The Spanish Civil War Page 15
Lerroux’s first difficulties derived from yet another series of anarchist challenges. They attacked isolated civil guard posts and derailed the Barcelona-Seville express, killing nineteen people. In Madrid, there was a long telephone strike. In both Valencia and Saragossa there were general strikes lasting for weeks. That at Saragossa, designed, to begin with, to free prisoners taken by the government the previous year, lasted indeed for fifty-seven days. The CNT never issued strike pay, but the workers’ resilience astonished the country. The anarchist leaders, as usual, for a time believed that they were in the anteroom of the millennium; and their pistolero friends heightened the drama by sporadic shooting. The strikers decided at one point to send their wives and children away to Barcelona by rail. The civil guard fired on the train, and prevented it from reaching its destination. The evacuees later went by caravan. This unrest was partly the consequence of a new and ‘suicidal egoism’ of employers who celebrated, throughout Spain, the Right’s victory at the polls by attempting to lower wages, raise rents, and enforce evictions.1 On 8 December, a revolutionary committee, led by Buenaventura Durruti, was installed at Saragossa. This fought for several days against the civil police, reinforced by the army, backed by tanks. Durruti became a national legend. In numerous places in Aragon and Catalonia, ‘libertarian communism’ was briefly established. Fighting occurred in many places, causing 87 dead, many wounded, and 700 imprisoned.2 It was hard to accept that the country was at peace. Not surprisingly, militancy spread more and more through the UGT, especially its largest, but least well led, section, the agrarian FNTT. Their members were hit by falling wages, themselves the consequence of right-wing chairmen having been appointed by the radical minister of labour, José Estadella, to Largo’s arbitration boards. The recovery of the agrarian upper class was everywhere complemented by a more radical attitude on the part of the workers, supported by a more embittered Largo Caballero. Prieto, a moderate socialist if ever there was one, did not discourage this, to his everlasting regret. Besteiro did: he criticized the ‘anti-governmentalism’ in 1934 of his colleagues as much as he had done their ‘pro-governmentalism’ in 1931, to no avail.
In the new year of 1934, the government introduced a series of measures designed to halt the reforms of their predecessors. The substitution of lay for religious schools was indefinitely postponed. The Jesuits were shortly to be found teaching again.1 By a clever debating speech, Gil Robles secured that priests would be treated as if they were civil servants on pensions and they began to be paid two-thirds of their salary of 1931. Though the Agrarian Law remained on the statute book, its application was in many places tacitly abandoned. An amnesty was eventually also granted to political prisoners—including General Sanjurjo and all those imprisoned at the time of the rising in 1932. This clemency merely stimulated the old plotters to new schemes.
By this time, many small pueblos seemed to have been utterly divided by politics. In places which still had socialist or left-wing councils, efforts were being made to impose a new cultural order, the exact reverse of its predecessor in that religious ideas had given way to atheism, not just agnosticism; old festivals were giving way to celebrations of the revolutionary tradition—The First of May, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution or the death of Galán and García Hernández. Women, whom old Spain had traditionally kept at home behind high windows, came out into the streets wearing party colours, ‘forming groups like men, singing, shouting and dancing in great gangs to celebrate the name of Liberty’.2 Battles took place now over working conditions as well as over the church. For example, in one village in Aragon, a café had been made into a labour exchange. Everyone had to seek work through the officials in the café. Nobody liked that and those of the Right disobeyed, as did all workers who had any old arrangement to work for a particular farmer. The Left called a general strike: the men of the Right went on working, and were picketed. Fighting began and a death occurred. Threats, taunts, and demonstrations then became part and parcel of the life in the village. Everyone began to join one group or another. The uncommitted sought ideologies, while leaders on both sides schemed to make politics out of all entertainments.
People on the Right assumed automatically that Azaña’s, and the socialists’, defeat meant a victory for old Spain. Certainly, whether the government liked it or not, all over Spain the old masters of the economy used what they believed to be their opportunity to restore their position; and, as certainly, the socialist party responded by despairing of, even denouncing, the republic. In a speech in his constituency of Granada, even Fernando de los Ríos said as much. From that time on, El Socialista regularly argued that the republic was as bad as the monarchy had been and that, in this ‘bourgeois republic’, there was no place for the proletariat. Azaña tried to point out to the socialists the danger of this attitude. If the socialists really tried to bring ‘the revolution’, he said, they would fail. De los Ríos, to whom he spoke, said that ‘the masses dominated the leaders’. Azaña replied, ‘the feelings of the masses can be changed’. He pointed out that, to prepare an insurrection, as the socialists seemed to be doing, was to invite the army to reenter politics: ‘The army would be delighted to launch a repression against the workers’. De los Ríos passed on Azaña’s remarks to Largo who, however, brushed them aside and, three weeks later, the extremist ‘Caballerista’ view triumphed in the national committee of the Spanish socialist party resulting in the resignation of moderates such as Besteiro, Saborit and Trifón Gómez. A ‘pre-revolutionary’ commission was then formed, and, on 31 January, Largo told the Madrid socialist party that he desired to reaffirm his belief in the necessity of preparing a proletarian rising.1 It was a fatal error of judgement.
From that time onwards, the socialists began to arrange military training for their youth, and thus joined the insurrectionary Right, as well as the minuscule groups on the edges of Spanish politics such as the Falange and the communists, in the character of their challenge to the republic. They became intoxicated by the prospect of revolution.
The Carlists had been active in this way for months. In Navarre, their red berets (boinas rojas) were weekly seen in the market-places. A dashing colonel, Enrique Varela, who had twice won Spain’s highest medal for gallantry in Morocco, was procured to train these new requetés—as the levies had been named in the Carlist Wars, from a line of the marching song of their most ferocious battalion. Varela (whom the Carlist leaders Fal Conde and Rodezno had met in gaol after the 1932 rising) travelled about the Pyrenean villages dressed as a priest, known as ‘Tío Pepe’ (Uncle Pepe), acting as a missionary of war. When officially promoted a general, he was replaced by Colonel Rada.1 The Carlist communion claimed no less than 700,000 members, in 540 sections, in early 1934 and, though that surely was an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the movement was growing fast, as a result of the quickening political awareness of the Catholic petty bourgeoisie in western Andalusia, Navarre, Valencia and parts of Catalonia.2
On 31 March 1934, Antonio Goicoechea, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, together with two Carlists (Rafael Olazábal and Antonio Lizarza) and General Barrera (the unsuccessful coordinator of the plot of 1932), visited Mussolini. The Spaniards gave an impression of disaccord as to their aims. Mussolini, however, brushed this aside by saying that all that was necessary was that the movement should be ‘monarchist and of a corporative and representative’ character. He promised 1½ million pesetas, 20,000 rifles, 200 machine-guns, and 20,000 grenades to the Spanish rebels, and agreed to send more when the rising started. The money was paid the next day.1 Thereafter, the requetés developed fast, committees being formed to deal with, for example, recruitment of officers, propaganda, arms purchase, and strategy.2 There had been several previous tentative expeditions by monarchist or other plotters to Italy; and now, with the arrival there of ex-King Alfonso, Rome became a new focus of conspiracy against the republic. On the other hand, with the appointment of the energetic Fal Conde as ‘royal secretary-general’ of the Carlists
in May 1934, that movement differentiated itself sharply from the orthodox monarchists, of whom they spoke as the ‘riff-raff of the Alfonsine monarchy which has adopted the name of Renovación Española, as if we did not know that the “renovation” with which they entice us is the return of a régime of iniquity’. Rodezno, Fal Conde’s predecessor, the movement’s leader in the Cortes, continued to believe in a broader movement.3
Four days after the meeting in Rome, Lerroux resigned in protest against the vacillation of the President, Alcalá Zamora, in giving his signature to the law pardoning Sanjurjo and the plotters of 1932. The new Prime Minister, an indolent Valencian lawyer, Ricardo Samper, was also a radical. He owed his promotion to the fact that he was a friend of President Alcalá Zamora, who preferred a weak Prime Minister, perhaps in order to justify his own interference. Samper did little save try and maintain his majority, though, to be fair, settlements continued under the agrarian law until October 1934. His minister of the interior, however, Salazar Alonso, smelled revolution everywhere and removed, as was within his legal power, many town councils on the excuse that they did ‘not inspire confidence in matters of public order’. In fact, he sought, by changing such councils, if they were socialist, to get rid of many FNTT members’ last political friends in their villages.
Combined with evictions, the use of migrant labour and dismissals on political grounds, this policy made the countryside most tense in early 1934, when wages were falling and hunger on the increase. Gil Robles’s speeches fanned the flames as young men of the Right began to see that the pendulum of politics was now swinging against ideas of compromise: ‘leaders are always right! (¡los jefes no se equivocan!)’, cried the young CEDAistas at a great rally at the Escorial in April.1 There followed, at the beginning of June, a well-organized peasant strike in the south, during the harvest, by the socialist FNTT. This was fired by the repeal of the Municipal Boundaries Act which had given local casas del pueblo the control of labour. The FNTT had gained acceptance of their demands on wage rates and of their proposal for guarantees that all available labour be employed. But they struck over their sensational demand that harvest wages should be paid for the rest of the year. The anarchist leaders agreed to support this, but many socialist moderates did not. Salazar Alonso, the minister of the interior, believing that he had a revolutionary general strike on his hands, sent in the civil guard, imposed press censorship in the south and made many, though short-term, arrests, of socialist leaders, including mayors and even deputies. The strike collapsed, the harvest was brought in with police protection, while the UGT and the moderate leaders were accused of letting down the FNTT by inaction.2 Next, also in June, a serious situation arose in Catalonia.
The Catalan government, the Generalidad (which had made little impact since the passage of the Catalan statute), had passed a law, the Ley de Cultivos, which enabled tenant farmers with vines (the rabassaires) in the region to secure a freehold of their farms if they had had them for fifteen years.3 The proprietors complained to the supreme legal body of the republic, the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, which, by a small majority, rejected the Ley de Cultivos on the grounds that the Generalidad could not pronounce on such a matter. But Luis Companys, who, on Colonel Maciá’s death, in December 1933, had become president of the Generalidad, ratified the law of his own accord. In taking this step, which constituted a challenge to the government in Madrid, Companys was encouraged by his new right-wing counsellor for the interior, José Dencás. Dencás, a doctor, was a leader of an extreme separatist group, Estat Catalá, founded by Maciá in 1922, now the main faction of militant Catalan youth. They wanted outright independence. They had a green-shirted militia, the escamots, headed by a reckless terrorist, Miguel Badía, who had spent most of his youth in gaol for an attempt on the life of Alfonso XIII. For a short time in 1934, Companys nevertheless had Badía as police chief. Even without this complication, the predicament of a left-of-centre Catalan government with a right-of-centre one in Madrid was certain to cause difficulties before long. Azaña had spoken in words of caution to Companys as he had earlier done to de los Ríos. Companys had seemed to appreciate the dangers at first but afterwards had been carried away by what he thought the ‘masses’ desired.
The serious constitutional dispute thereby engendered was still simmering when the question of the separatist aspirations of the Basques also came to the fore. The Basques’ financial relations with the central government in Madrid had been dictated by the concierto económico of 1876. This gave the Basques an autonomous fiscal system, by which they taxed themselves and paid a single sum to the state. The municipal councils of the Basque provinces believed that certain laws introduced by Samper’s government threatened the concierto, and decided to hold municipal elections in the three provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Alava, wherein the elected representatives would declare themselves publicly on the question of the concierto. The government forbade that. When, despite this prohibition, the elections were nevertheless held, the new councillors were arrested. A series of wild demonstrations in favour of Basque home rule followed throughout the three provinces. The Basque nationalist party, Catholic and middle-class bourgeois as they were almost to a man, began to embark upon an alliance with the socialists and the Left that was as bizarre as it was fateful. They were disillusioned with the CEDA and sought new sponsors.
While both separatist problems in Spain had become simultaneously acute, the nation was shocked by the news that several cases of arms had been landed in Asturias for the benefit of the socialists by the hitherto ‘moderate’ Prieto, on the steamer Turquesa.1 The government proclaimed a state of alarm; Gil Robles, in a great meeting of his youth movement (JAP), held at Covadonga, the sanctuary in Asturias commemorating where the Visigoth King Pelayo began the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors, announced: ‘We will no longer suffer this state of affairs to continue’. The CNT and UGT, acting together, for the first time for many years, proclaimed a general strike in Asturias, so making it difficult for the CEDA delegates to this meeting to return home to Madrid. A week later, Gil Robles declared that, when the Cortes met in October after the summer, he and his party would no longer support the government of Samper. The implication was that he would himself take power. At this, the UGT issued a statement denouncing Gil Robles, ‘the lay Jesuit’. If the CEDA should enter the government without declaring support for the republic, the UGT ‘would not answer for their future action’. The inference was that the UGT would regard such conduct by the CEDA as the first step towards the establishment of a fascist state in Spain. Largo Caballero then sought to form an alianza obrera, a workers’ alliance, which he hoped would bring together socialists, communists and anarchists; he outmanoeuvred Prieto and other reformists. Prieto told Besteiro that he would have liked to strangle Largo; Besteiro sensibly replied that it would be ‘better to resist him’.2 But even Prieto, de los Ríos and all the moderate leaders were nevertheless soon swept along by a wave of optimistic militancy in which the youth movement played the main part.
Gil Robles’s reluctance to declare his adhesion to the republic derived from a fear of losing many right-wing supporters if he did so, since he would seem to be accepting the still unrevised anti-clerical clauses of the constitution; he needed the monarchists’ financial help and also, perhaps, he had a genuine abhorrence of the republic. But this was the late summer of 1934. The Spanish socialists of the UGT had seen how the German and Austrian socialists had been overwhelmed by Hitler and Dollfuss respectively during the last eighteen months. Where lay the difference between Dollfuss and Gil Robles? Gil Robles did nothing to make it clear.
The time for the reassembly of the Cortes drew near. The atmosphere was worsened by several political murders. On 2 October, Gil Robles withdrew the support of the CEDA from Samper’s government, which resigned. Alcalá Zamora still did not ask Gil Robles to form an administration. Instead, Lerroux was again entrusted with this task. He included three members of the CEDA in his cabinet, though
not Gil Robles himself. Alcalá Zamora still suspected him. Lerroux also had no intention, if he could help it, of letting in a young rival for leadership of Spain’s middle class.1 On the other hand, the President shrank from new elections such as the socialists had expected. Further, he had wanted only one CEDA minister. Gil Robles was strong enough to insist on three.
The reaction was swift and violent. Azaña’s Republican Left party,2 Martínez Barrio and even Miguel Maura denounced the President’s action in handing over the republic to its enemies. In Madrid, the UGT proclaimed a general strike, and certain socialist militants advanced, firing, towards the ministry of the interior in the Puerta del Sol. But the CNT did not. JAPista youth members ensured essential services.3 The countryside was inactive, exhausted by the strikes earlier in the year. The alianza obrera1 only extended in Madrid to the socialists and some communists.2 There was general confusion. Largo Caballero dithered. By the end of the day, the government were masters of the situation, and the socialist leaders had been arrested.