Chapter 1: Social War Begins
Rising tensions between left and right
"The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.
This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.
Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers including El Debate, soon began to publish the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. The editor of the scurrilously satirical Gracia y Justicia was Manuel Delgado Barreto, a one-time collaborator of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his son José Antonio and an early sponsor of the Falange. It would reach a weekly circulation of 200,000 copies
The Republic would face violent resistance not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT recognized that many of its militants had voted for the Republican–Socialist coalition in the municipal elections of 12 April and that its arrival had raised the people’s hopes. As one leading anarchist put it, they were ‘like children with new shoes’. The CNT leadership, however, expecting the Republic to change nothing, aspired merely to propagate its revolutionary objectives and to pursue its fierce rivalry with the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which it regarded as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. In a period of mass unemployment, with large numbers of migrant workers returning from overseas and unskilled construction workers left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the dictatorship, the labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the hard-line anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) who argued that the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order.7"
"In late May, a group of nearly one thousand strikers from the port of Pasajes descended on San Sebastián with the apparent intention of looting the wealthy shopping districts. Having been warned in advance, the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, deployed the Civil Guard at the entrance to the city. They repelled the attack at the cost of eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. It was defeated by harsh police measures and strike-breaking by workers of the Socialist UGT who refused to join the CNT in what they saw as a sterile struggle. The Director General of Security, the sleek and portly Ángel Galarza of the Radical-Socialist Party, ordered that anyone seen trying to damage the installations of the telephone company should be shot. Maura and Galarza were understandably trying to maintain the confidence of the middle classes. Inevitably, their stance consolidated the violent hostility of the CNT towards both the Republic and the UGT.8
For the Republican–Socialist cabinet, the subversive activities of the CNT constituted rebellion. For the CNT, legitimate strikes and demonstrations were being crushed by dictatorial methods indistinguishable from those used by the monarchy. On 21 July 1931, the cabinet agreed on the need for ‘an urgent and severe remedy’. Maura outlined a proposal for ‘a legal instrument of repression’ and the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, proposed a decree to make strikes illegal. The two decrees would eventually be combined on 22 October into the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a measure enthusiastically supported by the Socialist members of the government not least because it was perceived as directed against their CNT rivals.9 It made little difference to the right, which perceived the violent social disorder of the anarchists as characteristic of the entire left, including the Socialists who denounced it and the Republican authorities who crushed it."
"While most of Spain remained peaceful, from the earliest days of the Republic an atmosphere of undeclared civil war festered in the latifundio zones of the south and in other areas dominated by the CNT. Miguel Maura claimed that, in the five months from mid-May 1931 until his resignation in October, he had to deal with 508 revolutionary strikes. The CNT accused him of causing 108 deaths with his repressive measures.27...At the cabinet meeting of 21 July, the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, demanded that Miguel Maura take firm action to end the disorders which were damaging the Republic’s image. When the Prime Minister, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, asked if everyone was agreed that energetic measures against the CNT were called for, the cabinet assented unanimously. Maura told Azaña that he would order artillery to demolish a house from which anarchists had fired against the forces of order.28
Meanwhile, on the night of 22–23 July 1931, extreme rightists were permitted to take part in the repression of the strikes in Seville. Believing that the forces of order were inadequate to deal with the problem, José Bastos Ansart, the Civil Governor, invited the landowners’ clubs, the Círculo de Labradores and the Unión Comercial, to form a paramilitary group to be known as the ‘Guardia Cívica’. This invitation was eagerly accepted by the most prominent rightists of the city"
"The events in Seville and the telephone strike were symptomatic of clashes between the forces of order and the CNT throughout urban Spain. In Barcelona, in addition to the telephone conflict, a strike in the metallurgical industry saw 40,000 workers down tools in August. The activist FAI increasingly advocated insurrection to replace the bourgeois Republic with libertarian communism. Paramilitary street action directed against the police and the Civil Guard was to be at the heart of what the prominent FAI leader Juan García Oliver defined as ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. This inevitably led to bloody clashes with the forces of order and with the more moderate Socialist UGT. The consequent violence in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid, although directed against the government, was blamed by the right on the Republic.31"
"Unfortunately for the Republican–Socialist coalition, for an increasing number of middle-class Spaniards the excesses of the army and the Civil Guard were justified by the excesses of the CNT. On 18 January 1932, there was an insurrection by miners who took over the town of Fígols in the most northerly part of the province of Barcelona. The movement spread to the entire region of northern Catalonia. The CNT immediately declared a solidarity strike. The only place outside Catalonia where there was any significant response was Seville. There, the CNT, with the backing of the Communist Party, called a general strike on 25 and 26 January. The strike was total for the two days and public services were maintained by the Civil Guard. The accompanying violence convinced the Socialists that there were agents provocateurs in the anarchist movement working to show that the government was incapable of maintaining order. On 21 January, Azaña also declared in the Cortes that the extreme right was manipulating the anarchists. He stated that those who occupied factories, assaulted town halls, uprooted railway tracks, cut telephone lines or attacked the forces of order would be treated as rebels. His response was to send in the army, apply the Law for the Defence of the Republic, suspend the anarchist press and deport the strike leaders from both Catalonia and Seville. Inevitably, CNT hostility against the Republic and the UGT intensified to a virtual war.63"
"The immediate reaction of the rightist press was favourable, echoing its customary applause for the Civil Guard’s repression of the rural proletariat.78 However, when they realized that political capital could be made, rightist groups cried crocodile tears and echoed anarchist indignation. Before the full details of the massacre were known, all three Socialist ministers, especially the moderate Indalecio Prieto, had given Azaña their support for the anarchist rising to be suppressed.79 However, despite their hostility to the anarchists, the Socialists could not approve of the gratuitous brutality displayed by the forces of order. To make matters worse, the officers responsible claimed falsely that they had been acting under orders. They were backed up to devastating effect by the future leader of the Unión Militar Española. Captain Barba Hernández was on duty the night of 8 January 1933. When the scandal broke out, he defended his friend Captain Rojas Feijespan by claiming that Azaña had personally given the order ‘shoot them in the belly’. Seized upon by the right-wing press, the fabrication did immense damage to the Republican–Socialist coalition.80 Casas Viejas and its repercussions brought home to the Socialist leadership the cost of participation in the government. They saw that the defence of the bourgeois Republic against the anarchists was sacrificing their credibility with the Socialist masses."
"Workers – especially in the countryside – were being forced into increasing militancy by the employers’ refusal to comply with social legislation. As long as the Socialists had a presence in the government and could offer the prospect of reform, the unions would still respond to calls for discipline and patience. However, for some time, Alcalá Zamora had been seeking an opportunity to get the Republican–Socialist coalition out of power. This was partly because of discomfort with the Socialists and personal incompatibility with Manuel Azaña. In early September, despite a parliamentary vote of confidence for Azaña, the President invited the corrupt leader of the Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux, to form a government. Unable to face parliament without certain defeat, he governed with the Cortes closed. Landowners were quickly delighted by the forbearing stance of the new Ministers of Agriculture, Ramón Feced Gresa (a property registrar by profession) and of Labour, Ricardo Samper (a Radical from Valencia). The new Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, named several reactionary civil governors who permitted most of the Republic’s social legislation to be more or less ignored. To the detriment of local workers, cheap labourers were brought into the southern provinces from Galicia. Infractions of the law were not punished.86 Inevitably, the dwindling Socialist faith in bourgeois democracy was further undermined."
"During the first two years of the Republic, the left had been appalled by the vehemence of opposition to what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation. After the elections of November 1933, however, the flimsy foundations of a socially progressive Republic laid down in that period were to be ruthlessly torn up as the right used its victory to re-establish the repressive social relations obtaining before 1931. That the right should have the opportunity to do so was a cause of great bitterness within the Socialist movement. In large part, it was their own fault for having made the elemental mistake of rejecting an electoral alliance with the Left Republican forces and thus failing to take advantage of the electoral system. They now believed that the elections had no real validity. The Socialists had won 1,627,472 votes, almost certainly more than any other party running alone could have obtained. With these votes, they had returned fifty-eight deputies, while the Radical Party, with only 806,340 votes, had obtained 104 seats. According to calculations made by the secretariat of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the united right had gained a total of 212 seats with 3,345,504 votes, while the disunited left had won ninety-nine seats with 3,375,432 votes.88 That the right gained a parliamentary seat for fewer than 16,000 votes while left-wing seats ‘cost’ more than 34,000 was certainly galling, although that did not alter the fact that the main factor in determining the results was the party’s own tactical error in failing to take advantage of a system which favoured coalitions.
However, the Socialists had other, more substantial reasons for rejecting the validity of the elections. They were convinced that in the south they had been swindled out of parliamentary seats by electoral malpractice. In villages where one or two men were the sole source of employment, it was relatively easy to get votes by the promise of a job or the threat of dismissal. For many workers on the verge of starvation, a vote could be bought for food or a blanket. In Almendralejo (Badajoz), a local aristocrat bought votes with bread, olive oil and chorizo. In many villages of Granada and Badajoz, those who attended left-wing meetings were beaten by the landowners’ estate guards while the Civil Guard stood by. The new Civil Governors named by the Radicals were permitting ‘public order’ to be controlled by armed thugs in the service of the landowners. Sometimes with the active assistance of the Civil Guard, at other times simply with its benevolent neutrality, they were able to intimidate the left. In the province of Granada, Fernando de los Ríos and other candidates faced violent disruption of their campaign. In Huéscar, De los Ríos was met with a volley of rifle-fire and, in Moclín, his car was stoned by rightists. At Jérez del Marquesado, the local caciques (bosses) hired thugs whom they armed and filled with drink. De los Ríos was forced to abandon his planned meeting when he was warned that they planned an attempt on his life. At the remote village of Castril, near Huéscar, a meeting being addressed by María Lejárraga and De los Ríos was disrupted by the simple device of driving into the crowd some donkeys laden with logs. In Guadix, their words were drowned out by the persistent ringing of the nearby church bells. In the province of Córdoba, in Bujalance, the Civil Guard tore down left-wing election propaganda. In Montemayor, Encinas Reales, Puente Genil and Villanueva del Rey, Socialist and Communist candidates were prevented by the Civil Guard from giving election speeches. On the eve of the elections, there was an attempt on the life of the moderate Socialist leader Manuel Cordero. In Quintanilla de Abajo (Valladolid), local workers demonstrated against a fascist meeting. The Civil Guard searched them and, when one said that his only weapons were his hands, they broke his arms with rifle butts.89"
Religious conflict/dehumanising views of leftists
"In the consequent atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, there was a ready middle-class audience for the notion long since disseminated by extreme right-wing Catholics that a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the Communist Third International was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. In Catholic Spain, the idea that there was an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging their interests. In this paranoid fantasy, Freemasons were smeared as tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world."
"In 1912, the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League had been founded by José Ignacio de Urbina with the support of twenty-two Spanish bishops. The Bishop of Almería wrote that ‘everything is ready for the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’.2 That there was never any hard evidence was put down to the cleverness and colossal power of the enemy, evil itself."
"Spain’s middle and upper classes were chilled, and outraged, by the various revolutionary upheavals that threatened them between 1917 and 1923. The fears of the elite were somewhat calmed in September 1923, when the army intervened again and a dictatorship was established by General Miguel Primo de Rivera"
"These ideas essentially delegitimized the entire spectrum of the left, from middle-class liberal democrats, via Socialists and regional nationalists, to anarchists and Communists. This was done by blurring distinctions between them and by denying their right to be considered Spanish. The denunciations of this ‘anti-Spain’ were publicized through the right-wing press and the regime’s single party, the Unión Patriótica, as well as through civic organizations and the education system. These notions served to generate satisfaction with the dictatorship as a bulwark against the perceived Bolshevik threat. Starting from the premise that the world was divided into ‘national alliances and Soviet alliances’, the influential right-wing poet José María Pemán declared that ‘the time has come for Spanish society to choose between Jesus and Barabbas’. He claimed that the masses were ‘either Christian or anarchic and destructive’ and the nation was divided between an anti-Spain made up of everything that was heterodox and foreign and the real Spain of traditional religious and monarchical values.3"
"On 13 October 1931, the Minister of War, and later Prime Minister and President, Manuel Azaña, stated that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic.’10 Even if this was true, Spain remained a country with many pious and sincere Catholics. Now, the Republic’s anti-clerical legislation would provide an apparent justification for the virulent enmity of those who already had ample motive to see it destroyed. The bilious rhetoric of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy was immediately pressed into service. Moreover, the gratuitous nature of some anti-clerical measures would help recruit many ordinary Catholics to the cause of the rich.
The religious issue would nourish a second crucial factor in fostering right-wing violence. This was the immensely successful propagation of theories that left-wingers and liberals were neither really Spanish nor even really human and that, as a threat to the nation’s existence, they should be exterminated. In books that sold by the tens of thousands, in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the idea was hammered home that the Second Republic was foreign and sinister and must be destroyed. This notion, which found fertile ground in right-wing fear, was based on the contention that the Republic was the product of a conspiracy masterminded by Jews, and carried out by Freemasons through left-wing lackeys. The idea of this powerful international conspiracy – or contubernio (filthy cohabitation), one of Franco’s favourite words – justified any means necessary for what was presented as national survival. The intellectuals and priests who developed such ideas were able to connect with the latifundistas’ hatred for the landless day-labourers or jornaleros and the urban bourgeoisie’s fear of the unemployed. The Salamanca landowner Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, like many army officers and priests, was a voracious reader of such literature.11"
"Both at the time and later, the right-wing determination to annihilate the Republic was justified as a response to its anti-clericalism. However, as had been amply demonstrated by its enthusiastic support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the right hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical. Moreover, those who opposed the Republic on religious grounds also cited social, economic and political grounds, especially in opposition to regional autonomy.24
Nevertheless, the religious issue was the occasion of intense conflict, both verbal and physical. On Sunday 10 May 1931, the inaugural meeting of the Circulo Monarquico Independiente in the Calle Alcalá ended with loudspeakers provocatively blaring out the Royal Anthem. Republican crowds returning from an afternoon concert in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro were outraged. There was a riot; cars were burned and the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC in neighbouring Calle Serrano were assaulted. The fierce popular reaction spilled over into the notorious church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante from 10 to 12 May. This suggested how strongly ordinary people identified the Church with the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. Indeed, it was claimed that, to discredit the new regime, young monarchists had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings.25
Even if there were agents provocateurs involved, many on the left were convinced that the Church was integral to reactionary politics in Spain and physical attacks were carried out in some places by the more hotheaded among them. In many villages in the south, priests had stones thrown at them. For those on the right, the identity of the true culprits mattered little. The church burnings confirmed and justified their prior hostility to the Republic. Nevertheless, Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, commented bitterly: ‘Madrid’s Catholics did not think for a second that it was appropriate or their duty to make an appearance in the street in defence of what should have been sacred to them.’ There were serious clashes in many small towns (pueblos) where the faithful protected their churches from elements intent on profaning them. Later in May, when the provisional government decreed an end to obligatory religious education, there were many petitions in protest."
"The unease thereby fomented among the middle classes was consolidated among Catholics by the anti-clericalism of the Republic. Little distinction was made between the ferocious iconoclasm of the anarchists and the Republican–Socialist coalition’s ambition to limit the Church’s influence to the strictly religious sphere. Right-wing hostility to the Republic was mobilized fully, with clerical support, in the wake of the parliamentary debate over the proposed Republican Constitution. The text separated Church and state and introduced civil marriage and divorce. It curtailed state support for the clergy and ended, on paper at least, the religious monopoly of education. The proposed reforms were denounced by the Catholic press and from pulpits as a Godless, tyrannical and atheistic attempt to destroy the family.32 The reaction of a priest from Castellón de la Plana was not uncommon. In a sermon he told his parishioners, ‘Republicans should be spat on and never spoken to. We should be prepared to fight a civil war before we tolerate the separation of Church and State. Non-religious schools do not educate men, they create savages.’33
The Republic’s anti-clerical legislation was at best incautious and at worst irresponsible, perceived on the right as the fruit of Masonic-inspired hatred. Republicans felt that to create an egalitarian society, the power of the Church education system had to be replaced with nondenominational schools. Many measures were easily sidestepped. Schools run by religious personnel continued as before – the names of schools were changed, clerics adopted lay dress. Many such schools, especially those of the Jesuits, tended to be accessible only to the children of the rich. There was no middle ground. The Church’s defence of property and its indifference to social hardship inevitably aligned it with the extreme right.34
Substantial popular hostility to the Republic’s plans for changes in the social, economic and religious landscape was garnered during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. Bitter right-wing opposition to the Constitution passed on 13 October was provoked by plans to advance regional autonomy for Catalonia and to introduce agrarian reform.35 Nevertheless, it was the legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders – seen as evil Masonic machinations – that raised Catholic ire.36 During the debate on 13 October 1931, the parliamentary leader of Acción Popular, José María Gil Robles, declared to the Republican–Socialist majority in the parliament, the Cortes, ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, in the Plaza de Toros de Ledesma, Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic.37"
"The idea that leftists and liberals were not true Spaniards and therefore had to be destroyed quickly took root on the right. In early November 1931, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea declared to a cheering audience in Madrid that there was to be a battle to the death between socialism and the nation.40 On 8 November, the Carlist Joaquín Beunza thundered to an audience of 22,000 people in Palencia: ‘Are we men or not? Those not prepared to give their all in these moments of shameless persecution do not deserve the name Catholic. We must be ready to defend ourselves by all means, and I don’t say legal means, because all means are good for self-defence.’ Declaring the Cortes a zoo, he went on: ‘We are governed by a gang of Freemasons. And I say that against them all methods are legitimate, both legal and illegal ones.’ At the same meeting, Gil Robles declared that the government’s persecution of the Church was decided ‘in the Masonic lodges’.41"
"In the eyes of the right, ‘communism’ included the Socialist Party and Freemasonry signified the various Republican liberal parties and their regional variants known as Left Republicans.4"
"Justification for hostility to the Republic could easily be found in its efforts to secularize society. Distress had been caused by the fact that municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In January 1932, Church cemeteries came under municipal jurisdiction. The state now recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding also had to visit a registry office. Burial ceremonies were to have no religious character unless the deceased, being over the age of twenty, had left specific instructions to the contrary, something involving complicated bureaucracy for relatives.44"
"In May 1932, during the feast of San Pedro Mártir in Burbáguena (Teruel), a brass band played in the town square, thereby deliberately clashing with the religious music being sung in the church in honour of the saint. In Libros (Teruel), a dance was organized outside the parish church while a mass was being said in honour of the Virgen del Pilar.45 In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession. Their members were predominantly militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and their gesture popularized among right-wing Catholics the phrase ‘Seville the martyr’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see the processions go ahead. Vociferous complaints came from the same men who were also prominent in employers’ and landowners’ organizations. In the event, only one cofradía marched and was the target of insults and stones. Some days later, on 7 April 1932, the Church of San Julián was burned down.46
Some local municipalities removed crucifixes from schools and religious statues from public hospitals as well as prohibiting the ringing of bells. Such measures went beyond official government policy, which was that municipal permission was required for public ceremonies. Perceived as persecution, they caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. In many villages in the province of Salamanca, there were street protests and children were kept away from school until the crucifixes were returned. Ordinary Catholics were upset when, in late September 1932, the ringing of church bells was prohibited in Béjar for mass, weddings or funerals. Elsewhere, many left-wing alcaldes (mayors) levied a local tax on bell-ringing.47 In Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), the Mayor imposed fines on women wearing crucifixes. In the socially conflictive province of Badajoz, numerous incidents, such as the prohibition of funeral processions, incited hatred. In Fuente de Cantos, the Mayor imposed a tax on bell-ringing of 10 pesetas for the first five minutes and 2 pesetas for every minute thereafter. In Fregenal de la Sierra, bell-ringing was forbidden altogether and a tax levied on Catholic burials. There were church burnings in several villages. In Villafranca de los Barros, the Socialist majority of the town council voted in April 1932 for the removal of the statue of the Sacred Heart from the main square.48
Religious frictions were quickly exploited by the right. Processions became demonstrations, pilgrimages became protest marches, and Sunday sermons became meetings which often provoked anti-clerical reactions, sometimes violent.49 It was but a short step from the rhetoric of persecution and suffering to the advocacy of violence against Republican reforms portrayed as the work of a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot.50 In later years, Gil Robles would admit that he had deliberately set out to push his audiences towards conflict with the authorities. In April 1937, when Acción Popular was being dissolved and incorporated by Franco into his new one-party state, Gil Robles claimed proudly that the reserves of mass rightist belligerence which he had built up during the Republic made possible the victory of the right in the Civil War. He saw this ‘splendid harvest’ as the fruit of his own propaganda efforts. He was still taking pride in this achievement when he published his memoirs in 1968.51"
"This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’.55 Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath.56 The often explicit conclusion was that the rural proletariat should be disciplined in the same way as the colonial enemy in Morocco, and there were calls for the Civil Guard to be reinforced with crack motorized units.57"
"Azaña observed in his diary that Spanish public opinion was now divided between those who hated the Civil Guard and those who revered it as the last-ditch defender of the social order.60 After Arnedo, Sanjurjo declared that the Civil Guard stood between Spain and the imposition of Soviet communism and that the victims were part of an uncultured rabble that had been deceived by malicious agitators.61 His words after Castilblanco and the Civil Guard’s revenge reflected the way in which the cruelty and savagery of the Moroccan wars was imported into Spain and used against the working class. Sanjurjo, however, was not the first person to note the link. The Asturian miners’ leader, Manuel Llaneza, wrote after the repression of the revolutionary general strike of 1917 of ‘the African hatred’ with which the military columns had killed and beaten workers and wrecked and looted their homes.62"
Land Reform
"The agrarian oligarchy, in an unequal partnership with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, was traditionally the dominant force in Spanish capitalism. Its monopoly of power began to be challenged on two sides in the course of the painful and uneven process of industrialization. The prosperity enjoyed by neutral Spain during the First World War emboldened industrialists and bankers to jostle with the great landowners for political position. However, with both menaced by a militant industrial proletariat, they soon rebuilt a defensive alliance. In August 1917, the left’s feeble revolutionary threat was bloodily smothered by the army. Thereafter, until 1923, when the army intervened again, social ferment occasionally bordered on undeclared civil war. In the south, there were the rural uprisings of the ‘three Bolshevik years’. In the north, the industrialists of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias, having tried to ride the immediate post-war recession with wage-cuts and layoffs, faced violent strikes and, in Barcelona, a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals.
"Another factor which fomented violence was the reaction of the landowners to the Second Republic’s various attempts at agrarian reform. In the province of Salamanca, the leaders of the local Bloque Agrario, the landowners’ party, Ernesto Castaño and José Lamamié de Clairac, incited their members not to pay taxes nor to plant crops. Such intransigence radicalized the landless labourers.12 Across the areas of great estates (latifundios) in southern Spain, Republican legislation governing labour issues in the countryside was systematically flouted. Despite the decree of 7 May 1931 of obligatory cultivation, unionized labour was ‘locked out’ either by land being left uncultivated or by simply being refused work and told to comed República (literally ‘eat the Republic’, which was a way of saying ‘let the Republic feed you’). Despite the decree of 1 July 1931 imposing the eight-hour day in agriculture, sixteen-hour working days from sun-up to sun-down prevailed with no extra hours being paid. Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired. Although there were tens of thousands of unemployed landless labourers in the south, landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic.13 In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’.14 Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards."
"In fact, what the landowners were doing was merely one element of unequivocal right-wing hostility to the new regime. They occupied the front line of defence against the reforming ambitions of the Republic. There were equally vehement responses to the religious and military legislation of the new regime. Indeed, all three issues were often linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.19"
"Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.20 Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democratic legitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable."
"Gil Robles’s rhetoric during the Republic reflected the feelings and the fears of his most powerful backers, the big landowners or latifundistas. Their outrage at the sheer effrontery of landless labourers in daring to take part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–21 reflected their sense of social, cultural and indeed near-racist superiority over those who worked their estates. That the Republican–Socialist coalition should declare its intention to improve the daily lot of the wretched day-labourers implied a sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months of the Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain."
"Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, evidence mounted that the Republic’s social laws were simply being ignored. Official labour exchanges and the arbitration committees known as mixed juries were bypassed and work offered only to men who would tear up their union cards. Land was withdrawn from cultivation. There were ever more cases of landowners shooting at workers. A meeting of the national committee of the UGT was held in mid-June to consider the drift to anarchist and Communist organizations of members frustrated by Socialist efforts to maintain worker discipline in the face of provocation.85"
Sanjurjo coup
"Among the civilian participants in the coup were many of those who had been involved in the Guardia Cívica responsible for the events in the Parque de María Luisa in July 1931. There is no sign that they were deterred by their failure in 1932. Indeed, several of them, along with the officers involved, would be prominent in the events of the summer of 1936.66 Sanjurjo was tried for treason on 25 August in the Military Section of the Supreme Court. The acting president of the court, Mariano Gómez González, had no choice but to issue the death sentence, but he recommended a pardon with the sentence reduced to expulsion from the army.67 Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexican President, sent a message to Azaña: ‘If you wish to avoid widespread bloodshed and make the Republic live, shoot Sanjurjo.’ In cabinet, Azaña successfully argued in favour of Mariano Gómez’s recommendation. No one was shot, and Sanjurjo and others were imprisoned and eventually released.68"
"Despite loud protests about the allegedly excessive prison sentences meted out, the right was sufficiently emboldened by the relatively feeble punishments to intensify preparations for a successful venture next time.69"
"Unfortunately, the left became over-confident, seeing the Sanjurjada as the equivalent of the Kapp putsch of March 1920 in Berlin. Since Sanjurjo, like Kapp, had been defeated by a general strike, many believed that the defeat of the Sanjurjada had strengthened the Republic as Kapp’s failure had strengthened Weimar. Nothing was done to restructure guilty units. In contrast, the right learned much from Sanjurjo’s fiasco, especially that a coup could not succeed without the collaboration of the Civil Guard and that the Republican municipal authorities and trade union leaders had to be silenced immediately."
"Above all, the conspiratorial right, both civilian and military, concluded that they must never again make the mistake of inadequate preparation. In late September 1932, a conspiratorial committee was set up by Eugenio Vegas Latapie and the Marqués de Eliseda of the extreme rightist group Acción Española and Captain Jorge Vigón of the General Staff to begin preparations for future success. The theological, moral and political legitimacy of a rising against the Republic was argued in the monarchist journal Acción Española. The group operated from the Biarritz home of the monarchist aviator and playboy Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Considerable sums of money were collected from rightist sympathizers to buy arms and to finance political destabilization for which unnamed elements of the CNT–FAI were put on the payroll. A substantial amount was also spent each month on the services of a police inspector, Santiago Martín Báguenas. He had been a close collaborator of General Emilio Mola, who had headed the Dirección General de Seguridad (the General Directorate of Security) in the last months of the monarchy. Martín Báguenas was now hired to provide an intelligence service for the conspirators and he in turn employed another of Mola’s cronies, the even more corrupt policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla. Another of the principal objectives of the new committee was the creation of subversive cells within the army itself, a task entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Valentín Galarza Morante of the General Staff.71"
1933 election
"On the day after the election, Margarita Nelken sent a telegram to the Ministry of Labour protesting that a group of thugs led by the Radical Mayor of Aljucén in Badajoz had opened fire on groups of workers, killing one, seriously wounding two and wounding several more.91 Margarita was herself manhandled at gunpoint after a speech in the Casa de Pueblo of Aljucén. At voting stations, Civil Guards obliged workers to exchange their voting slips for ones already marked in favour of right-wing candidates. There was significant falsification by the right – votes bought with food and/or blankets, intimidation of voters, repeat voting by truckloads of right-wing sympathizers and the ‘misplacing’ of boxes of votes from places with known left-wing majorities. The consequence was that the PSOE won only the three seats allotted to the minority block for the province – Margarita Nelken, along with fellow Socialists Pedro Rubio Heredia and Juan-Simeón Vidarte.92
Throughout the south, glass voting urns and the louring presence of the caciques’ thugs made the secret ballot irrelevant. In some provinces (particularly Badajoz, Málaga and Córdoba), the margin of rightist victory was sufficiently small for electoral malpractice to have affected the results. In Granada, there were nine towns where the rightist majority was an implausible 100 per cent, two where it was 99 per cent and a further twenty-one where it was between 84 and 97 per cent. After the elections, the Minister of Justice resigned, in protest at the level of electoral falsification.93 Across the south, the landowners returned to the semi-feudal relations of dependence that had been the norm before 1931."