe Fannelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, was sent to Spain by the First International in November 1868. His inspirational oratory soon secured him his own evangelists who took anarchism to one village after another. The message that land, justice and equality should be seized by direct action struck a chord among the starving day labourers, or braceros, and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fannelliâs eager converts took part in outbreaks of occasional violence, crop-burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, easily defeated revolutionary outbursts began to alternate with periods of apathy.
It was but a short step from direct action to individual terrorism. The belief that any action was licit against the tyranny of the state saw increasing levels of social violence. In January 1892, an army of braceros, armed only with scythes and sticks but driven by hunger, invaded and briefly held the town of Jerez before being driven out by the police and the Civil Guard. As anarchism took root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage reprisals from the forces of order. In August 1897 mass arrests and the use of torture provoked the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Cirilo CĂĄnovas by a young Italian anarchist. A mass campaign against the torturing of anarchist prisoners in Barcelonaâs Montjuich prison, the Spanish Bastille, saw the rise to fame of the buccaneering demagogue Alejandro Lerroux.
The system was rocked in 1898 by defeat at the hands of the USA and the loss of the remnants of empire, including Cuba. This was to have a catastrophic effect on the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. Barcelona was the scene of sporadic strikes and acts of terrorism by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Moreover, by the turn of the century, a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Catalonia, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias, although the Spanish economy remained essentially agrarian. Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than British coal. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the limited growth of these industries in the north saw the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also witnessed the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basques and Catalans paid a very high proportion of Spainâs tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy. In 1901 the Catalanist party known as the Lliga Regionalista won its first electoral victory.
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 Bilbao and the coal miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the UniĂłn General de Trabajadores (UGT). However, any possibility of overall unity within the organized workersâ 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 partyâs rigid leader, Pablo Iglesias. The party was isolationist, committed to the view that the workersâ party should struggle for workersâ 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 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 Ibåñez, increasingly there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Ălvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Ălvarezâs 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 Azaña, who would come to represent modernity and the European Spain of the distant future.
The rise of republicanism persuaded some elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio Prieto, of the need for the establishment of liberal democracy and they therefore fought for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans. Prieto had seen in Bilbao that, alone, the Socialists 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. RepublicanâSocialist 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 CĂłrdoba, 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 duel with a newspaper editor. His exposĂ©s 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 âEmperor of the Paraleloâ, 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 the near pornographic techniques of anti-clerical demagogy in which he enjoined his followers, the âyoung barbariansâ, to murder priests, sack and burn churches and âliberateâ 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 a disparate array of Socialists, anarchists, Radicals, moderate Republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in which rapid but sporadic industrialization and partial labour organization coincided with major post-imperial trauma. A resentful army disappointed in Cuba turned inwards, determined not to lose further battles, and became obsessed with the defence 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 âseparatistsâ. 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 ÂĄCu-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 endeavour in Morocco, made possible by British desires for a Spanish buffer ...
