The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (5 page)

In reaction against the commercial backwardness and rigidity of the ruling order, Spain was to experience a middle-class revolution in advance of most of Europe. The country enjoyed a brief easing of the chains in the mid eighteenth century, during Charles III’s reign, when the influence of the Enlightenment was felt. Reforms severely reduced the Church’s influence over the army, while many officers were attracted to Freemasonry. This anti-clerical and, therefore, political movement, was inextricably linked with the development of liberalism among Spain’s very small professional middle class. Liberalism became a recognizable force early in the nineteenth century as a result of the ‘War of Independence’ against Napoleon’s armies. The faint-hearted Charles IV was overthrown in a popular revolt because of the corruption and scandals of his favourite, Manuel de Godoy, and the arrival of the French army. Napoleon refused to recognize his heir, Ferdinand VII, and much of the Spanish aristocracy sided with the occupying power. Then Murat’s executions in Madrid provoked a spontaneous rising by the people on the ‘Second of May’ 1808, when they ferociously attacked the French emperor’s Mameluke cavalry with knives. ‘Napoleon’s ulcer’, as the rising was called, was the first large-scale guerrilla war of modern times and 60,000 Spaniards died in the defence of Saragossa. The bitter resistance came from a popular movement, though some liberal army officers played a major role, especially within the local juntas of defence.

The traditional ruling structure of ‘Old Spain’ suffered its first formal upset in 1812, when the central junta of defence proclaimed the Constitution of Cádiz, which was based upon middle-class liberal principles. This opportunity of dispensing with the stifling restrictions of monarchy and Church prompted many towns and provinces to declare themselves self-governing cantons within a Spanish federation. These changes did not last. Ferdinand VII was allowed to return on condition that he accepted the constitution, but he later broke his word and invoked the Holy Alliance, under which in 1823 the French King Louis XVIII sent an army, called ‘The Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis’, to crush Spanish liberalism. Ferdinand dismantled the liberal army and reintroduced the Inquisition to destroy ‘the disastrous mania of thinking’.

Spain in the nineteenth century continued to suffer from the clash between liberalism and traditionalism. After Ferdinand’s death in 1833, his heir was the young Queen Isabella II. The liberal army supported her succession (and later provided most of her lovers). But the traditionalist forces grouped themselves around Ferdinand’s brother and rival claimant, Don Carlos (and thus became known as Carlists). The main Carlist strength lay among the smallholders of the Pyrenees, especially in Navarre, and his supporters became famous for their religious fanaticism and ferocious rejection of modernity. In the first Carlist War of 1833–40 a British Legion, nearly 10,000 strong and led by regular officers, fought for the liberal side. The civil war of a hundred years later would also attract foreign volunteers, but sympathy for such idealistic ventures changed drastically in British governing circles. Admiration for the Byronic tradition of supporting foreign insurrections disappeared after 1918 with the rise of socialist revolution and recognition of the true horrors of war.

The free-thinking liberalism which permeated the increasingly middle-class Spanish officer corps in the early years of the century declined. Liberals profited from the sale of church lands and developed into a reactionary
grande bourgeoisie
. The governments in Madrid were corrupt and the generals acquired a taste for overthrowing them. This was the age of the
pronunciamiento
, when generals would form up their troops and make long speeches appointing themselves saviour and dictator of the country. Between 1814 and 1874 there were 37 attempted coups, of which twelve were successful.
¹
The country lurched along, becoming poorer and poorer, while Queen Isabella exercised her guards officers. She was finally deposed in 1868 after choosing a lover of whom the army did not approve. Two years later Amadeo of Savoy was chosen as her successor, but his earnest goodwill was not enough to win support from a population exasperated with the monarchy. His abdication in February 1873 was followed by a vote in the Cortes establishing a republic.

The First Republic was soon brought down by military intervention. Its federalist programme had included the abolition of military conscription, a very popular measure, but within a few weeks of the first elections sporadic Carlist revolts became a full-scale civil war and the government was forced to break this important promise. The Carlist pretender’s most effective troops were the staunchly Catholic Basques, who were primarily motivated by separatist ambitions of throwing off rule from Madrid. Spanish monarchs were only lords of the Basque provinces, which constituted a
señorio
and which had never been subjected to central rule like other parts of the peninsula.

The generals saw the army’s main role as enforcing Spanish unity, especially after the loss of the American empire. As Castilian centralists, they were appalled by the prospect of separatist Basque and Catalan nations occupying the Pyrenean frontier. They were also implacably opposed to federalism, so when self-governing cantons were proclaimed in other areas they did not hesitate to crush this movement against government from Madrid as well as the Carlists and Basques. The First Republic lasted only a few months.

The conservative politician Cánovas del Castillo had been planning the re-establishment of the Bourbons since the fall of Isabella. He also wanted to institute stable government while returning the army to barracks. This was achieved when General Martínez Campos proclaimed Alfonso XII king at the end of 1874. Alfonso was Isabella’s son (and therefore presumably of good military stock), but he was still only a Sandhurst cadet.

Under Cánovas’s constitution, which was to last half a century, Church and landowner were back in strength. They had every intention of keeping it that way and elections were unashamedly manipulated. Peasants and tenants had to vote as their landlord told them or face eviction. Canvassing consisted of the political bosses, the
caciques
, sending out armed gangs known as
El Partido de la Porra
(the Bludgeon Party) and if that did not look like working, then ballot papers were destroyed or substituted. Political and economic corruption spread from Madrid in a way that far exceeded anything known in previous centuries. The courts were rigged right down to the village tribunals, so no poor person ever expected to have his case heard, let alone obtain justice.

Although there may often have been a vicious rivalry between liberals and conservatives in the provinces, there was virtually a gentleman’s agreement between their leaders in the capital. Whenever there was an unpopular measure to carry out, the conservatives retired and the liberals, who had now become almost indistinguishable from their opponents, came in. The two parties resembled those little wooden men who appear alternately to indicate the weather. But any high-minded figure, however aristocratic, who denounced the corruption was regarded as a traitor and shunned. The trinity of army, monarchy and Church, which had originally made the empire, was also to preside over its final collapse. In 1898 the Spanish-American War saw the pathetic rout of the armed forces and the loss of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Most of the soldiers’ food and equipment had been sold by their officers.

Even the tawdry end of the
reconquista
vision in Cuba in 1898 did not rouse the rulers of Spain from their myopic complacency. They could not admit that the obsession with empire had ruined the country. To admit that would have been to undermine the institutions of aristocracy, Church and army. This refusal to face reality started to come up against new political forces, which were growing rapidly and which, unlike the liberalism of the early nineteenth century, could not be absorbed into the governing structure. The incompatibility of ‘Eternal Spain’ with these new political movements developed into the clash which later tore the country apart.

Alfonso XIII, the driver of the broken-down car, became king at the age of sixteen in 1902. Poverty was so great at the beginning of the twentieth century that over half a million Spaniards, out of a population of eighteen and a half million, emigrated to the New World in the first decade of the century alone. Life expectancy was around thirty-five years, the same as at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Illiteracy rates, varying sharply by area, averaged 64 per cent overall. Two thirds of Spain’s active population still worked on the land. Yet it was not just a problem of property rights and tensions between landowners and landless peasants. Within the total of five million farmers and peasants, there were huge differences in standards of living and techniques, according to region. In Andalucia, Estremadura and La Mancha, agriculture remained primitive and ineffectively laborious. In many other areas, such as Galicia, León, Old Castile, Catalonia and the north, small proprietors worked their own land with fierce independence while the rich coastal plain of the Levante represented perhaps the best example of intensive culture in Europe.
²

Industry and mining provided only 18 per cent of the jobs available, little more than domestic and other services.
³
Spain’s main exports came from agricultural produce, particularly the fertile coastal region around Valencia, and only a certain amount from mining. But after the collapse of the last vestiges of empire, money was repatriated and along with other investment from Europe, above all from France, a banking boom followed during which some of the major Spanish banks of today were founded.
⁴
The government subsidized industrial development and, in Catalonia especially, huge fortunes were made.

The country remained neutral in the First World War. Its agricultural exports, raw materials and rising industrial output at such a time created what seemed like an economic miracle, with thousands of new enterprises. The new prosperity led to a significant rise in the birth rate, which would have its effect twenty years later in the mid 1930s. Spain’s balance of payments were so favourable that the country’s gold reserves increased dramatically.
⁵
But when the war was over the economic miracle faded away. The governments of the day fell back on protectionism. Expectations had risen, and disappointment and resentment were bound to follow in the unemployment that ensued.

Royal Exit

T
he first attempt to organize some form of trade union in Spain had occurred as early as the 1830s, and there were small non-political associations in existence at the middle of the nineteenth century. Then new political ideas arrived across the Pyrenees and began to take root. The anarchist, or libertarian, form of socialism arrived first and its fundamental disagreement with Marxist socialism was to have great repercussions in Spain. Proudhon had already been translated by Pi y Margall, the president of the First Republic, when Giuseppe Fanelli arrived in Spain in 1868. Fanelli was an admirer of Bakunin, Marx’s great opponent in the First International. He came to Madrid without speaking any Spanish and with no money, but the ‘Idea’, as it became known, found a very enthusiastic audience. Within four years there were nearly 50,000 Bakuninists in Spain, of whom the majority were in Andalucia.

There were several reasons why anarchism in the early days became the largest force within the Spanish working class. Its proposed structure of co-operative communities, associating freely, corresponded to deep-rooted traditions of mutual aid, and the federalist organization appealed to anti-centralist feelings. It also offered a strong moral alternative to a corrupt political system and hypocritical Church. Many observers have pointed to the naive optimism which anarchism inspired among the landless peasants of Andalucia. Much has also been made of the way in which the word was spread by ascetic, almost saint-like characters and how the converts gave up tobacco, alcohol and infidelity (while rejecting official marriage). As a result it was often described as a secular religion. Even so, the intensity of this early anarchism led converts to believe that everybody else must see that freedom and mutual aid were the only foundation of a naturally ordered society. An uprising was all that was needed to open people’s eyes, unfetter the vast potential of goodwill and set off what Bakunin called the ‘spontaneous creativity of the masses’.

Their frustration at being unable to ‘unlock the mechanism of history’, as the Russian writer Victor Serge described it, led to individual acts of political violence in the 1890s. The
tigres solitarios
, as their fellow anarchists called them, acted either in the hope of stirring up others to emulate them or in reprisal for the indiscriminate brutality of the Brigada Social, the secret police. The most famous example was the torturing to death in 1892 of several anarchists in the castle of Montjuich in Barcelona. This led to an international outcry and to the assassination of Cánovas del Castillo, the organizer of the restoration. A vicious circle of repression and revenge was to follow.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Marxist wing of socialism,
los autoritarios
, as their opponents called them, developed much less rapidly. In late 1871 Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue arrived after the fall of the Paris Commune and within a year the basis of Spanish socialism was laid in Madrid. The Marxists’ comparative lack of success was partly due to the emphasis which they placed on the central state. The socialists under Pablo Iglesias, a typesetter who emerged as the leading Spanish Marxist, proceeded cautiously and concentrated on building an organization. Eventually in 1879 they founded the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and formed their General Union of Labour (UGT) in 1888. Iglesias still insisted that the class struggle should be waged in a moderate and evolutionary manner (the PSOE did not formally repudiate the monarchy until 1914). The socialists accused their anarchist rivals of ‘irresponsibility’, but they in turn were seen as heavily bureaucratic and received the nickname of ‘Spanish Prussians’.