The Spanish Civil War (4 page)

My shoulders are broad [he said]. I do not shun, indeed I accept with pleasure, the responsibility for what I do … I recall the answer given by St Dominic of Silos
²
to a Spanish king: ‘Sire, my life you may take from me, but more you cannot take’. Is it not, indeed, better to perish gloriously, than to live in contempt? But I, in turn, bid the Prime Minister to reckon up his responsibilities; if not before God, since he is an atheist, at least before his conscience, inasmuch as he is a man of honour.

He spoke then of the roles of Kerensky and Karolyi in delivering Russia and Hungary over to communist revolution:

My honourable friend will not be a Kerensky, since he is not unconscious of what he is doing. He possesses full knowledge of what he conceals, and of what he thinks. God grant that he will never be compared with Karolyi, the conscious betrayer of a thousand-year civilization!

Calvo Sotelo sat down. As he did so, shouts and applause rang through the chamber. ‘That’s your last speech,’ La Pasionaria is supposed to have shouted.

The reverberations of this debate, with its threats and warnings,
echoed all over Spain. They found their way to the President, Manuel Azaña, the embodiment of the republic, gloomily watching the collapse of his hopes from the rich loneliness of the National Palace.
¹
They found their way to those generals who for so long had been employing their ample leisure with tactical schemes for a military rising against the government. They reached, too, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the old dictator and leader of the Spanish fascists, the Falange, in his prison in the port of Alicante, whither he had been vainly sent on a trivial charge, virtually as a hostage for the good behaviour of his followers. They reached to that other group of Spaniards whose aspirations lay outside the Cortes, the anarchists. They found their way to most of the 24 million people who then formed the population of Spain. The questions in every mind as the summer mounted, as the bull-fight season attained its meridian, were: ‘How long will this go on?’ ‘Will there be a revolution?’ and ‘Could it be war?’ For while there had been no civil wars in most of Europe since the seventeenth century, Spain, the one major European country to have kept out of the Great War, had fallen back into conflict within her national frontiers three times in the previous century.

This debate in the Cortes was the culmination of the several passionate quarrels as to how Spain should be governed which had continued since 1808. In that year, the enfeebled monarchy made an abject surrender before Napoleon. The British under the Duke of Wellington helped the Spanish people to drive out the French in the ensuing War of Independence. The Bourbons were brought back in the loathsome person of Ferdinand VII. But the monarchy was no longer sacrosanct. For almost three centuries before 1808, Spain had been the most untroubled of European countries; from then on, it would be among the most turbulent of them.

The history of the succeeding half-century was marked by a struggle over the constitution. The contestants were the church and the army, the two Spanish institutions which had survived with credit from the War of Independence, the former being conservative, the latter honeycombed with free-thinking masonic lodges. Throughout, this dispute was almost war.
¹
In 1820, liberal officers forced a constitution upon King Ferdinand who, in 1823, brought in a French army, the ‘hundred thousand sons of St Louis’, to do away with it. In 1834, the quarrel turned into the First Carlist War, when the church, and the ad
vocates of regional rights in the north, rallied to the cause of Don Carlos, the brother of the dead Ferdinand. Carlos claimed the throne in the place of his infant niece, Isabella II, Ferdinand’s daughter. The latter was championed by the liberals and the army, both representing the claims of Castile to dominate the Peninsula. This war of religion and of secession ended in 1839, when the liberals won, but peace took the form of a compromise between the armies of both sides. Carlist officers were permitted to join the regular Spanish army. Partly as a result (and partly because the confiscation of the church’s lands in 1837 reduced the influence of that institution), the quarrel between liberals and clerical conservatives took the form thereafter of a succession of
coups d’état
(
pronunciamientos
) by one general after another.

This curious era ended in 1868, when Queen Isabella, a nymphomaniac, was herself expelled by the greatest of Spain’s liberal generals, Prim. If the occasion of her departure was her excessive reliance on Father Claret, her confessor, the real cause was a revolt against the style of government over which Isabella and her ‘Court of Miracles’ had vaguely presided. The succeeding seven years were confused. A brother of the King of Italy, the Duke of Aosta, was brought in as King Amadeo I. This attempt at bourgeois monarchy could not contain the violence rearoused between liberals and conservatives, newly in arms. Amadeo abdicated. The First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. This republic was at first intended as a federal one, in which the provinces would have substantial rights. But the intellectuals who planned this were powerless to ensure the survival of authority of any kind. In the north, the Carlists rose again under a grandson of the Old Pretender, and were generally supported by the church throughout the Peninsula. In the south and south-east, many coastal towns proclaimed themselves independent cantons. Once again, the army eventually took power. While restoring order, the generals decided that there was no alternative save to bring back Queen Isabella’s son, then a cadet at Sandhurst, as King Alfonso XII.

A constitution was promulgated in 1876. Thanks to favourable European conditions of trade, Spain was prosperous in the 1880s. Universal male franchise was nominally introduced. But the results of the elections were always defrauded by an informal pact, the
turno pacífico,
between the two main parties, carried out by the agency of the minister of the interior and local political bigwigs, the
caciques.
The people
of Spain came to look upon the parliamentary system, a deliberate imitation of English practice, as a means of excluding them from politics. Alfonso XII, meanwhile, died young in 1885, at the age of twenty-eight, leaving a posthumous son, Alfonso XIII, for whom his mother, María Cristina, ruled as Regent till 1902.
¹

The ‘pious fraud’ of the constitution was one reason for the spread of revolutionary ideas throughout the working class. By the time of the First World War, there existed in Spain two general trade unions. The first, the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo),
²
was inspired by the anarchist ideas of the Russian Bakunin; the second, the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores),
³
was Marxist, though reformist and not revolutionary. The socialists of the UGT collaborated with the political system so far as to seek election to the Cortes and, in the cities, where the
caciques’
manipulation of votes became increasingly difficult, succeeded in gaining election. But the anarchists saw the constitution as unclean; and the violence, murders, and lightning strikes undertaken intermittently by the anarchist militants kept the governments in turmoil. Both these working-class movements desired to regenerate Spain through education, superior public morality, pacifism and anti-clericalism, as much as through politics.

Two other problems, however, caused the collapse of the constitution established at the restoration. The first was that of Catalonia. Many Catalans aspired to a recognition of their separate character from the rest of Spain. Catalonia had continued, after Spanish unification, to live as a region of its own and to look to its own capital of Barcelona, never to Madrid. The ‘Catalan question’ became acute because of the industrial development of that capital during the nineteenth century. Irritation with the incompetence of the government at Madrid led the new rich of Barcelona at the end of the century to embrace Catalan nationalism. This, together with the anarchist faith of the workers, the high rates of illiteracy and the demagogic atmosphere inculcated by a centralist, opportunist, but wild Radical party,
⁴
made
Barcelona (growing fast in population) at the turn of the century the most turbulent city in Europe: the ‘city of bombs’. The great strike in Barcelona in 1902 and that in Bilbao in 1903 were major battles in which the nerves of all were fully extended. The ornate architecture favoured by the prosperous bourgeoisie was the lavish backcloth to a mounting series of anarchist crimes. ‘In Barcelona, a revolution does not have to be prepared,’ wrote the civil governor, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, ‘since it is always ready.’
¹
Meantime, aspirations similar to those of Catalonia began to be echoed in the more tranquil Basque provinces, where a comparably self-sufficient bourgeoisie was becoming rich from iron, banking and commerce.

1. Regions and provinces of Spain

The third crisis of the régime derived from the colonial wars in, first, Cuba, then Morocco. The Cuban War of 1895 turned into the Spanish American one of 1898; all was lost, save honour. The defeat inflamed the Catalan problem, since Cuba had been the best market for Catalan textiles. The loss of Cuba was also of psychological concern since many Catalan fortunes had been based on Cuban commerce.
²
In addition, the loss of the last vestige of empire caused a national crisis. It gave force to old causes of discontent, and fired new ones. The year of defeat, 1898, was thus a turning-point: Spaniards were forced to think of themselves as a poor European country with few resources.

Morocco, however, offered a new chance of empire. But it caused new upheavals too. Spain had held the two northern Moroccan ports of Melilla and Ceuta for several hundred years. She had tried to extend her rule there in the 1860s, and there had been further fighting, near Melilla, in the 1890s. Spain was understandably reluctant to allow any other European power to establish herself on the north coast of Africa facing her. In 1904, as part of the
Entente Cordiale
between Britain and France, France and Spain divided Morocco into zones of influence, Spain taking the smaller, northern part. Morocco was then backward, lawless, and ripe for European interest, if not investment, though the tribes of both zones had a formal loyalty to a sultan at Fez. The ill-informed Spanish populace was probably as critical of these high-handed arrangements as was the indolent sultan; neither was
consulted. Business, however, followed the flag: the iron mines of Morocco were rich. A gradual extension of Spanish commerce followed, partly the reflection of similar French action (had Spain shown no interest, France would have absorbed the whole of Morocco). A Spanish colonization company was founded, and it bought land in the wake of the troops. But then the advances stopped; Moroccan tribesmen closed ranks; a series of setbacks forced the army to call for reinforcements; in 1909, there were serious defeats; by September of that year, the Spanish army was 40,000 strong in Morocco. But it was by then committed to an imperial adventure whose only end could be the conquest of north Morocco at a cost which the country could not afford.

2. Spanish Morocco

Already there were, in 1909, horrible repercussions at home when Antonio Maura’s government called up 850 reservists, some from Catalonia, all from north-east Spain. When the men went reluctantly to their ships in the harbour at Barcelona, a general strike was called in protest. A week of rioting ensued, the
Semana Trágica,
the Tragic Week, of Barcelona. Radicals, socialists and anarchists collaborated in the burning of churches that followed. Some hoped that a national revolution would ensue. But, bereft of real political direction, the riot
ers spent themselves in pointless destruction. While the leaders hesitated, radical women, clerks, criminals, boys and prostitutes terrified nuns out of nunneries, burned their possessions, killed their domestic animals and chickens, and disinterred bodies. A handsome coalman danced with one disinterred corpse outside the house of the rich Marqués de Comillas, ‘delighted to be of use as a revolutionary’. Eventually, the army resumed control; some 120 people had been killed,
¹
three clergy among them; the rioters had wanted to destroy ‘property and illusions’, not life. About fifty churches or other religious buildings were burned.

This disaster was a shock which seemed to show how violent a nation lay underneath the surface of constitutional rule. The authorities were less disturbed by the revolutionary expectations of the radicals or the anarchists than by the apparently meaningless destruction caused by the populace once their blood was up. The Tragic Week was a setback to the idea that a parliamentary democracy might gradually be established: if the masses were as they showed themselves in 1909, the political class of the day thought, real democracy would result in ruin. Henceforward, politicians avoided general elections if they could and tried to arrange coalitions out of groups of parliamentarians already in the legislature. The international demonstrations of outrage against the execution of the anarchist schoolmaster, Ferrer, accused of being the prime organizer of the riots,
²
also had a contra-productive effect: the upper classes saw in these protests the hypocritical, as well as hysterical and ill-informed, reactions of a mysterious coalition of international busybodies and freemasons soon to become sadly famous as ‘anti-Spain’.

The Prime Minister, Maura, who as a result of international complaints was dismissed by the King and abandoned by conservatives, believed that this ‘surrender in the Cortes’ after the ‘victory in the streets’ doomed the régime, since it had been seen to have given way to
disorder, propaganda and malice. Thereafter the conservative party, which had held together since the 1870s, followed the liberals into disintegration. Maura moved into the wings of politics as the focus of a movement of young men angry with parliamentarianism, anxious for regeneration, but unable to gain a majority for a government. In
Maurismo
there were to be seen the springs of fascism—evident in other countries before 1914 as well (with Déroulède and Maurras in France, D’Annunzio in Italy, and even the Ulster volunteers). Maura promised a ‘revolution from above’. The malicious said that he merely desired a ‘revolution without a revolution’.

The Moroccan war continued. Tangier, north Morocco’s best port, was excluded from the Spanish protectorate in 1912, as an international city, and the tribes refused to accept the Spanish ‘civilizing’ presence. Men, money, food and emotion continued to be poured into the country by a Spain that could only afford the first. The tribes had never been subject to the sultan; only Spain gave them a unity. In seeking an empire, Madrid thus helped to inspire nationalism.