The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Yet the dictatorship can only be measured by the personality of Primo de Rivera himself. He was patriotic, magnanimous, sympathetic, and tolerant, while his physical and his moral courage, in Cuba, the Philippines and Morocco, were well-attested. Once he entered a theatre and began to smoke, while notices everywhere proclaimed that smoking was forbidden; on being informed of this, he rose and announced, cigar in hand, ‘Tonight, everyone may smoke!’ A widower, he would work hard for months on end and then disappear for a lost weekend of dancing, drinking, and lovemaking with gipsies. He would be observed almost alone in the streets of Madrid, swathed in an opera cloak, making his way from one café to another, and, on returning home, would issue a garrulous and sometimes intoxicated communiqué, full of unexpected metaphors and embarrassing confidences, which he might have to cancel in the morning. He desired to run Spain as an enlightened despot, at a time, however, when despotism could only last if it were brutal.

  Primo de Rivera fell in the end partly because he persecuted, but did not crush, the liberal and professional middle class; for example, the affair of ‘La Caoba’ (‘the mahogany girl’) scandalized many. La Caoba was an Andalusian courtesan who, when implicated in a drug case, appealed to Primo de Rivera. The dictator ordered the judge to release her. The judge refused and was supported in this by the president of the Supreme Court. Primo transferred the first, and sacked the latter. Those who protested, such as Unamuno, the philosopher, poet, journalist and professor of Greek, were sent to confinement on the hot Canary island of Fuerteventura. This action was unfortunately symptomatic of Primo’s attitude to law, whose rules he made and broke with impunity. The practice subverted more than his system; it prepared the way for a reckless attitude in the 1930s on the part of the Spanish Right which would have been unheard of in the nineteenth century.

  Primo also offended the army, and even the King, by changes which affected the delicate matter of promotions in the corps of artillery. When the artillery officers tried to protest, Primo closed down the corps and released the men from their oaths of obedience to their officers. Similarly, orthodox bankers were alarmed by Calvo Sotelo’s plans for income tax and, even more, by the Extraordinary Budget, whose aim was to finance public works from loans, the interest upon which would be met out of revenue. Nobody, save the beneficiaries, liked the monopolies for telephones (granted to the American International Telegraph and Telephone Company), the sale of petrol (granted to CAMPSA,1 a group of banks), or tobacco in Morocco (sold to the Majorcan millionaire Juan March), especially when the consequence of the petrol monopoly was to make the country dependent on Russian oil.

  Primo’s consultative and nominated National Assembly drafted a new constitution, in which the elected and the corporative element were combined. The first disturbed the Right, the second was rejected by liberals and the Left. Nor did the King like a scheme which envisaged him sharing his powers of dismissal with a Spanish version of Mussolini’s Grand Fascist Council. So this scheme did not point the way to a return to ‘normality’, such as the dictator expected. When he abolished press censorship, he received a hail of criticism. The students opposed him bitterly. There were two unsuccessful pronunciamientos against him, in Valencia and Andalusia, the one led by a seventy-year-old conservative politician, Sánchez Guerra, the other by the ambitious young General Goded, who had been chief of staff to the victorious field commander General Sanjurjo, in the Moroccan campaign. The era of pronunciamientos seemed to have begun again. The peseta fell, while the slump of 1929 caused the collapse of several of those grandiose financial schemes which Calvo Sotelo had introduced. The coming of cinemas and the radio, and the extension of the use of the telephone and the motor-car raised popular expectations, particularly the cinemas, of which there were more in Spain by 1930 than in France. In the end, desirous of reassurance, Primo took the curious step of addressing a telegram to all the captains-general of Spain, asking them to find out if the senior officers still supported him. They wrote back mentioning their loyalty to the monarch; few mentioned the dictator. The King told Primo that he was Prime Minister not by virtue of the army’s support, but by the King’s command. Alfonso now thought that he might be the saviour of Spain himself and made it plain that he hoped that Primo would retire. He did so. ‘And now,’ the dictator remarked, in the last of his famous communiqués, ‘and now for a little rest, after 2,326 days of continuous uneasiness, responsibility, and labour.’1 He left Spain, and died a few months later in the Hotel Pont Royal, in Paris, alone and unhappy. He was only sixty.

  He left behind him no basis for a régime. For a while, the King attempted to govern as Primo had governed, through a directory of ministers, led by General Berenguer, who had been an able and honest high commissioner in Morocco, but was no politician. It would anyway have tried the most skilful statesman to lead Spain back to the constitution of 1876, as the King desired. Berenguer himself said that he assumed power when Spain was like ‘a bottle of champagne, about to blow out its cork’.2 Republican sentiments spread through the country. Many army officers, as well as the remains of Primo’s Patriotic Union, thought that the King had behaved dishonourably in accepting the dictator’s resignation. Others were now unrepentant republicans. The church was equivocal, with some of its most influential figures concerned (following the still Wilsonian mood of Pope Pius XI) to establish a democratic system if at all possible. Other churchmen were more opportunistic. Neither bourgeoisie nor lower classes had anything to hope for from a continuance of the monarchy. The King, however, was not prepared to establish a royal dictatorship of the Balkan type, and General Berenguer dilly-dallied before calling for elections. In the summer of 1930, a pact was signed at the summer watering-place of San Sebastián between several republican politicians and intellectuals, the socialists, and the advocates of Catalan nationalism. The former conceded autonomy for the Catalans who, in return, agreed to support the republican plots, such as they were. In Madrid, three eminent intellectuals, Dr Gregorio Marañón, Ortega y Gasset and the novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala, formed themselves into a ‘movement for the service of the republic’. Ortega (whose earlier, well-phrased criticisms of parliament had helped Primo) wrote a famous article announcing, ‘Spaniards! Your state is no more! Reconstitute it! ¡Delenda est monarquía!’.3 More importantly, several discontented officers supported the rebels, and even the anarchists, submerged but alive, gave weary sympathy to the bourgeois opponents of the King. In December, a pronunciamiento was prepared. The plotters issued the following statement:

  A passionate demand for Justice surges upwards from the bowels of the Nation. Placing their hopes in a Republic, the people are already in the street. We would have wished to communicate the people’s desires through the due process of Law. But this path has been barred to us. When we have demanded Justice, we have been denied Liberty. When we have demanded Liberty, we have been offered a rump parliament like those of the past, based on fraudulent elections, convoked by a dictatorship, the instrument of a King who has already broken the Constitution. We do not covet the culminating drama of a revolution. But the misery of the people of Spain moves us greatly. Revolution will always be a crime or an act of insanity when Law and Justice exist. But it is always just when Tyranny prevails.

  These republicans were men who not only opposed the idea that a single man, even if a Bourbon, could dismiss and appoint a prime minister, but who also saw in the idea of the abolition of the monarchy a step towards the modernization of Spain.

  The sequel was swift. First, the garrison at Jaca, in Aragon, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, led by two zealous young officers, Captain Fermín Galán and Lieutenant García Hernández, rose against the monarchy before the conspirators in the rest of Spain gave the word. Captured while marching their men in the direction of Saragossa, the two officers were shot for rebellion. The indignation at the executions was great. Elsewhere, the movement failed. A young captain in the air force, Ramón Franco (a national hero because of his pioneering flight in th
e Non Plus Ultra across the south Atlantic to Buenos Aires), set out to bomb the Royal Palace, hesitated, and dropped pamphlets instead; he then fled to Portugal. The signatories of the Pact of San Sebastián were arrested. When they were tried, they defended themselves by saying that the King had broken the constitution by accepting Primo de Rivera as dictator. From their much visited cells, the republicans’ reputation grew. Several small parties were founded to raise enthusiasm for the monarchy: they failed to do so. Primo de Rivera’s Patriotic Union became converted as the Monarchical Union, but defended the memory of the dictator, not the future of the King. General Berenguer hesitantly offered elections. The idea was refused as insincere and the general, ill, resigned thankfully. After unsuccessful negotiations with politicians, the King named as Prime Minister Admiral Aznar, who was unknown and inexperienced. He and the King decided to test opinion by holding municipal, not general, elections in April. In the interim, student riots of a violent kind forced the civil guard on to the defensive.

  These local elections were held in an exuberant atmosphere, and assumed the character of a plebiscite. Huge meetings were addressed all over the country by would-be politicians of every sort. When the final results of the poll on 12 April began to come in, it was obvious that, in all the large towns of Spain, the candidates who supported the monarchy had been defeated. The size of the republicans’ vote in Madrid and Barcelona (then with populations of 950,000 and a million respectively)1 was enormous. In the country, the monarchy gained enough seats to secure for its friends a majority in the nation as a whole. But it was realized that, there, the caciques were powerful enough to prevent a fair vote.2 In several places, a republic was proclaimed—the first being Eibar, in the Basque provinces. By the evening of 14 April, crowds were gathering in the streets of Madrid. The cabinet, aghast and intimidated, advised the King to accept the republican leaders’ advice to leave the capital ‘before sunset’, to prevent bloodshed. Only one minister, Juan de la Cierva (the minister of the interior at the time of the ‘Tragic Week’ in 1909), wanted to resist. If the King had done so, he might have triumphed in Madrid, but he would have found the provincial capitals disposed to fight. A civil war might there and then have followed. At least one of the King’s cousins wanted him to hold on. But Alfonso issued a dignified announcement:

  Sunday’s elections have shown me that I no longer enjoy the love of my people. I could very easily find means to support my royal powers against all comers, but I am determined to have nothing to do with setting one of my countrymen against another in a fratricidal civil war. Thus, until the nation speaks, I shall deliberately suspend the use of my royal prerogatives.

  With these grave and cryptic words, the King drove away from Madrid to the coast, and to exile.

  The experiment of constitutional monarchy tried between 1874 and 1923 failed because it was a defensive political arrangement brought into effect in reaction to the revolutionary confusion of 1868–74. Its statesmen could, to begin with, play on the desire for survival (ansia de vivir), which affects even the poor, after an upheaval. The turbulence revived and Primo de Rivera could for a time count again on that conservative mood. He believed that only an authoritarian system could preside over Spain’s modernization. The succeeding years, particularly after the flight of the King, were again tumultuous, despite their orderly beginning. Thus many came to believe that Primo de Rivera’s work could be continued, in a more well-regulated manner; while others also sought authority, since they feared the future. For the time being, however, the destiny of Spain was in the hands of those who welcomed change and the opportunities it offered.

  3

  ‘This young and eager Spain has at last arrived at its majority,’ exclaimed the republicans rapturously in 1931: a strange comment on one of the oldest nation states and one which had already seen the failure of several attempts at regeneration. The new republic was another such effort. At first, it promised well. After all, the monarchy had been overthrown without bloodshed. A new government took over the ministries in Madrid with ease. The first Prime Minister of the republic was Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a barrister from Andalusia, with the flowery style of eloquence typical of that region. Warm-hearted, honest, erudite and confident, Alcalá Zamora was also vain and meddlesome and, while in Madrid he appeared to love liberty more than life, he seemed the embodiment of the old-time political boss in Priego, his remote home town in Andalusia. Once a minister of the King before Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, chairman of the revolutionary committee set up at San Sebastián, he and others of his cabinet were mobbed by cheering crowds as they drove slowly through Madrid towards the ministry of the interior. Both Don1 Niceto and Miguel Maura,2 who became minister of the interior and was, therefore, immediately responsible for the maintenance of order in the country, were Catholics. They could thus be regarded as expressing the acceptance by a party within the church of the end of monarchy. Was it not rumoured, after all, that ‘the village priests had voted for the republic’ in the famous municipal elections? (But the mayor of one small town had telegraphed the ministry of the interior: ‘We have declared for the republic. What shall we do with the priest?’)

  The other members of the first cabinet of the republic were anti-clerical if not atheist. There were two members of the radical party, which had risen to notoriety in Barcelona in the early years of the century: first, Alejandro Lerroux, son of an Andalusian cavalry vet, the radicals’ founder and, in the nineties, known as ‘the Emperor of the Paralelo’ (the roughest district of Barcelona), was, at sixty-seven, foreign minister of the republic. Age had cooled the passions of this corrupt demagogue. Willing to take a bribe from almost any government or offer one to almost any potential backer, enriched by business, he was no longer the man who had called on his followers in 1905 from the slums of Barcelona to rise against their employers and the church: ‘Young barbarians of today! Enter and sack the decadent civilization of this unhappy country! Destroy its temples, finish off its gods, tear the veil from its novices and raise them up to be mothers! Fight, kill, and die!’1 Lerroux was now an experienced orator, journalist and politician, sympathetic, even affectionate, to his friends, tactful, ever seeking a compromise—if only because he was anxious to be off to the theatre or a banquet. His party had split: many of those who had been radicals in 1910 had become socialists or anarchists. Lerroux was no longer a revolutionary, the radicals were not radical, and few remembered even the days when it was said that ‘a Lerrouxista without his gun is like a Catholic without his rosary’. His inclusion in the cabinet, with his moderate lieutenant, Diego Martínez Barrio, an arch-freemason from Seville,1 however, caused some anxiety among the Spanish hierarchy which was none the less real for being unnecessary. A few years later, a Catholic deputy summed up the radical party as being like the voyage of a ship: ‘people of all ages and conditions, of the most diverse ideologies, brought together merely to travel’.2

  There were, however, a more formidable group of anti-clerical politicians than these radicals, in the first ministry of the Second Republic. These were those professional men who, representing thousands like them, were the heirs of the nineteenth-century liberal reformers of Spain. They were the men of the constitution of Cádiz of 1812, who had sought for a hundred years to limit the power of the religious orders, the great estates, and other restraints on mercantile freedom. They were men whose intellectual outlook had been either directly or indirectly formed by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Education), founded under the Restoration, as a free, and free-thinking, university, then as an enlightened school, by a group of university professors, who had refused to take an oath of loyalty to ‘church, crown, and dynasty’ and were, therefore, deprived of their teaching posts.3 The state of mind inculcated by the Free Institute derived partly from admiration of English toleration, partly from the idealistic pantheism of the German philosopher Karl Krause, whose lectures the first leader of the dissident professors, Sanz del Río, had attended in Berlin. Th
e Institute was at first anti-political. But there has not yet been a period in Spanish history when the advocacy of free thought has been a politically neutral act. Reluctantly, therefore, through their love of truth, these intellectuals, led by Sanz del Río’s successor and disciple, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, were drawn into political attitudes. The Institute was also partly responsible for that renaissance of Spanish culture which followed the loss of the last American colonies in the Spanish American War of 1898 and whose prime mover was distress at Spanish backwardness, complacency and procrastination.4 Later, the spirit of the Institute moved those who were the most formidable intellectual opponents of the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera. Their hope was that the personal contact between teacher and taught would become the model for the university and other ‘institutes’, since the existing establishment, and its college the ‘Residencia’ in Madrid (with its junta of further studies, designed to help Spanish students go abroad), could do no more than influence the middle-class leaders of the future.