The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  The conditions of the country and the régime were as grave as Gil Robles suggested, even if the figures seemed suspiciously precise, and even if some of the disorder caused was the work of the Right: the building of El Ideal, a right-wing newspaper in Granada, had been apparently burned by young men of the upper class and there was other provocation.3 In addition to the violence, men at both extremes of the political spectrum were being drilled for fighting, as military formations. ‘All out on Sunday’ was an instruction by a score of political leaders. Neither Casares Quiroga nor Gil Robles, representing groups which had been prominent in the history of the Second Republic,4 could control events. Both, indeed, were sustained in the Cortes by the votes of deputies whose aims were different from their own. The elections of the preceding February had been contested by two alliances: the Popular Front, and the National Front. Besides the liberals like Casares, the former had consisted of the large socialist party, the small communist party, and other working-class groups. Behind the socialist party there was the powerful trade union, the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores),1 one of the best organized workers’ movements in Europe. The National Front consisted not only of the CEDA, but also of monarchists, agrarians, representing the large landowners of the south and centre, and some other right-wing parties. It was the political front for all the forces of old Spain, the army, as well as of the church and the bourgeoisie.

  The Popular Front had gained the day in February 1936 though, by the Spanish electoral law, their majority of seats in the Cortes was greater than their total of votes cast would have entitled them under a strict system of proportional representation. Not all the parties which had shared in the electoral alliance took part in the government. Indeed the government was composed of liberal republicans,2 while it depended for its majority upon the working-class parties. This is never a recipe for strong government. It was peculiarly unhappy in Spain in 1936, when the latter were already in a perpetual state of revolutionary effervescence; and, apart from those who cooperated with the democratic system so far as to contest seats in the Cortes, there remained, outside, the great army of nearly two million anarchist workers, chiefly in Andalusia or Barcelona, organized in the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo),3 and directed by a secret society, the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica).4 This huge, self-absorbed and passionate movement, already throbbing like a great city at war, despised the progressive government of Casares Quiroga as much as it had in the past hated the governments of the Right. Then there was the army. Who in that early summer in Madrid had not heard rumours of plots by generals, to establish ‘order’ or even a military dictatorship? Indeed, after Gil Robles had finished speaking in the Cortes, a socialist deputy declared that the churches were being burned by agents provocateurs to justify just such a rebellion.

  The socialists were divided. Some were reformists. Some were intellectual fabians. A few were revolutionaries. Some were dazzled by the flattery of communists, some were aghast at the recent rise of communist influence. But all could agree with the accusations levelled at the Right by their spokesmen.

  When their cheering had died down, the monarchist leader, Calvo Sotelo, proudly rose. Like Casares Quiroga, he was a native of Galicia; but also, like Casares, he lacked the dispassion for which that green region is celebrated. Had he gipsy blood? Was he as strong a man as his handsome face suggested? A Spanish Roosevelt, or a cleverer, Spanish Mussolini? All people knew for certain was that he was ruthless, eloquent, and able. On leaving the University of Saragossa in 1915 he had been private secretary to Maura,1 the high-minded conservative Prime Minister of Alfonso XIII. Shortly afterwards, Maura made him civil governor2 of Valencia at twenty-five. General Primo de Rivera gave him the ministry of finance at thirty-two. Prudently spending the first years of the republic in Paris to escape condemnation for the financial mistakes of the dictatorship, he returned to Spain only when the republic had begun to founder. Elected to the Cortes as a monarchist, he believed above all in his own star. The eclipse of Gil Robles had been his gain. Already experienced and at the height of his powers, he spoke as if the future of Spain were in his hands.3

  The disorder in Spain, he said, in a speech punctuated by interruptions, was the result of the democratic constitution of 1931. No viable state, he believed, could be built upon that constitution.

  Against this sterile state [he went on] I am proposing the integrated state, which will bring economic justice, and which will say with due authority: ‘no more strikes, no more lock-outs, no more usury, no more capitalist abuses, no more starvation wages, no more political salaries gained by a happy accident,1 no more anarchic liberty, no more criminal conspiracies against full production’. The national production will be for the benefit of all classes, all parties, all interests. This state many may call fascist; if this be indeed the fascist state, then I, who believe in it, proudly declare myself a fascist!

  When the ensuing storm of derision and applause had died down, he went on:

  When I hear talk of the danger from monarchist generals, I smile a little, for I do not believe (and you will grant me a certain [he paused] moral authority for this assertion), that there is, in the Spanish army, a single soldier disposed to rise on behalf of a monarchy and against the republic. If there were such a person, he would be mad—I speak with all sincerity, mad indeed, as would be any soldier who, before eternity, would not be ready to rise on behalf of Spain, and against anarchy—if that should be necessary.

  Calvo Sotelo had already secretly committed himself to support a military rising if it should come.2 The Speaker of the Cortes, the swarthy Diego Martinez Barrio, requested Calvo Sotelo not to make such announcements, since his intentions could be misunderstood. The Speaker was an experienced politician of obscure birth from Seville, who had been once briefly Prime Minister. Now he was leader of the Republican Union party. Open, sympathetic, but vain, he had hitherto successfully represented in his political life the idea of compromise. This was so rare in Spanish affairs that his enemies attributed his rise to his occult power as a freemason of the thirty-third grade.

  With deliberation, the Prime Minister answered Calvo Sotelo:

  After Your Excellency’s3 words, the responsibility for whatever happens will be yours. You come here today with two aims only: to condemn parliament as impotent, and to inflame the army, trying to detach units from their loyalty to the republic. But I give my assurance. Parliament will work. The army will do its duty.

  The most famous Spanish communist, Dolores Ibarruri, known as ‘La Pasionaria’ (the passion flower), spoke next. Always dressed in black, with a grave but fanatical face which caused the masses who listened to her speeches to suppose her a revolutionary saint, she was now forty. Years before, as a girl, she had been a devout Catholic. In those days she had wandered from village to village in the Basque provinces, selling (according to one account) sardines from a great tray which she bore on her head.1 But Dolores la Sardinera married a miner from Asturias, one of the founders of the socialist party in northern Spain. Personal tragedies accumulated—three of her daughters died in infancy—against a harsh background of struggle.2 She transferred her devotion from the Virgin of Begoña to the prophet of the British Museum Reading Room. The Right spread rumours that she had once cut a priest’s throat with her own teeth. She was to become a great orator, and was already an artist in words and timing. But her personality was less strong than it publicly appeared and her enemies on the Trotskyite Left explained the success of her oratory as attributable to secret Svengalis sent from Moscow. She was nevertheless a simple, direct, and powerful woman who had been to prison many times—three times under the republic—and twice to Moscow too. In the Cortes, she stood out as the only striking leader in the small if growing Spanish communist party. There were only seventeen communist deputies, all ‘unknown and ignorant’ in the view of Indalecio Prieto, a socialist moderate, and, outside, the party had 130,000 members at most.3

  More important, La Pasionaria also r
epresented the idea of revolutionary womanhood, a strong force in a country which had given the Virgin a special place in religion. As long ago as 1909, women in Barcelona had been the most eloquent, daring and violent among strikers, church-burners and looters of nunneries.4

  When La Pasionaria spoke in the Cortes on 16 June, she dismissed the fascists of Spain as gangsters. But was there not a ‘fascist international’, directed from Berlin and Rome, which had already designated a day of reckoning in Spain?

  A Catalan businessman, Juan Ventosa, next expressed his alarm at the apparent optimism of the Prime Minister. Ventosa, twice finance minister under the King, had been in politics for many years and was the political lieutenant of Francisco Cambó, the great financier of Barcelona and one of the richest men in Spain. It was said that Cambó’s wealth had already been transferred abroad. The question was, was it wiser, from the point of view of the flight of capital, to seem hopeful or concerned? The government could never decide. Joaquín Maurín, leader of the rebel communist party known as the POUM,1 announced next that there existed already a pre-fascist situation in the country. Then Calvo Sotelo rose once more to answer the Prime Minister:

  My shoulders are broad [he said]. I do not shun, indeed I accept with pleasure, the responsibility for what I do … I recall the answer given by St Dominic of Silos2 to a Spanish king: ‘Sire, my life you may take from me, but more you cannot take’. Is it not, indeed, better to perish gloriously, than to live in contempt? But I, in turn, bid the Prime Minister to reckon up his responsibilities; if not before God, since he is an atheist, at least before his conscience, inasmuch as he is a man of honour.

  He spoke then of the roles of Kerensky and Karolyi in delivering Russia and Hungary over to communist revolution:

  My honourable friend will not be a Kerensky, since he is not unconscious of what he is doing. He possesses full knowledge of what he conceals, and of what he thinks. God grant that he will never be compared with Karolyi, the conscious betrayer of a thousand-year civilization!

  Calvo Sotelo sat down. As he did so, shouts and applause rang through the chamber. ‘That’s your last speech,’ La Pasionaria is supposed to have shouted.

  The reverberations of this debate, with its threats and warnings, echoed all over Spain. They found their way to the President, Manuel Azaña, the embodiment of the republic, gloomily watching the collapse of his hopes from the rich loneliness of the National Palace.1 They found their way to those generals who for so long had been employing their ample leisure with tactical schemes for a military rising against the government. They reached, too, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the old dictator and leader of the Spanish fascists, the Falange, in his prison in the port of Alicante, whither he had been vainly sent on a trivial charge, virtually as a hostage for the good behaviour of his followers. They reached to that other group of Spaniards whose aspirations lay outside the Cortes, the anarchists. They found their way to most of the 24 million people who then formed the population of Spain. The questions in every mind as the summer mounted, as the bull-fight season attained its meridian, were: ‘How long will this go on?’ ‘Will there be a revolution?’ and ‘Could it be war?’ For while there had been no civil wars in most of Europe since the seventeenth century, Spain, the one major European country to have kept out of the Great War, had fallen back into conflict within her national frontiers three times in the previous century.

  2

  This debate in the Cortes was the culmination of the several passionate quarrels as to how Spain should be governed which had continued since 1808. In that year, the enfeebled monarchy made an abject surrender before Napoleon. The British under the Duke of Wellington helped the Spanish people to drive out the French in the ensuing War of Independence. The Bourbons were brought back in the loathsome person of Ferdinand VII. But the monarchy was no longer sacrosanct. For almost three centuries before 1808, Spain had been the most untroubled of European countries; from then on, it would be among the most turbulent of them.

  The history of the succeeding half-century was marked by a struggle over the constitution. The contestants were the church and the army, the two Spanish institutions which had survived with credit from the War of Independence, the former being conservative, the latter honeycombed with free-thinking masonic lodges. Throughout, this dispute was almost war.1 In 1820, liberal officers forced a constitution upon King Ferdinand who, in 1823, brought in a French army, the ‘hundred thousand sons of St Louis’, to do away with it. In 1834, the quarrel turned into the First Carlist War, when the church, and the advocates of regional rights in the north, rallied to the cause of Don Carlos, the brother of the dead Ferdinand. Carlos claimed the throne in the place of his infant niece, Isabella II, Ferdinand’s daughter. The latter was championed by the liberals and the army, both representing the claims of Castile to dominate the Peninsula. This war of religion and of secession ended in 1839, when the liberals won, but peace took the form of a compromise between the armies of both sides. Carlist officers were permitted to join the regular Spanish army. Partly as a result (and partly because the confiscation of the church’s lands in 1837 reduced the influence of that institution), the quarrel between liberals and clerical conservatives took the form thereafter of a succession of coups d’état (pronunciamientos) by one general after another.

  This curious era ended in 1868, when Queen Isabella, a nymphomaniac, was herself expelled by the greatest of Spain’s liberal generals, Prim. If the occasion of her departure was her excessive reliance on Father Claret, her confessor, the real cause was a revolt against the style of government over which Isabella and her ‘Court of Miracles’ had vaguely presided. The succeeding seven years were confused. A brother of the King of Italy, the Duke of Aosta, was brought in as King Amadeo I. This attempt at bourgeois monarchy could not contain the violence rearoused between liberals and conservatives, newly in arms. Amadeo abdicated. The First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. This republic was at first intended as a federal one, in which the provinces would have substantial rights. But the intellectuals who planned this were powerless to ensure the survival of authority of any kind. In the north, the Carlists rose again under a grandson of the Old Pretender, and were generally supported by the church throughout the Peninsula. In the south and south-east, many coastal towns proclaimed themselves independent cantons. Once again, the army eventually took power. While restoring order, the generals decided that there was no alternative save to bring back Queen Isabella’s son, then a cadet at Sandhurst, as King Alfonso XII.

  A constitution was promulgated in 1876. Thanks to favourable European conditions of trade, Spain was prosperous in the 1880s. Universal male franchise was nominally introduced. But the results of the elections were always defrauded by an informal pact, the turno pacífico, between the two main parties, carried out by the agency of the minister of the interior and local political bigwigs, the caciques. The people of Spain came to look upon the parliamentary system, a deliberate imitation of English practice, as a means of excluding them from politics. Alfonso XII, meanwhile, died young in 1885, at the age of twenty-eight, leaving a posthumous son, Alfonso XIII, for whom his mother, María Cristina, ruled as Regent till 1902.1

  The ‘pious fraud’ of the constitution was one reason for the spread of revolutionary ideas throughout the working class. By the time of the First World War, there existed in Spain two general trade unions. The first, the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo),2 was inspired by the anarchist ideas of the Russian Bakunin; the second, the UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores),3 was Marxist, though reformist and not revolutionary. The socialists of the UGT collaborated with the political system so far as to seek election to the Cortes and, in the cities, where the caciques’ manipulation of votes became increasingly difficult, succeeded in gaining election. But the anarchists saw the constitution as unclean; and the violence, murders, and lightning strikes undertaken intermittently by the anarchist militants kept the governments in turmoil. Both these working-class movements
desired to regenerate Spain through education, superior public morality, pacifism and anti-clericalism, as much as through politics.

  Two other problems, however, caused the collapse of the constitution established at the restoration. The first was that of Catalonia. Many Catalans aspired to a recognition of their separate character from the rest of Spain. Catalonia had continued, after Spanish unification, to live as a region of its own and to look to its own capital of Barcelona, never to Madrid. The ‘Catalan question’ became acute because of the industrial development of that capital during the nineteenth century. Irritation with the incompetence of the government at Madrid led the new rich of Barcelona at the end of the century to embrace Catalan nationalism. This, together with the anarchist faith of the workers, the high rates of illiteracy and the demagogic atmosphere inculcated by a centralist, opportunist, but wild Radical party,4 made Barcelona (growing fast in population) at the turn of the century the most turbulent city in Europe: the ‘city of bombs’. The great strike in Barcelona in 1902 and that in Bilbao in 1903 were major battles in which the nerves of all were fully extended. The ornate architecture favoured by the prosperous bourgeoisie was the lavish backcloth to a mounting series of anarchist crimes. ‘In Barcelona, a revolution does not have to be prepared,’ wrote the civil governor, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, ‘since it is always ready.’1 Meantime, aspirations similar to those of Catalonia began to be echoed in the more tranquil Basque provinces, where a comparably self-sufficient bourgeoisie was becoming rich from iron, banking and commerce.