The Spanish Civil War (16 page)

His youth movement, the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular), was a hectic and impatient group of
señoritos,
who openly boasted of their anti-parliamentarianism: ‘the common good cannot be integrated by
means of an assembly elected by an inorganic universal suffrage’, they would tell their followers in their journal on 8 December 1934.
JAPistas
were pressing Gil Robles towards counter-revolution. A dangerous situation was thus developing in Spain in the winter of 1933–4, since the Spanish socialist party, with all the weight of its prestige and its disciplined trade union, was also heading away from constitutionalism.

This last change derived primarily from disillusion at the way that the Right had successfully used the constitution to block reform. The socialists were also distressed at the way that the constitution which they had helped to write had turned out to be so bad a friend to them at the polls. As expected, Largo Caballero had not been a very successful parliamentarian (unlike Prieto). The influx of peasants of the south into the FNTT, the socialist agrarian federation, also played a part. Those new recruits were closer to anarchism than they were to orthodox Marxism. They were very different from the disciplined factory and building workers of Bilbao and Madrid. Largo Caballero was speaking in language that they relished when he said that ‘If legality is no use to us, if it hinders our advance, then we shall bypass bourgeois democracy and proceed to the revolutionary conquest of power’. Furthermore, the violence of the anarchists in recent months persuaded Largo that he had to match them to win more of the Spanish working class for socialism. This, he believed, could only be done by breaking with the republican, middle-class parties, with whom the socialists had collaborated in the government, and by setting out to be the most extreme of all the Spanish proletarian parties. Actually, his conclusion was wrong, since the internal disputes, and probably the violence also, were causing people to abandon anarchism, which had many fewer followers in 1933 than it had had in 1931. Largo also listened to the arguments of his new advisers, the journalists Luis Araquistain and Julio Álvarez del Vayo, that collaboration with the bourgeoisie was bound to be a mistake.
¹
Meantime, many younger socialists were anxious for the revolution, and for action: ‘we greatly enjoyed bomb stories’ recalled the socialist youth leader.
²

Among the many new deputies in the Cortes, meantime, elected in 1934 on behalf of small parties, there were two of special interest. These were José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the barrister son of the old dictator, who proclaimed himself a fascist; and Cayetano Bolívar, who was returned as communist deputy for Málaga.

Spanish fascism had been initiated, while Primo de Rivera was still dictator, by Ernesto Giménez Caballero.
¹
Beginning life, like most European fascists, as a socialist, this excitable would-be D’Annunzio of Spain had come to admire Mussolini through the influence of Curzio Malaparte, whom he had met in Italy in 1928. Returning to Spain, he propagated a theory of militant ‘latinity’. This attacked everything which had caused the decline of the Mediterranean countries. Germany was viewed at this time by Giménez Caballero with hatred, though, for a while, he surprisingly regarded Russia as an ally of the Mediterranean. But Rome was the centre of Giménez Caballero’s world, being the capital of religion, as well as of fascism. He revised these views after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933.

Even before that, the Nazis had their admirers in Spain. In March 1931, a poor ex-student of the University of Madrid, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, son of a schoolmaster in Zamora, founded a magazine,
La Conquista del Estado
(
The Conquest of the State
). In this he had proclaimed a policy resembling that of the Nazis. Ledesma carried his admiration of Hitler to the extent of copying his quiff. He was otherwise a man of puritan intolerance. In
La Conquista del Estado,
he announced that he did not seek votes, but ‘the
politique
of military feeling, of responsibility, and of struggle’. The cadres of the movement were to be ‘military-type teams without hypocrisy before the rifle’s barrel’.
²
One man was immediately drawn to this steely programme. This was Onésimo Redondo, who, like Giménez Caballero and Ledesma, was of the middle class, and had studied law at Salamanca. He became a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Mannheim, where he admired ‘the imperturbable ranks of the Nazis’.
³
Returning to his native Valladolid in 1931, he briefly worked as organizer of a syndicate of sugar-beet growers, and later founded his own weekly,
Libertad,
which argued the need for the ‘disciplined reaffirmation of the spirit of old Castile’. In September, Redondo and Ledesma drew together, though the former was a Catholic and conservative, the latter a lower-middle-class radical. In October, they announced the formation of a movement portentously named Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (known as the JONS). The programme was contained in the ‘sixteen points’ of Valladolid of 1931. These included a denunciation of separatism and of class war, the approval of Spanish expansion to Gibraltar, Tangier, French Morocco, and Algeria, and ‘the implacable examination of foreign influences in Spain’.
¹
Like comparable programmes elsewhere, the document included penalties for those ‘who speculated with the misery and ignorance of the people’, and demanded the control (the ‘disciplining’) of profits. Ledesma and Onésimo Redondo gave a place to the Roman Catholic religion, which they described as embodying the ‘racial’ tradition of the Spaniards. Catholicism seems to have meant the same to Redondo as Aryan blood did to Hitler. But they criticized the church in Spain at the time. They regarded the CEDA, for instance, as the committed ally of ‘reaction’, even though from the beginning the falangists spoke in much the same style as did the leaders of the CEDA youth: thus the JAP’s leader, José María Valiente, wanted to ‘forge new men, a new authentic youth, happy, optimistic, in short, Spanish, and not like that other youth, sad and sour, stuffed with Russian novels, the fitting offspring of the anarchic Generation of ’98’.
²
Nor was there much difference between the Falange and the monarchists: ‘What is my position? That of a traditionalist? That of a fascist? A bit of each, why deny it?’ Such were the comments of the monarchist Goicoechea.
³

For the rest of 1931, and all of 1932, the activity of the JONS was slight. Lack of funds hampered them, and the middle class of Spain was still far from desperation. Redondo took a minor part in Sanjurjo’s rising of 1932, though Ledesma despised the officers as reactionaries.
Meantime, a more reckless group of richer young men gathered around José Antonio Primo de Rivera.
¹

José Antonio was a tall, handsome lawyer, then in his early thirties, unmarried (with an unhappy romance to forget), and filled with a desire to please. His enemies admitted his charm. A communist agreed that he ‘carried a dream in his head … dangerous for him and for our people, but a dream nevertheless’.
²
His writings leave the impression of a talented undergraduate who has read, but not digested, an over-long course of political theory. He had begun his career as a monarchist, though he was disgusted at many monarchists’ treachery (as he saw it) to his father. He remained a Catholic. For the paper
El Fascio
(of which only one issue ever appeared), he wrote, in March 1933: ‘The country is a historical totality … superior to each of us and to our groups. The state is founded on two principles—service to the united nation and the cooperation of classes.’
³
A year later, he announced:

Fascism is a European inquietude. It is a way of knowing everything—history, the state, the achievement of the proletarianization of public life, a new way of knowing the phenomena of our epoch. Fascism has already triumphed in some countries and in some, as in Germany, by the most irreproachably democratic means.
⁴

José Antonio was always ready to fight anyone who criticized his father, and his career was in some ways simply an attempt to vindicate the old dictator. From his father, he inherited a contempt for political parties, a belief, instinctive in the father, rationalized in the son, in ‘intuition’—the triumph of experience over intellect. José Antonio’s point of view was paternalist. The liberal state, he said, has meant ‘economic servitude, because it says to the workers with tragic sarcasm: “You are free to work as you wish: no one can force you to accept such and such a condition of work. But as it is we who are the rich, we offer you the conditions we like;
if you do not accept them, you will die of hunger in the middle of liberal liberty.”’
¹
With his charm, his aristocratic disdain for money, his willingness to take risks, José Antonio was a characteristic
señorito,
or playboy, from Andalusia, whence his family came. But he had a social conscience which was untypical of that milieu. José Antonio’s favourite poem was Kipling’s ‘If’. He would read sections of this, in Spanish, to his followers, before Sunday parades or possible street fights. He launched his own party, the Falange Española, in October 1933, though he was uncertain about his own potential as a leader: ‘The attitude of doubt and the sense of irony which never leaves those of us who have some degree of intellectual curiosity’, he wrote, ‘incapacitates us for shouting the robust, unflinching cries required of leaders of the masses’.
²
‘How I suffer seeing arms raised high saluting me’, he told Ximénez de Sandoval.

Two days after a
JONSista
of Madrid, Matías Montero, had been killed while selling the Falange newspaper,
FE,
by a member of the FUE (the Federación Universitaria Escolar, the main students’ union, then controlled by left-wing students and founded in 1927),
³
José Antonio and Ledesma Ramos negotiated the amalgamation of the Falange and the JONS. The latter had had some success in 1933: a student group was formed, the Sindicato Español Universitario (SEU), incorporating 400 students, and about a hundred other ‘militants’ had been organized to fight in the streets, in groups of four.
⁴
The new united party (which came into being on 11 February 1934) adopted the JONS’s symbol of the yoke and arrows but, of the triumvirate in control, two—José Antonio and Ruiz de Alda—came from the Falange and only Ledesma from the JONS. The slogans of the party came from Ledesma: ‘
¡Arriba!
’; ‘
¡España, Una, Grande, Libre!
’; and ‘
Por la Patria, el Pan y la Justicia
’. But José Antonio overshadowed his companions, through his social prestige, his
dignity as a deputy—he had been elected by conservative interests in Cádiz—and by his attractive personality. In the spring of 1934, he visited Germany—but he did not see Hitler, and returned to Spain critical of the Nazis. Six months before he had been more pleased by Mussolini,
¹
while he had himself made ‘a deep impression’ on Sir Oswald Mosley in England.
²

On 14 March 1934, the first national meeting of the Falange and JONS was held at Valladolid. A vigorous but still ‘poetic’ speech was made by José Antonio, a brawl occurred with some socialists outside, and the movement was off to a good start. Retired officers busied themselves with military training. The leaders continued to speak in bellicose language, though it was not till mid-1934 that José Antonio accepted the full implications of his own words. Even then, he was always a reluctant supporter of terrorism.
³
The falangists now saw themselves as an heroic élite of young men, whose mission was to release Spain from the poison of Marxism, as from what they took to be the second-rate, dull, provincialism of orthodox liberal values.

The majority of the members of the Falange were young. Ledesma thought that no one over forty-five should be allowed to be a member, and, indeed, the national syndical state set out to be that of the under-forties. A minority were dissatisfied sons of the rich, anxious for the climate, at least, of combat. There were a few dissatisfied ex-socialists and ex-communists. Others were survivors of the old dictator’s Patriotic Union. Many were frustrated members of the middle class, like Ledesma himself, anxious for a more heroic life than they could afford. Most came from the centre of Spain, though Seville was a source of recruits. In Madrid, there was a hard core of Falange taxi-drivers—perhaps because they had seen the middle class at its worst. Students probably composed the largest single group.
⁴
Funds came from business and from the monarchists, always willing to have their finger in a
new rightist movement, but the party was short of money. Some of the ‘ideology’ was Carlist in phraseology, and so it was scarcely accidental that one of the army officers who told young falangists elementary facts about handling weapons was the retired Colonel Ricardo Rada, who had the same task with the Carlists at a later date.

At the other side of the political battle, the party of Cayetano Bolivar, the communist deputy for Málaga, probably numbered in 1933 about 25,000.
¹
Its origins were to be sought among the pro-bolshevik sections of both socialist and anarchist movements at the time of the Russian Revolution. In April 1920, a majority of the executive committee of the socialist youth movement had declared themselves in support of the Soviet Union and, after a while, formed themselves into the first Spanish communist party, the Partido Comunista Español. Though they were denounced by their own rank and file, in June of the same year a majority of the socialist party proper pronounced their support of entry into the Comintern, the vote being 8,270 to 5,016, 1,615 abstaining. The socialist trade union, meantime, the UGT, kept to its non-communist position, affiliating to the (Social Democrat) Labour and Socialist International.
²