The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge

In many respects, 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 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 ‘chief’). 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: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ 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. Fannelli’s 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 Cánovas by a young Italian anarchist. A mass campaign against the torturing of anarchist prisoners in Barcelona’s 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 Spain’s 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 Unión General de Trabajadores (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 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 Ibáñez, increasingly there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’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 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. 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 Córdoba, 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 exposés 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 the near pornographic techniques of anti-clerical demagogy 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 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 ‘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 endeavour 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 Semana Trágica 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 or 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 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 in the throes of being defeated by the Rif tribesmen at the battle of Barranco del Lobo. There were anti-war demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and cities with railway 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 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 the use of 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 Trágica the hostility between the military and the labour movement prefigured the violent hostilities of the civil war.

The Semana Trágica 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 autumn of 1910, a variety of anarchist groups united to form an anarcho-syndicalist trade union known as the Confed-eración Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The new organization rejected 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 overthrow that 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 that 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 also 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 the economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products. Coal mine owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, Catalan textile magnates 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 the 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 Cambó, 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 industrialists enriched by the war coincided with a desperate need for change from a proletariat impoverished by it. Boom industries had attracted rural labour 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, 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 between 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 rigours 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 the 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 promotion only by strict seniority. When salaries started to be 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’ clichés were acclaimed as the 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 the corruption of 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 workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the system survived by skilfully exploiting these 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 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 a fear of the lower classes. Short-lived though it was to be, the coalition symbolized the slightly improved position of industrialists in a reactionary alliance still dominated by the landed interest.

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 labourers 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 defence 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 Ángel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain before 1936. Through his organization of determined social Christian activists, the Asociación Católica 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 defence in the 1930s first by voting for the legalist parties of the right during the Second Republic and later by fighting for Franco.