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Authors: Antony Beevor

Tags: #Europe, #Revolutionary, #Spain & Portugal, #General, #Other, #Military, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939, #Spain, #History

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The Catalan employers, meanwhile, having welcomed Primo’s arrival in power, now hated his control over their methods of dealing with union leaders. Primo also took a spiteful pleasure in attacking their nationalism through attempts to suppress Catalan language and culture. Like all patriarchs, he was convinced of his own good intentions. He made grand gestures, took petty measures and was unpredictable. His biggest success, due more to luck than good judgement, was to end the war in Morocco. In April 1925 the great Riffian chief Abd-el-Krim overreached himself by attacking the French zone in a wild fashion. This produced an immediate military alliance between France and Spain. On 8 September French and Spanish troops landed at Alhucemas, trapping Abd-el-Krim’s force. The rebellion in Morocco was finally crushed.

In December Primo formed a directorate composed of military officers and civilians. Yet his plans to modernize Spain lacked both judgement and luck. They included overambitious and badly planned engineering projects, such as hydroelectric dams and highways, which resulted in enormous waste.
10
The deficit doubled between 1925 and 1929, and his young finance minister, José Calvo Sotelo, made things far worse by pegging the peseta to the gold standard. Currency speculators made large fortunes at the government’s expense and attempts to prop up the value of the currency failed dismally. There was a flight of capital, and by the time the Second Republic was declared in 1931 the peseta had lost nearly 50 per cent of its value.

Under Primo’s rule a claustrophobic irritation built up. Bankers and industrialists hated his intervention in matters he did not understand. The middle classes started to react when he interfered with the universities. As a flamboyant product of his profession and background, the well-meaning patriarch had by now become a liability to the monarchy he had stepped in to save. Alfonso XIII began to fear for his throne. Over the previous five years a political opposition to the dictatorship had developed in left-liberal and intellectual circles. The most important became known as the Alianza Republicana and was headed by Manuel Azaña, Alejandro Lerroux, Marcelino Domingo and several others. Its aim was not just to do away with the dictatorship, but also the monarchy. Opposition to the whole idea of collaborating with Primo had also grown within socialist ranks and by 1929 Largo Caballero was forced to realize his mistake in agreeing to work with the regime. When in 1930 the socialists opposed the monarchy and the dictatorship, UGT membership began to rise rapidly From 211,000 members in 1923 it increased to 277,000 in 1930 and was to reach just over half a million two years later.

Like a stern, insensitive father whose authority is challenged, Primo tried to enforce his will more and more. Hurt and confused at not being appreciated, he appealed to the army to reassure himself of their support. It was not forthcoming, so Primo presented his resignation to the king on 28 January 1930 and went into exile. He died in Paris a few weeks later.

On 30 January Alfonso XIII, who could no longer fall back on the constitution that he himself had openly broken, entrusted the government to another general, Dámaso Berenguer. This outraged General Sanjurjo, then the director of the Civil Guard, who believed himself far better qualified for the post. Alfonso’s obstinate recourse to generals and the fact that Berenguer allowed nearly a whole year to pass before summoning the Cortes only exasperated people more as the country was governed by decree and censorship remained in place. Even former monarchist politicians, such as Niceto Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura, publicly came out in favour of a republic.

Indalecio Prieto, at first on his own account, then later with the support of the executive committees of the socialist PSOE and UGT union, joined the conspiracy. The republican alliance officially came into being in the Basque coastal resort of San Sebastián on 27 August 1930. Catalan republicans joined the San Sebastián pact, as it became known, on condition that Catalonia received a statute of autonomy. This republican movement strengthened with the support of military officers such as Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, one of General Franco’s chief rivals after the military rising of 1936, Ramón Franco, the aviator brother of the nationalist leader, and Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, later the communist commander of the republican air force in the civil war.

In December the UGT called a general strike, which the anarcho-syndicalist CNT did not oppose. Meanwhile Alcalá Zamora became the president of a revolutionary committee, which constituted itself as a government in waiting. University students and workers openly campaigned for the overthrow of the monarchy and a rising, which was planned for 12 December, had to be delayed by three days. Unfortunately, nobody warned Captains Galán and García Hernández of the garrison of Jaca. They rose in revolt at six in the morning, but finding themselves on their own, they had to surrender. Tried for military rebellion, they were executed. This turned them into immediate martyrs of the republican cause. General Emilio Mola, the director-general of security, arrested all the members of the revolutionary committee to be found and the uprising collapsed. But this did little to halt the republican momentum.

In the following month, January 1931, another university strike began, headed by a group known as ‘Al servicio de la República’. It included the principal figures of the Spanish intelligentsia: José Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón, Ramón Pérez de Ayala and their president, the poet Antonio Machado. On 14 February the king, shaken by the agitation, replaced Berenguer with Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar and gave orders that municipal elections should be called for 12 April. This allowed the republicans to turn the vote into a plebiscite on the monarchy itself. On the evening of 12 April the results began to come in. The socialists and liberal republicans had won almost all the provincial capitals of Spain. The excited crowds packing the centre of Madrid instantly acclaimed the shadow government of Alcalá Zamora as the new government, even though these elections had nothing to do with the Cortes.
11

General Berenguer, who had become minister of war, ordered the army to abide by the will of the people. The Count de Romanones, a member of Admiral Aznar’s government, tried in vain to come to an agreement with the republican committee. He then asked the director of the Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo, if he could count on his force. The offended general took his revenge and answered no. The whole of Madrid became ‘a fiesta of the people which took on the appearance of a revolution’.
12
That same evening Admiral Aznar presented the king with his government’s resignation.

At six in the morning of 14 April 1931 the Republic was proclaimed at Eibar and the news spread almost instantaneously throughout Spain. Romanones had a meeting with the republican leader Alcalá Zamora, who told him that the king and his family should leave Spain that very afternoon. The king, who rejected the idea of another minister, that the army should keep him in power, left Madrid to embark at Cartagena. His departure created no disturbances. ‘Well before its collapse,’ wrote Miguel Maura, ‘the monarchy had evaporated in the consciousness of Spaniards.’
13

The Second Republic

O
n 14 April 1931 the revolutionary committee headed by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a Catholic and a landowner from Cordoba, converted itself into the provisional government of the Republic. Alcalá Zamora then became president and head of state.
1

These leaders of the Republic faced immense problems deeply rooted in Spanish society: agrarian reform, the intransigence of the armed forces, the Catalan and Basque questions, and the issue of relations between the Catholic Church and the state. They also needed to tackle the deficiencies of the educational system in their objective to create a ‘Republic of citizens’.

The international situation following the Wall Street crash of 1929 was hardly propitious. The world depression did not affect Spain as severely as some of the more industrially developed countries, yet prices for the country’s traditional exports were reduced by nearly half.
2
Protests over the fall in living standards and social unrest awoke fears across much of Europe of more revolutions following the one in Russia. This had contributed to the assumption of dictatorial or authoritarian regimes in a number of countries.
3
In such a climate the fall of the monarchy in Spain and the proclamation of a republic was unwelcome to the international banking community. Morgan’s Bank immediately cancelled a loan of 60 million dollars agreed with the previous administration.

The new government also inherited the consequences of the economic mistakes made under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, the massive debts from public spending projects and the collapse in the value of the peseta. Large amounts of capital had also been transferred abroad in anticipation of increased taxation and a further deterioration of the country’s economy.
4
Landowners and industrialists, afraid of the financial effects of the government’s likely social programme, immediately cut investment. These fears were influenced by the appointment of one socialist, Indalecio Prieto, as minister of finance, and another, Largo Caballero, as minister of labour.
5

The government, a coalition from six different parties, proceeded nevertheless to summon the Cortes and draft a constitution for the Second Republic. Throughout April, May and June of 1931 they continued to issue decrees dealing with the question of land reform. These forbade landowners to expel tenants or to hire day labourers from outside their municipality. And they extended employment rights agreed in industry, including the eight-hour day, to agricultural workers. On 21 May the government created the Comisión Técnica Agraria to draft a law, setting up an Institute of Agrarian Reform. It established a programme to resettle between 60,000 and 75,000 families each year, but its budget was only 50 million pesetas, a totally inadequate amount for the task.

The following week the new minister of war, Manuel Azaña, set out to tackle the overmanned military establishment. He offered generals and officers the possibility of passing to the reserve list on full pay. He reduced the sixteen captaincy-generals to eight ‘organic divisions’, suppressed the rank of lieutenant-general, reduced the length of obligatory military service to one year and ordered the closure of the General Military Academy of Saragossa, which happened to be commanded by General Francisco Franco.
6

These reforms did not bring about any substantive improvements in the modernization or efficiency of the army. If anything, it provided disgruntled officers with the time and opportunity to plot against the Republic. The government also made the error of keeping General Sanjurjo in the post of commander of the Civil Guard, a corps which had a notorious reputation for its deadly acts of repression.
7
It set up a new paramilitary force, with the unpromising title of Assault Guard. They were known as the
asaltos
, and tended to be deployed in towns and cities while the Civil Guard policed the countryside.

Catalan autonomy was also high on the list of matters to be addressed. It was a question which greatly concerned old-fashioned Castilian centralists, who saw any concessions to the regions as a threat to the unity of Spain. The April elections had proved a victory for the party of the Catalan left, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, an essentially middle-class organization led by Francesc Macià and Lluís Companys. The two of them had proclaimed on 14 April that a Catalan republic would be established within a federal state. This was not exactly what had been negotiated in the pact of San Sebastián, so three days later three ministers left Madrid for Barcelona to discuss with Macià and Companys the best way forward to enable the Cortes to approve a statute of autonomy. On 21 April Macià was named as president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the name of the mediaeval Catalan Commonwealth.

The relationship between the new secular Republic and the Catholic Church was unlikely to be simple, with the Concordat of 1851 still in force. No more than fifteen days after the announcement of the Republic, Cardinal Pedro Segura, the primate of Spain, issued a pastoral denouncing the new government’s intention to establish freedom of worship and to separate Church and state. The cardinal urged Catholics to vote in future elections against an administration which in his view wanted to destroy religion. The Catholic press followed his lead. The organ of Acción Católica,
El Debate
, dedicated itself to defending the privileges of the Church while the monarchist daily,
ABC
, aligned itself with the most traditionalist positions.

Faced with a revolt by the most important figure in the Spanish Church, republican ministers ordered the expulsion from the country of Cardinal Segura and another cleric, Mateo Múgica, Bishop of Vitoria. In the course of a curious spate of activity Cardinal Segura based himself in the south of France and instructed his priests in Spain to sell church property without transferring the proceeds into pesetas.
8

The fanatical mysticism of the church provoked much of the anticlericalism in Spain, especially the ‘miracles’, which in the 1930s often involved a ‘red’ supposedly committing a sacrilegious act and dropping dead on the spot. The novelist Ramón Sender attributed the left’s vandalism against churches, such as the desecration of mummies, to the Church’s obsession with the kissing of saints’ bones and limbs. Anything, however ridiculous, was believed by the
beatas
, the black-clothed women who obeyed their priests’ every word like the devotees of a cult leader. In Spain there were more psychological disorders arising from religious delusions than all other kinds. This atmosphere influenced even unbelievers in a strange way. Workers formed gruesome ideas of torture in convents, and many natural catastrophes were attributed to the Jesuits in the same way as the Church blamed Freemasons, Jews and communists.

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