The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge

An outraged government immediately insisted on Segura’s immediate removal by the Vatican. Before a response was received, Segura, believing himself to be in danger of reprisals, requested a passport and went to Rome. However, on 11 June he slipped back into Spain and began to organize clandestine meetings of priests. Accordingly, the deeply Catholic Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, without consulting the rest of the cabinet, took the decision to expel him from Spain. Newspaper photographs of the Cardinal Primate of Spain being escorted by police and Civil Guards from a monastery in Guadalajara was immediately produced as evidence of Republican persecution of the Church. The see of Toledo would remain vacant until 12 April 1933 when Segura was replaced by an equally vehement enemy of the Republic, Isidro Gomá.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1931, the episode over Segura’s pastoral had done nothing to soften the Republican view that the Church was the bulwark of black reaction. Thus, on May 11, when a rash of church burning spread through Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante, the cabinet refused to call out the Civil Guard. Manuel Azaña, the immensely talented left Republican Minister of War, proclaimed that ‘all the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of one Republican’, a statement which was exploited by the rightist press to persuade its middle-class readership that Azaña somehow approved of the actual burnings. Certainly, the government demonstrated a notable lack of energy in dealing with the fires, which does not mean that it was to blame for them. The indifference of the watching crowds reflected just how strongly ordinary people identified the Church, the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of agents provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres, in an effort to discredit the new regime. Indeed, it was even claimed that the young monarchists of the Círculo Monárquico Independiente (CMI) had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings. On May 22, full religious liberty was declared. The monarchist daily ABC and the Catholic El Debate howled abuse and were briefly closed down by the government.

Several issues were to cause friction between the Republic and the armed forces but none more than the new regime’s readiness to concede regional autonomy. On 14 April, Colonel Macià, the leader of the Catalan Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia), declared an independent Catalan republic. A deputation from Madrid persuaded him to await government action by promising a rapid statute of autonomy. Inevitably, this aroused the suspicions of the army which had shed so much blood in the fight against Catalan separatism. To make matters worse, the Minister of War, Azaña, began in May to prepare reforms to cut down the inflated officer corps and to make the army more efficient. It was thereby hoped to reduce the political ambitions of the armed forces. It was a necessary reform and, in many respects, a generous one, since the eight thousand surplus officers were retired on full pay. However, military sensibilities were inflamed by the insensitivity with which various aspects of the reforms were implemented. Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 insisting on the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) reopened some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars. Many distinguished right-wing generals including Francisco Franco faced the prospect of being reduced to the rank of colonel. The commission carrying out the revision took more than eighteen months to report, causing unnecessary anxiety for the nearly one thousand officers affected, of whom only half had their cases examined. On 30 June 1931, Azaña closed the General Military Academy in Zaragoza for budgetary reasons and because he believed it to be a hotbed of reactionary militarism. This guaranteed Azaña the eternal enmity of its Director, General Franco.

Since Azaña’s reforms involved the abolition of the army’s jurisdictions over civilians thought to have insulted it, many officers regarded them as a savage attack. Those who were retired, having refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic, were left with the leisure to plot against the regime. This was encouraged by the conservative newspapers read by most army officers, ABC, La Época and La Correspondencia Militar, which presented the Republic as responsible for the economic depression, for the breakdown of law and order, and for disrespect for the army and anti-clericalism. In particular, a campaign was mounted alleging that Azaña’s intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the army). Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. In fact, far from depriving the army of funds and equipment, Azaña, who had made a lifetime study of civil–military relations, merely ensured that the military budget would be used more efficaciously. If anything, Azaña tended to be punctilious in his treatment of a shambolic and inefficient force which compared poorly with the armies of countries like Portugal or Romania. Ironically, the military readiness of the Spanish army in 1936 owed as much to the efforts of Azaña as to those of his successor, the rightist José María Gil Robles. Azaña was converted by the rightist propaganda machine into the bogey of the military because he wanted to provide Spain with a non-political army. For the right, the army existed above all to defend their social and economic interests. Azaña was therefore presented as a corrupt monster, determined to destroy the army, as he was allegedly determined to destroy the Church, because it was part of the Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy to do so. Curiously, he had a much higher regard for military procedures than his predecessor, General Primo de Rivera. A general who presumed to ‘interpret the widespread feeling of the nation’ to Azaña was told forthrightly, ‘Your job is merely to interpret regulations.’ That was not how Spanish generals expected to be treated by civilians.

From the very first days of the Republic right-wing extremists disseminated the idea that an alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the working-class Internationals was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. Anti-semitism, even in a country whose Jews had been expelled four and a half centuries earlier, was a potent weapon. Already in June 1931 the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro had denounced Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and his Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, as Jews. The Catholic press in general made frequent reference to the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The Editorial Católica, which owned a chain of newspapers including El Debate, would soon be publishing the deeply anti-semitic and anti-masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. Even the more moderate Catholic daily, El Debate, referred to De los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The attribution of the Republic’s reforming ambitions to a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot made it that much easier to advocate violence against it. As this propaganda intensified over the next five years, the conviction grew on the extreme right that the Spanish supporters of this filthy foreign conspiracy had to be exterminated.

Such propaganda was soon widespread. However, the first major political contest of the Republic had taken place before the right was properly organized. The June 1931 elections were won by the Socialists in coalition with the left Republicans. Republicanism tended to be a movement of intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie, more an amorphous improvised grouping than a united left-wing force. The only centre grouping, the Radicals, had, on the other hand, started out as a genuine mass movement in Barcelona in the early years of the century. Led by the fiery orator and corrupt machine politician Alejandro Lerroux, the Radicals were to become progressively more conservative and anti-Socialist as the Republic developed. They did immense damage to the Republic by their readiness to opt for the winning side at any given time. The polarization brought about by the pendulum effect of a big left-wing victory in the 1931 elections followed by an equally dramatic rightist triumph in 1933 was greatly intensified by the fact that the Radicals had changed sides.

The centrifugal dynamic of Republican politics was in itself the inadvertent consequence of a set of electoral regulations which were drawn up in such a way as to avoid the political fragmentation that destroyed the Weimar Republic. To ensure strong government majorities, in any given province, 80 per cent of the seats were given to the party or list with most votes over 40 per cent of those cast. The other 20 per cent block of seats went to the list that was second past the post. Accordingly, small fluctuations in the number of votes cast could lead to massive swings in the number of parliamentary seats actually won. The pressure to form coalitions was obvious. The elections of 28 June 1931 for the Constituent Cortes therefore registered a heavy victory for the broad coalition of Socialists, the left Republicans and the Radicals, with a total of 250 seats. The PSOE had gained 116 seats. In the flush of victory, little thought seems to have been given by the Socialist leadership to the long-term implications of the fact that Lerroux’s Radicals, with a campaign that was unashamedly conservative, not to say right wing, had gained ninety-four seats and become the second largest party in the Constituent Cortes. The somewhat heterogeneous right gained only eighty seats. By 1933, however, the success of rightist tactics in blocking reform and the consequent disappointment of the left-wing rank and file had provoked a significant realignment of forces. By then, the anarchists who had voted for the leftist parties in 1931 were committed to abstention. The Socialists had so lost faith in the possibilities of bourgeois democracy that they refused to make a coalition with the left Republicans. The apparatus of the state would thus be allowed to slip out of the grasp of the left in the November 1933 elections.

That change was a reflection of the enormity of the task that faced the 1931 parliament, known as the Constituent Cortes because its primary task was to give Spain a new Constitution. For the Republic to survive it had to increase wages and cut unemployment. Unfortunately, the regime was born at the height of the world depression. Large numbers of migrant workers were returning from overseas while unskilled construction workers had been left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the Dictatorship. With agricultural prices falling, landowners had let land fall out of cultivation. The landless labourers, who lived near starvation at the best of times, were thus in a state of revolutionary tension. Industrial and building workers were similarly hit. The labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the secret organization founded in 1927 to maintain the ideological purity of the movement. To make matters worse, the wealthy classes were hoarding or exporting their capital. This posed a terrible dilemma for the Republican government. If the demands of the lower classes for expropriation of the great estates and takeovers of the factories were met, the army would probably intervene to destroy the Republic. If revolutionary disturbances were put down in order to appease the upper classes, the government would find the working class arrayed against it. In trying to tread the middle course, the Republican–­Socialist coalition ended up enraging both sides.

This was soon demonstrated. The Republic’s brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order. Then, at the end of the month, clashes between striking port workers from Pasajes on the outskirts of San Sebastián and the Civil Guard left eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. The strike achieved its most notable successes in Seville and Barcelona and was an intense embarrassment to the government which was anxious to prove its ability to maintain order. The Ministry of Labour declared the strike illegal, and the Civil Guard was called in.

In Seville the CNT attempted to convert the strike into an insurrection. Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior, decided on drastic action: martial law was declared and the army sent in to crush the strike. Maura authorized the shelling of an anarchist meeting place, the Casa Cornelio. Local rightist volunteers were permitted to form a ‘Guardia Cívica’ and killed several leftists, including four anarchists shot in cold blood in the Parque de María Luisa. The revolutionary nature of the strike frightened the upper classes, while the violence with which it was put down – thirty killed and two hundred wounded – confirmed the anarchists in their hostility to the Republic.

The CNT was increasingly falling under the domination of the FAI. In the summer of 1931 there was a split between the orthodox unionists of the CNT and FAI members who advocated continuous revolutionary violence. The FAI won the internal struggle and the more reformist elements of the CNT were effectively expelled. The bulk of the anarcho-syndicalist movement was left in the hands of those who felt that the Republic was no better than either the monarchy or the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Thereafter, and until the CNT was uneasily reunited in 1936, the anarchists embarked on a policy of ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ – anti-Republican insurrectionary strikes which invariably failed because of lack of coordination and fierce repression, but enabled the rightist press to identify the Republic with violence and upheaval.

In the autumn of 1931, however, before the waves of anarchist agitation were fully under way, the Cortes was occupied with the elaboration of the new Constitution. After an earlier draft by the conservative politician Angel Ossorio y Gallardo had been rejected, a new constitutional committee, under the Socialist law professor Luis Jimenéz de Asúa, met on 28 July. It had barely three weeks to draw up its draft. In consequence, some of its unsubtle wording was to give rise to three months of acrimonious debate. Presenting the project on 27 August, Jimenez de Asúa described it as a democratic, liberal document with great social content. An important Socialist victory was chalked up by Luis Araquistain, later to be one of Largo Caballero’s radical advisers, when he prevailed on the chamber to accept Article 1, which read ‘Spain is a republic of workers of all classes’. Article 44 stated that all the wealth of the country must be subordinate to the economic interests of the nation and that all property could be expropriated, with compensation, for reasons of social utility. Indeed, the Constitution finally approved on 9 December 1931 was as democratic, laic, reforming and liberal on matters of regional autonomy as the Republicans and Socialists could have wished. It appalled the most powerful interests in Spain, landowners, industrialists, churchmen and army officers.

The opposition of the conservative classes to the Constitution crystallized around Articles 44 and 26. The latter concerned the cutting off of state financial support for the clergy and religious orders; the dissolution of orders, such as the Jesuits, that swore foreign oaths of allegiance; and the limitation of the Church’s right to wealth. The Republican–Socialist coalition’s attitude to the Church was based on the belief that, if a new Spain was to be built, the stranglehold of the Church on many aspects of society must be broken. That was a reasonable perception, but it failed to take into account the sensibilities of Spain’s millions of Catholics. Religion was not attacked as such, but the Constitution was to put an end to the government’s endorsement of the Church’s privileged position. To the right, the religious settlement of the Constitution was a vicious onslaught on traditional values. The debate on Article 26, the crucial religious clause, coming in the wake of the bitterness provoked by Azaña’s military reforms, intensified the polarization which was to end in civil war.

Substantial popular support for right-wing hostility to the Republic was secured during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. The opposition to the Constitution’s religious clauses was equalled in bitterness by that to the clauses concerning regional autonomy for Catalonia and agrarian reform. The legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders contained in Article 26 infuriated the Catholic establishment and the right-wing press, which attributed the measures to evil Jewish–Masonic machinations. During a debate late into the night of 13 October 1931, Gil Robles turned to the Republican–Socialist majority in the Cortes and declared: ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, on 18 October 1931, in the Plaza de Toros at Ledesma (Salamanca), Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic, claiming that ‘while anarchic forces, gun in hand, spread panic in government circles, the government tramples on defenceless beings like poor nuns’.

Indeed, the passing of the Constitution marked a major change in the nature of the Republic. By identifying the Republic with the Jacobinism of the Cortes majority, the ruling coalition alienated many members of the Catholic middle classes. The perceived ferocity of the Constitution’s anti-clericalism provoked the right into organizing its forces at the same time as the union made at San Sebastián in 1930 began to break up. During the debate of 13 October, later described by Alcalá Zamora as the saddest night of his life, the defence of the religious clauses of the Constitution fell to Manuel Azaña. In the course of his intervention, he made the remark that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic’, which was taken by the right as proof that the Republic was determined to destroy the Church. He was merely commenting on a reality already accepted by the more liberal elements of the Church hierarchy that, sociologically, Catholicism no longer enjoyed the preeminence that it had once had. Nevertheless, in October both Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura resigned and Azaña, who had risen to prominence during the debate, became Prime Minister. This upset Lerroux, who had been grooming himself for the job, and was excluded because of widespread fear in political circles that he would be unable to keep his hands out of the till. He went into opposition with his Radicals. Thus Azaña was forced to rely more heavily upon the Socialists. This in turn made it more difficult for him to avoid provoking the enmity of the Right.

In fact, Azaña was caught between two fires – that of the left, which wanted reform, and that of the right, which rejected it. This was made apparent when he came to deal with the agrarian problem. Agrarian violence was a constant feature of the Republic. Based on the crippling poverty of rural labourers, it was kept at boiling point by the CNT. The anarchists, together with the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT: Federatión Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra, founded in April 1930), were calling for expropriation of estates and the creation of collectives. The Republicans, as middle-class intellectuals, respected property and were not prepared to do this. Largo Caballero, as Minister of Labour, had improved the situation somewhat with the four decrees that he had introduced in the spring. However, the limits of such piecemeal reform were starkly exposed in December 1931 when the Badajoz section of the FNTT called a general strike. It was in the main a peaceful strike, in accordance with the instructions of its organizers. In one isolated village called Castilblanco, however, there was bloodshed. When the strike was called, the FNTT members in Castilblanco had already endured a winter without work. On 31 December, while they were holding a peaceful and disciplined demonstration, the Civil Guard started to break up the crowd. After a scuffle, a Civil Guard opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. The hungry villagers, in a frenzy of fear, anger and panic, fell upon the four guards and beat them to death with stones and knives.

General José Sanjurjo, the Director General of the Civil Guard, told journalists that one of the PSOE’s parliamentary deputies for Badajoz, the fiery Jewish feminist Margarita Nelken, was responsible for the entire incident. He went on to compare the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen whom he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a headquarters’. He also declared – mendaciously – that after the colonial disaster of Annual in 1921, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’. Sanjurjo’s words seemed to justify the subsequent revenge taken by the Civil Guard. More importantly, his identification of the Spanish rural proletariat and with the rebels of the Rif indicated how little the army felt that its job was to protect the Spanish people from an external enemy. The Spanish proletariat was clearly ‘the enemy’. In that sense, the mentality of the Africanista high command reflected one of the major consequences of the colonial disaster of 1898. This was simply that the right coped with the loss of a ‘real’ overseas empire by internalizing the empire; that is to say, by regarding metropolitan Spain as the empire and the proletariat as the subject colonial race.

Almost before the cabinet had time to come to terms with Castilblanco, Sanjurjo’s men had wreaked a bloody revenge which killed eighteen people. Three days after Castilblanco the Civil Guard killed two workers and wounded three more in Zalamea de la Serena (Badajoz). Two days later, a striker was shot dead and another wounded in Calzada de Calatrava and one striker was shot in Puertollano (both villages in Ciudad Real), while two strikers were killed and eleven wounded in Épila (Zaragoza), and two strikers killed and ten wounded in Jeresa (Valencia). On 5 January the most shocking of these actions occurred when twenty-eight Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Arnedo, a small town in the northern Castilian province of Logroño. Several workers had been sacked from the local shoe factory at the end of 1931 for belonging to the UGT. At a public protest, the Civil Guard opened fire, killing a worker and four women bystanders, one of them a twenty-six-year-old pregnant mother whose two-year-old son also died. A further fifty townspeople were wounded, including many women and children, some of them babes in arms. Over the next few days, five more people died of their wounds and many had to have limbs amputated, among them a five-year-old boy and a widow with six children.

Then, in early 1932, an anarchist strike was put down with considerable severity, especially in Alto Llobregat in Catalonia. Arrests and deportations followed. Anarchist and Socialist workers were simply being exasperated at the same time as the right was being left with its belief that the Republic meant only chaos and violence. Nevertheless, the need for reform was self-evident, particularly in the rural south where, despite promises of agrarian reform, conditions remained brutal. All over the south, many owners had declared war on the Republican–Socialist coalition by refusing to plant crops.

The response of the big landowners to reform measures had been rapid, both nationally and locally. Their press networks spouted prophecies of the doom that would ensue from government reforms while in reality they themselves simply went on as if the decrees had never been passed. What the vituperative outbursts of the landowners’ organizations failed to stress was the extent to which Socialist measures remained little more than hopes on paper. There was virtually no machinery with which to enforce the new decrees in the isolated villages of the south. The social power consequent on being the exclusive providers of work remained with the owners. The Civil Guard was skilfully cultivated by, and remained loyal to, the rural upper classes. Socialist deputies from the south regularly complained in the Cortes about the inability of provincial civil governors to apply government legislation and to oblige the Civil Guard to side with the braceros rather than with landowners.