PEOPLE BETRAYED EB

Paul Preston

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780007558391
• eBook ISBN: 9780007558384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From the foremost historian of 20th century Spain, A People Betrayed is the story of the devastating betrayal of Spain by its political class, its military and its Church.

This comprehensive history of modern Spain chronicles the fomenting of violent social division throughout the country by institutionalised corruption and startling political incompetence. Most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera and Franco dictatorships, grotesque and shameless corruption went hand-in-hand with inept policies that prolonged Spain's economic backwardness well into the 1950s.

A People Betrayed looks back to the years prior to 1923 when electoral corruption excluded the masses from organized politics and gave them a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution. Bitter social conflict, economic tensions and conflict between centralist nationalism and regional independence movements then exploded into the civil war of 1936-1939.

It took the horrors of that war and the dictatorship that followed to break the pattern. The moderation shared by the progressive right and a chastened left underlay a bloodless transition to democracy after 1975. Yet, as before, corruption and political incompetence continued to have a corrosive effect on political coexistence and social cohesion.

Sparkling with vivid portraits of politicians and army officers, some corrupt and others clean, recounting the triumphs and disasters of Kings Alfonso XIII and Juan Carlos, A People Betrayed unravels the mystery of why both right and left have been unable or unwilling to deal with corruption and the pernicious clash between Spanish centralist nationalism and regional desires for independence.

1

Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption

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’. It was symptomatic of Spain’s dysfunctional society that, between 1814 and 1981, there were more than fifty attempted military coups.14 Although barely half were threatening, they indicated both the army’s hostility towards politicians and the extent to which the Spanish state did not adequately serve its citizens. Thus, the mutual mistrust between the army and civil society intensified until the officer corps concluded that its duty to decided the nation’s destiny outweighed the authority of politicians. 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. 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 leg...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption
• 2 Violence, Corruption and the Slide to Disaster
• 3 Revolution and War: From the Disaster of 1898 to the Tragic Week of 1909
• 4 Revolution and War: From the Tragic Week of 1909 to the Crisis of 1917–1918
• 5 A System in Disarray: Disorder and Repression, 1918–1921
• 6 From Colonial Disaster to Dictatorship, 1921–1923
• 7 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Success, 1923–1926
• 8 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Failure, 1926–1931
• 9 The Second Republic: Reform and Frustration, 1931–1933
• 10 The Black Years and the Coming of War, 1933–1936
• 11 Civil War: Hatred, Incompetence and Profit, 1936–1939
• 12 World War: Survival, Hypocrisy and Profit, 1939–1945
• 13 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Terror, 1945–1953
• 14 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Complacency, 1953–1969
• 15 The Twilight Years of a Corrupt Regime, 1969–1982
• 16 The Painful Creation of a Democracy, 1975–1982
• 17 The Grandeur and Misery of a Newborn Democracy, 1982–2004
• 18 The Triumph of Corruption and Incompetence, 2004–2018
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• By the Same Author
• About the Author
• About the Publisher