The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (4 page)

Juventudes Socialistas (JJSS). The Socialist Youth amalgamated with the Communist Youth in the spring of 1936 to form the United Socialist Youth, but then the whole organization was brought under communist control by its leader, Santiago Carrillo, when the civil war began.

Partido Comunista de España(PCE)

The Spanish Communist Party

Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU), the United Socialist Youth, Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña (PSUC). The United Socialist Party of Catalonia was an amalgamation of Catalan socialist parties in the spring of 1936, which was completely taken over by the communists.

Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista
(POUM)

The Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification was led by Andreu Nin (Trotsky’s former secretary from whom he was now disassociated) and Joaquin Maurin. The party was not ‘Trotskyist’ as the Stalinists claimed, but had more in common with the left opposition in the Soviet Union.

ALLIES OF THE POPULAR FRONT

The Libertarian Movement
(anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist) Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT). The National Confederation of Labour was the anarcho-syndicalist trade union.

Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI)

Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) Mujeres Libres (the anarcho-feminist organization)

BASQUES

Partido Nacionalista Vasca (PNV)

The Basque Nationalist Party of conservative Christian Democrats. Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV)

Basque Nationalist Action was a much smaller social democrat splinter from the PNV.

Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (STV)

Solidarity of Basque Workers. The Basque nationalist Catholic trade union.

INITIALS

PART ONE

Old Spain and the Second Republic

Their Most Catholic Majesties

O
n an unsurfaced road in Andalucia or Estremadura, one of the first automobiles in Spain has broken down. In the photograph a young man grasps the steering wheel. He is not very good-looking, due to a large nose and enormous ears. His brilliantined hair is parted in two and he has a moustache. The driver of the car is King Alfonso XIII.

On either side, men are pushing hard at the mudguards. Their faces are burned a deep brown by the sun and they are poorly dressed, without collars or ties. They are making a big effort. In the background, three or four figures dressed in suits and hats observe the goings-on. A rider, perhaps a local landowner, has reined in his horse. On the right, a landau drawn by two horses, the reins held by a uniformed coachman, waits ready to rescue the monarch if the car’s engine fails to restart. The caption announces that the king’s greatest wish is to maintain ‘direct contact with his people’. Few images better represented the extremes of the social and economic contrasts of Spain in the early part of the twentieth century. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the photograph is the way the peasants and the king must have seemed like foreigners to each other in their own country.

Spain, with its stern tradition of rule from Madrid, was becoming increasingly turbulent at that time, both in the countryside and in the big cities. So not even the tidy-minded could say later that the Spanish Civil War simply began in July 1936 with the rising of the ‘nationalist’ generals against the republican government. That event signalled the greatest clash in the conflict of forces which had dominated Spanish history. One of those antagonisms was evidently between class interests, but the other two were no less important: authoritarian rule against libertarian instinct and central government against regionalist aspirations.

The genesis of these three strains of conflict lay in the way the
Reconquista
of Spain from the Moors had shaped the social structure of the country and formed the attitudes of the Castilian conquerors. The intermittent warring against the Moors, begun by Visigoth warlords in the eighth century, finally ended in 1492 with the triumphal entry into Granada of Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. For the Spanish traditionalist that event marked both the culmination of a long crusade and the beginning of the country’s civilization. This idea permeated the nationalist alliance of 1936, which continually invoked the glory of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs, and referred to their own struggle as the second
Reconquista
, with liberals, ‘reds’ and separatists allotted the role of contemporary heathen.

With a feudal army forming the prototype of state power, the monarchy and warrior aristocracy retook possession of the land during the fight against the Moors. In order to continue the
Reconquista
, the aristocracy needed money, not food. The cash crop which could provide it was Merino wool. Common land was seized for sheep grazing, which not only had a catastrophic effect on the peasants’ food supply, but also led to soil erosion, ruining what had once been known as the ‘granary of the Roman empire’. Few people were needed to tend the sheep and the only alternative to starvation was the army and, later, the empire. In the Middle Ages Spain was estimated to have a population of about fourteen million. At the end of the eighteenth century it was a little over seven million.

Castilian authoritarianism developed from a feudal-military emphasis to one of political control by the Church. During the seven centuries of the
Reconquista’
s uneven course, the Church’s role had been mainly that of propagandist for military action, and even of participant. Then, in Isabella’s reign the warrior archbishop was superseded by the cardinal statesman. Nevertheless, the connection between Church and army remained close during the rapid growth of Spain’s empire when the crucifix was the shadow of the sword over half the world. The army conquered, then the Church integrated the new territories into the Castilian state.

The power which was exerted over the population was an irresistible force, backed by the threat of hell and its earthly foretaste in the form of the Inquisition. A single denouncer, an anonymous whisper from a jealous enemy, was often enough for the Holy Office, and the public confessions extracted before autos-da-fé provided a striking foretaste of the totalitarian state. In addition the Church controlled every aspect of education and placed the entire population in a protective custody of the mind by burning books to keep out religious and political heresy. It was also the Church which vaunted Castilian qualities such as endurance of suffering and equanimity in the face of death. It encouraged the idea that it was better to be a starving
caballero
than a fat merchant.

This Spanish Catholic puritanism had been guided by Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, the ascetic friar promoted by Isabella to be the most powerful statesman of the age. It was basically an internal reformation. The papacy was being rejected because of its corruption, so Spain had to save Europe from heresy and Catholicism from its own weakness. As a result the clergy practised what it preached, with the exception of forgiveness and brotherly love, and sometimes issued pronouncements on property which were almost as subversive as the original teaching. Nevertheless, the Church provided spiritual justification for the Castilian social structure and was the most authoritarian force in its consolidation.

The third strain of conflict, centralism against regionalism, also developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first major revolt against the united kingdoms had a distinctly regionalist element. The rising of the
comuneros
in 1520 against Isabella’s grandson, the Emperor Charles V, was provoked not only by his use of the country as the treasury of his empire and by the arrogance of his Flemish courtiers but also by his disregard for local rights and customs. Much of the country had been assimilated into the Castilian kingdom through royal marriage and the Spanish Habsburgs preferred to let the Church act as the binding force of the realm.

These three determining attributes of the Castilian state, feudal, authoritarian and centralist, were strongly interlinked. This was particularly true when it came to the regional question. Castile had established a central authority in Spain and built the empire, but its administration rigidly refused to acknowledge that feudal economic relationships were growing out of date. The wars in northern Europe, the fight against the French in Italy and the destruction of the Armada meant that the imperial power, developed in less than two generations, had started to decline almost immediately. Castile had the unbending pride of a newly impoverished nobleman, who refuses to notice the cobwebs and decay in his great house and resolutely continues to visualize the grandeur of his youth. This capacity for seeing only what it wanted to see made the Castilian ruling order introverted. It refused to see that the treasures from the Americas in the churches fed nobody and that the vast quantities of precious but useless metal only undermined the country’s economic infrastructure.

Catalonia, which was made part of the kingdom of Aragon during the Middle Ages, was very different from the rest of the peninsula. Not surprisingly, friction developed later between Madrid and Barcelona. The Catalans had enjoyed a considerable amount of power in the Mediterranean. Their empire had included the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the Duchy of Athens. But as it had been the Castilian Isabella, not Ferdinand of Aragon, who financed Columbus, they did not have direct trading access to the Americas.

In 1640 Catalonia and Portugal rose against Philip IV of Spain and his minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Portugal won its independence but Catalonia acknowledged Louis XIII of France as its king, until Barcelona fell to Philip IV in 1652. Then, after the death of the last Spanish Habsburg in 1700, the War of the Spanish Succession started and Catalonia sided with England against Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. The Catalans were betrayed by the English in the Treaty of Utrecht, and the Bourbon Philip V abolished Catalonia’s rights, after it was reduced in 1714. The castle of Montjuich was built to dominate the city and remind the Catalans that they were ruled from Madrid. With this beginning Philip proceeded to implement the centralist idea of his Sun King grandfather. The unifying force of the Church had waned, so a new centripetal strength was needed if the monarchy was to control non-Castilians. The twentieth-century Basque philosopher Unamuno, who was no separatist, stated that ‘the aim was unity and nothing else; unity stifling the slightest individuality and difference…It is the dogma of the ruler’s infallibility.’ But ruthlessness did not solve the problem; it only stored up trouble for the future.

The backwardness of Spanish commercial activity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was mainly due to the way that Spanish Catholicism had maintained an anti-capitalist line by clinging to medieval teaching on usury. The code of the
hidalgo
(Spanish nobleman) forced him to despise money in general and the earning of it in particular. The census of 1788 showed that almost 50 per cent of the adult male population was not involved in any form of productive work. The army, the Church and, above all, the vast nobility were a dead weight on the rest of the population. It was perhaps this statistic which provoked the well-known saying that ‘one half of Spain eats but does not work, while the other half works but does not eat’.