A People Betrayed

He offers an example:

We remember calling on a Spaniard who held the highest office in a chief city of Andalucia. As we came into his cabinet a cloaked personage was going out; the great man’s table was covered with gold ounces, which he was shovelling complacently into a drawer, gloating on the glorious haul … This gentleman, during the Sistema, or Riego constitution, had, with other 1oyalists, been turned out of office; and, having been put to the greatest hardships, was losing no time in taking prudent and laudable precautions to avert all similar calamity for the future. His practices were perfectly well known in the town, where people simply observed, ‘Está atesorando, he is laying up treasures,’ – as every one of them would most certainly have done, had they been in his fortunate position … Donde no hay abundancia, no hay observancia. The empty sack cannot stand upright, nor was ever a sack made in Spain into which gain and honour could be stowed away together; honra y provecho, no caben en un saco o techo; here virtue itself succumbs to poverty, induced by more than half a century of misgovernment, let alone the ruin caused by Buonaparte’s invasion, to which domestic troubles and civil wars have been added.26

For all that Spanish intellectuals resented the belittling of their country by foreign writers, there were those who did it themselves, albeit in a different way. There was a substantial literature that lamented Spain’s loss of empire, uninterrupted military failures, deep-rooted political instability and economic backwardness.27 In November 1930, the intellectual Manuel Azaña, a future prime minister and president of the Second Republic, echoed Richard Ford’s judgement. He described the political system as functioning with two mechanisms, despotic authoritarianism and corruption. The great practitioner of the first was the reactionary General Ramón María Narváez, who was seven times Prime Minister between 1844 and 1868. He was notorious for remarking on his deathbed: ‘I have no enemies. I have shot them all.’ The wizard of electoral falsification was Luis José Sartorius, who, in the 1840s and 1850s, according to Azaña, ‘elevated political corruption into a system and became a master in the art of fabricating parliamentary majorities’. During their collaboration, in Azaña’s view, ‘the most illustrious elements of Spanish society applied themselves to squeezing profit out of politics’.28

The civil war of 1936–9 represented the most determined effort by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reforming project which might threaten their privileged position. The enduring dominance of reactionary forces reflected the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. The painfully slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain accounted for the existence of a numerically small and politically feeble commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime 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 an incipiently democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. The legal basis for capitalism was established albeit without there being a political revolution and with the survival of elements of feudalism. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that its industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the political pattern established by Prussia.

Within this authoritarian model, until the 1950s capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian except for Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country in the north. 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-sized farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the most politically influential sectors 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 throughout parts of Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy saw occasional tentative challenges by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes. However, reliant on the repressive power of the oligarchy, their efforts met with little success. Until well into the 1950s, 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.

In Spain, industrialization and political modernization did not go hand in hand. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were diverted. The desamortización (disentailment) saw the expropriation of great swathes of Church and municipal lands and the lifting of mortmain, feudal restrictions on land transactions. The process had begun piecemeal in the late eighteenth century but was speeded up in 1836 by the Liberal Prime Minister Juan de Dios Álvarez Mendizábal. He had changed his name from Álvarez Méndez to hide the fact that he came from a Jewish family that sold second-hand clothes in Cadiz. He was a self-made businessman who had acquired a reputation as a financial genius as a result of having made a fortune in London. He saw the expropriation, and sale, of the lands of religious orders as a way of resolving royal financial problems created by the Carlist Wars of the 1830s. Mendizábal believed that he was thereby laying the basis for the future prosperity of Spain by creating a self-sustaining smallholding peasantry, ‘a copious family of property owners’.29 However, in the interests of the crown, the confiscated properties were sold at auction in large blocks, which meant that they were far beyond the means of even existing smallholders. Moreover, the fact that the lots were sold well below their market price, and often on credit which could be obtained only by the wealthy, ensured that one of the consequences was the consolidation of great estates. The other was that the privatization of property brought into cultivation land that had previously been idle or poorly cultivated. However, this was not enough to meet the needs of a steadily growing population, especially in the south.30

In 1841, General Baldomero Espartero extended the expropriations to all Church properties. Huge tracts of entailed ecclesiastical and common lands were liberated to pay for the Liberal war effort. This process was intensified after 1855 by the Ley Pascual Madoz which opened the way to the acquisition of common lands by private individuals, often simply by a combination of legal subterfuge and strong-arm tactics. The landed aristocracy benefited because their lands were taken out of mortmain but not expropriated. Thus they could buy and sell land and rationalize their holdings. By 1875, three-quarters of land that forty years previously had belonged to the Church or municipalities was in private hands. 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 also by lawyers and members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie who were attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and, unlike their inefficient predecessors, the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment and saw land as a productive asset to be exploited for maximum profit. Having said that, neither the old nor the new landowners were prepared to invest in new techniques. The judgement on the ‘general dilapidation’ made by Richard Ford in the 1840s would still be valid ninety years later: ‘The landed proprietor of the Peninsula is little better than a weed of the soil; he has never observed, nor scarcely permitted others to observe, the vast capabilities which might and ought to be called into action.’31 One obvious consequence was an increase in thefts of domestic animals and assaults on bakeries and other shops. That is not to say that all crimes of violence were responses to social deprivation. Many others were sexual and honour crimes.32

The capital of the merchants of the great seaports and of Madrid bankers was diverted away from industry and into land purchases both for speculative purposes and also because of the social prestige that came with it.33 Investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy weakened their commitment to reform. The weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was exposed during the period from 1868 to 1873, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. Population growth in the middle of the century had increased pressure on the land. Unskilled labourers from country districts flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who survived on the edges of society. This was especially the case in Barcelona, in large part because of the collapse of the wine industry as a result of the phylloxera crisis after 1880. Its population more than doubled between 1860, when it constituted an eighth of the Catalan total, and 1900, by which time it had swelled to more than a quarter. The living standards of the urban lower-middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers were almost as wretched as those of the unskilled labourers. One of the most explosive areas was the Catalan textile industry where the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding in insanitary living conditions and starvation wages – produced acute social tensions and, soon, anarchist terrorism. When cotton supplies were choked off by the American Civil War in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment was exacerbated by a depression in railway construction that saw the urban working class pushed to desperation. Until well into the twentieth century, Madrid governments, representing as they did agrarian interests, had little or no understanding of the problems of a growing and militant industrial proletariat in Catalonia. Consequently, the social problem was dealt with entirely as a public order issue. Of the eighty-six years between 1814 and 1900, for sixty of them Catalonia was under a state of exception, which effectively meant military rule. Moreover, a quarter of the nation’s military strength was stationed in Catalonia, a region containing approximately 10 per cent of the Spanish population. This was directed as much at rural Carlism as at urban anarchism.34

In 1868, growing working-class discontent linked with middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy as well as financial and sexual scandals involving Queen Isabel II. In September 1868, a number of pronunciamientos culminating in one by General Juan Prim coincided with urban riots. This led to the overthrow and exile of the Queen. The two forces driving the so-called glorious revolution were ultimately inimical. The liberal middle classes and army officers had aimed to amend the constitutional structure of the country. Now, they were alarmed to find that they had awakened a mass revolutionary movement for social change and opened the way to the six years of instability known as the sexenio revolucionario. To add to the instability, between 1868 and 1878 Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba, was riven by a rebellion against the metropolis. In November 1870, Prim finally offered the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Amadeo had neither the political nor even the linguistic skills to cope with the problems that he faced. On 30 December, the very day of the new King’s arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated. From the beginning, Amadeo faced opposition from republicans, from supporters of Isabel II’s thirteen-year-old son Alfonso and from the Carlists. In 1872, there began the third Carlist War. A successful rebellion across the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the establishment of a kind of Carlist state, disorganized and based on religiously inspired banditry.

In the Catalan countryside, the majority of small landowners and farmers were Carlist, not just because of the movement’s clericalism but also because of its commitment to local freedoms and ultimately devolution. Thus in Catalonia, and also in the Basque Country, the Church’s links to the Carlists fed into support for independence movements in both regions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a revival of Catalanist sentiment, of Catalan literature and of the language whose official use had been banned since the eighteenth century. This was intensified by the federalist movement from 1868 to the collapse of the First Republic. Nowhere was federalism as strong as in Catalonia. Another factor was almost certainly resentment of the lack of Catalan influence on the central government. Between 1833 and 1901, there were 902 men in ministerial office. Only twenty-four of them, 2.6 per cent of the total, were Catalan. In consequence, Catalanism was to be found not just in the rural areas but also in Barcelona, where it found enthusiastic adherents among the wealthy upper-middle classes. A loose federation of middle- and upper-class Catalanist groups formed the Unió Catalanista in 1892. Its programme, known as the Bases de Manresa, called for the restoration of an autonomous government, a separate tax system, the protection of Catalan industry and the institution of Catalan as an official language. With the exception of a brief period from 1906 to 1909, from 1868 until the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s Catalan nationalism would be a largely conservative movement.35

Faced with civil war, a colonial revolt and a deeply divided political establishment, Amadeo abdicated in despair on 11 February 1873. With the establishment divided, elections in May saw a republican victory and the proclamation of the First Republic on 1 June. Under the presidency of the Catalan Federalist Francesc Pi y Margall, a decentralized structure was adopted and Spain was divided into eleven autonomous cantons. A series of bold reforms were proposed, including the abolition of conscription, the separation of Church and state, the provision of free compulsory education for all, the eight-hour day, the regulation of female and child labour, the expropriation of uncultivated estates and the establishment of peasant collectives. The combination of rapidly established cantons, land seizures, a violent revolutionary general strike in Alcoy, the Carlist rebellion, the Cuban unrest, an outburst of anti-clericalism and the alarm provoked by the planned reforms ensured that Pi y Margall’s federal regime was perceived as an intolerable threat to the established order. The republican government was overthrown by the artillery General Manuel Pavia y Rodríguez de Alburquerque, who crushed the Cantonalist movement and established a more conservative government under General Francisco Serrano. Although the Carlists were on the verge of defeat, Serrano was unable to consolidate a conservative republic. On 29 December 1874, in Sagunto, the dynamic young Brigadier General Arsenio Martínez Campos proclaimed as King of Spain the now seventeen-year-old Prince Alfonso. One of the least scurrilous rumours concerning the sex life of his mother Queen Isabel II was that Alfonso’s father had been Enrique Puigmoltó, a Valencian captain of the Engineers. Subsequent to his mother going into exile, Alfonso was educated, successively, in Paris, in Vienna and at Sandhurst.36

On 26 June 1878, Alfonso XII’s wife María de las Mercedes de Orleans died of typhus two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was devastated and his consequent plunge into drink and sexual adventures did little for his own precarious health. Indeed, his wife’s death was merely one of a series of misfortunes. Efforts to quell rebellion in Cuba would eventually lead to the loss of 200,000 lives and an unsustainable drain on state resources. In August 1878, there was a minor republican uprising in Navalmoral de la Mata in Cáceres. It was easily suppressed, but the fact that it had happened at all hinted at underlying problems. On 15 October that same year, Alfonso XII was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Joan Oliva i Moncasí, an anarchist cooper from Labra in the province of Tarragona. Oliva fired twice with a double-barrelled pistol but missed. He was executed by garrote vil on 4 January 1879. Fourteen months later, on 30 December, there was a second assassination attempt. The King had remarried only a month before, on 29 November. He was returning from a walk in the Retiro with his new wife, Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena, when a twenty-year-old pastry chef from Galicia, Francisco Otero González, shot at them. Although he also missed, on 14 April 1880 Otero was similarly executed by garrote vil.37

For now, Arsenio Martínez Campos was achieving some success against the Cuban insurgents. By dint of a combination of energetic counter-guerrilla tactics, bribery and conciliatory negotiations, he had achieved the Peace of Zanjón. As Governor General, he urged thoroughgoing reform of education and the economy and especially of the Cuban tax burden and of Spanish tariffs on sugar, tobacco and coffee imports from the island. Cánovas was seriously alarmed because the proposed measures constituted a major threat to the Spanish economy. His solution was to invite Martínez Campos in June 1879 to form a government which he intended to control from the shadows. Cánovas’s electoral fixer, Francisco Romero Robledo, had friends among the Cuban plantation owners who were bitterly opposed to Martínez Campos’s proposed reforms and did everything possible to undermine the new Prime Minister. Deeply frustrated, Martínez Campos resigned a mere six months later on 7 December and was replaced by Cánovas. In the course of 1880 and 1881, only a few of Martínez Campos’s reforms were implemented, which guaranteed that the Cuban War would be reignited. On 7 February 1881, Alfonso XII exercised his royal prerogative by withdrawing confidence from Cánovas and effectively making Práxedes Mateo Sagasta Prime Minister by giving him a decree to dissolve the Cortes and call new elections.38 Little changed with the fall of Cánovas. Spain’s domestic economic problems ensured that Martínez Campos, who had become Sagasta’s Minister of War, remained unable to implement his proposed reforms. In addition to the plantation owners, wheat growers feared the loss of Cuban markets to North American producers. Catalan industrialists and the footwear manufacturers of Valencia and Alicante also relied on protected Cuban markets.

In many respects, the chaotic period 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order and establish a short-lived Republic, the liberal 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, the middle classes abandoned their reformist ideals 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 so-called Restoration political system created in 1876. Indeed, it would differ little in composition from what had gone before except that parties would alternate in power peacefully rather than by a combination of insurrections and military coups. A provisional government was established under the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who quickly set about drafting a new Constitution. After sixty years of civil wars, disastrous rule by generals and political corruption, he was convinced that what was necessary was a period of tranquillity in which industries might develop.

Cultured and widely read, Cánovas believed that the prosperity enjoyed by the dominant power of the day, Great Britain, was the result of the stability provided by its two-party system. His admiration of the British parliamentary system allegedly extended to learning by heart some of the speeches of Gladstone and Disraeli. In a bid to emulate British success, he had set out to copy, outwardly at least, what he believed to be its secret. He was determined both to exclude the army from political power and to run no risks of a radical electorate undermining his plan to consolidate the recently restored monarchy. Thus an apparent working model of the British system was elaborated whereby the Conservative Party under Cánovas and the Liberal Party under Sagasta would take turns in power. The tool necessary for this to function without interference by the electorate was electoral falsification.39 The system came to be known as the turno pacífico, that is to say the peaceful alternation in power of the two monarchist or ‘dynastic’ parties. Thus the turno, in the words of the liberal reformer Gumersindo de Azcárate, far from replicating the British system was merely ‘a ridiculous parody in which everything is a farce and a lie’.40 Salvador de Madariaga wrote that Cánovas ‘relied on force and fiction’ and described him as ‘personally honest and honourable’ but ‘the greatest corrupter of political life which modern Spain has known’.41

The micro-managing of elections ensured that, for the next half-century, power would remain in the hands of the same families that had held it before 1876. Entire dynasties, fathers, sons and sons-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law would monopolize parliamentary seats. Such would be the case of the family of Álvaro de Figueroa, the Conde de Romanones, in Guadalajara with tentacles in Baeza and Úbeda in Jaén, Castuera in Badajoz and Cartagena in Murcia. An equally striking example was the family of Eugenio Montero Ríos, the main cacique of the four provinces of Galicia, who was Minister of Development from 1885 to 1886, Minister of Justice between December 1892 and July 1893 and eventually Prime Minister in 1905. From his base in Lourizán in Pontevedra, he used his influence to promote the political careers of his sons and sons-in-law. Sagasta was equally watchful of the parliamentary welfare of his sons-in-law. Francisco Silvela y de Le Vielleuze, Cánovas’s eventual successor at the head of the Conservative Party, was the all-powerful cacique of Ávila. Although he criticized the electoral falsification of the turno pacífico, he placed members of his family in some of the most important government positions. Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, the omnipotent cacique of Murcia, similarly promoted his family. Indeed, it was not uncommon for parliamentary seats, senior government administrative posts and sometimes even government ministries to be virtually bequeathed from father to son.42

The two political parties did not have strongly defined ideologies or policies but were rather groups of notables representing the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy. The Conservatives looked mainly to the concerns of the wine and olive growers of the south while the Liberals protected the interests of the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were known as the ‘dynastic’ parties because they were both committed to the monarchy and were not divided on issues regarding the social order or the sanctity of property. As their name suggested, the Liberals were less authoritarian and, unlike the firmly Catholic Conservatives, inclined to be rather more critical of the Church. The main differences were to do with trade. The Conservatives favoured the free trade required by their constituency of export fruit growers and wine producers while the Liberals represented the needs of the inefficient wheat growers who wanted protection from the great international producers of Canada, Argentina and Australia. To give an example of the problem – in Barcelona in 1884, some 60 per cent of all wheat consumed came from Castile, yet two years later it was a mere 10 per cent. The various components of the northern industrial bourgeoisie were barely represented within the system but, for the moment, were content, as Cánovas had hoped, to devote their activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the early twentieth century, they began to organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers tended to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, in their case to protect the Spanish market against cheaper British and Indian competition. In contrast, the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders. Nevertheless, because of its lack of representation, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was forced to act as little more than a pressure group. Thus, despite having interests in common with the agrarian protectionists, they could be attacked by Liberals and Conservatives alike as the mouthpieces of Catalan nationalism.43