The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  There were a multitude of political parties in Catalonia, each dominated by people who, to a lesser or greater degree, rejected the authority of the Castilian unitary state. No party, admittedly, had had a history under Primo de Rivera, either in Catalonia or elsewhere. Even the centres of the once promising party of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Lliga Regionalista, had been closed. But the triumph of the anti-monarchists in the municipal elections of April 1931 was greater at Barcelona than elsewhere. To be precise, furthermore, the victory there had been gained by the Esquerra, a party whose name was the Catalan word for ‘left’. Its leader was an elderly, honourable, romantic colonel, Francisco Maciá, ‘el avi’ (the grandfather), who had spent the dictatorship plotting in France, Latin America and even Moscow. The leader apart, the Esquerra was a party of intellectuals, small businessmen and of the lower middle class of Barcelona.1

  By 1930, the Catalan industrialists had been frightened by the actions of the anarchists in their factories between 1917 and 1923, and by the failure of so many brave enterprises, into alliance with the Spanish orthodox Right. The Catalan upper class had once hoped to regenerate Spain through the revival of Catalonia. Their leader, Cambó, had opposed the old local caciques at the beginning of the century.1 But now he fought the Left and radicals. The Catalan movement had, on several occasions, united both Left and Right in the nationalist cause but the chance of a revival of that common front was now remote.

  In 1913, the provincial councils of the four Catalan provinces had been merged, under Canalejas’s law, for some of their functions, into a precursor of autonomy, the Mancomunidad, which had not affected Spanish sovereignty. It had been abolished by Primo. Would it now be restored? Or would the Esquerra go further? Manuel Carrasco Formiguera called on Catalonia ‘to declare war on Spain’. When the elected councillors in 1931 came out onto a balcony in the Plaza San Jaime, there were heard not only the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘Els Segadors’, the Catalan national anthem, but also cries for an independent Catalan republic. Luis Companys, Maciá’s lieutenant, a young lawyer (who had gained a reputation in the early 1920s for defending anarchists for nugatory fees) proclaimed ‘the Catalan republic’; and Maciá spoke of ‘the Catalan state and republic’ from the same balcony an hour later. So some Catalan-born ministers in Madrid, Nicolau d’Olwer and Marcelino Domingo, with Fernando de los Ríos, made a hasty visit to Barcelona to persuade Maciá to await the passage of a Catalan statue of home rule by the new Cortes (which would shortly be elected). Maciá agreed, although Barcelona was in his hands. No doubt he was wise to be patient, since Barcelona was far from having only Catalan inhabitants: over a third of the city’s population had been born outside Catalonia. Their political views could not be guessed.2

  The honeymoon of the new republic lasted a month. During this time, the republic was caricatured in the press as la niña bonita, the pretty girl, in the style of the happy Marianne north of the Pyrenees; she had first appeared as representing the constitution of Cádiz in 1812. The government made plans for an election in June for a provisional Cortes. That would approve a constitution. Meanwhile, the royal flag of red and gold was changed for a tricolour in red, yellow and purple, the royal national anthem was altered from the ‘Royal March’ to the ‘Hymn of Riego’ (the constitutionalists’ song in 1820), and many streets were rechristened with republican names. Companys, who became the first republican civil governor of Barcelona, destroyed police records of anarchists and common criminals alike. The government published plans for thousands of new primary schools and, on 6 May, decreed that henceforth religious instruction was no longer obligatory in state schools: it would be ‘available’ to those whose parents requested it. The change was a startling one in Spain.

  The enemies of the republic were, nevertheless, gathering. The anarchists took advantage of Maciá’s benevolent attitude and of the lurch of the country away from authoritarianism to settle some old scores in Barcelona, despite their national leadership’s declaration that they were against a return to terrorism. The republic carried out, meantime, no purge of either the national or the local administration, or of the police, the teachers and government agencies. The judiciary remained the same. So, of course, did the army. This combination of inexperienced, reformist politicians and a rather conservative governmental structure left many difficulties ahead.

  Then, though the great depression had been less severe in Spain than in more advanced industrial countries, it did present difficulties all the same, particularly in the mining areas. During the course of 1931, the effect would begin to be felt in Catalonia. Meantime, the return of many workers from abroad, particularly from the Americas, would exacerbate unemployment in the poorer regions, such as Galicia and Andalusia. In the country, unemployment would always be twice as severe as, if less noticed than, in the towns. Yet at this time Spain had no unemployment relief, and her social services were rudimentary in comparison with what existed in northern Europe. Finally, the first shot in a contest between church and state which was to continue until the civil war was the grave but menacing pastoral letter of Cardinal Segura, archbishop of Toledo and primate of the Spanish Church, made public at the beginning of May. This determined prelate combined intelligence with obstinacy. A bishop at thirty-five, he had been translated from his wild Estremaduran diocese by the special intervention of the King. He was a scholar who boasted of three doctorates and, when he undertook social work once a year, he worked as hard as a parish priest. In 1931, he was still under fifty, and at the height of his powers. His letter began with a eulogy of Alfonso XIII and ended with these threatening words:

  If we remain ‘quiet and idle’, if we allow ourselves to give way to ‘apathy and timidity’; if we leave open the way to those who are attempting to destroy religion, or if we expect the benevolence of our enemies to secure the triumph of our ideals, we shall have no right to lament when bitter reality shows us that we had victory in our hands, yet knew not how to fight like intrepid warriors prepared to succumb gloriously.1

  4

  The church in Spain in the 1930s included about 20,000 monks, 60,000 nuns, and 35,000 priests. There were nearly 5,000 religious communities, of which about 1,000 were monasteries, the rest convents.1 Two-thirds of the Spaniards in the 1930s were, however, not practising Catholics—that is, though they might use churches for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, they never confessed or went to mass. According to a Jesuit, Father Francisco Peiró, only 5 per cent of the rural population of New Castile carried out their Easter duties in 1931. In some villages of Andalusia, only 1 per cent of men attended church.2 In some villages, the priest said mass alone. In the rich parish of San Ramón, in Madrid’s suburb of Vallecas, 90 per cent of those educated in religious schools did not confess or attend mass after leaving school.3 Though figures in the country were different, those quoted give statistical support to the unwise remark of Manuel Azaña that Spain had ‘ceased to be Catholic’.4

  Azaña meant that Spain was no longer totally Catholic, as she had seemed, for instance, in the golden sixteenth century. At that time, the church alone had united the provinces. The Spanish Inquisition, instituted as the tribunal of religious orthodoxy, was the only legal body whose writ ran throughout the land. Financed by the wealth brought by the American colonies, the Habsburg kings had sought to realize a Catholic cultural and political unity in Europe never achieved even at the height of the middle ages. The powerful Spanish armies had been used in a new attempted Reconquista—that of Europe from the protestants and of the Mediterranean from the Turks. The Spanish king had proudly buckled on the temporal sword of the counter-reformation, while the Society of Jesus, founded by the Basque Ignatius and always retaining Spanish characteristics, became its theological leaders.

  The golden century of Spain, therefore, when that country joined forever the ranks of those which have been once, however briefly, the greatest on earth, marked also the apogee of the Spanish church. While the church was the link binding the nation together geograph
ically, it also did so socially. Spanish theologians were freed by the absence of a reformation from the arguments about forms of service which wearied the north of Europe. They, therefore, could discuss, in almost modern terms, the relations between citizen and society, and even argue as to the desirability of a more equal distribution of land. Great nations decline, however, for the same reasons which earlier raised them above others. The bastard-medieval aspirations of the Habsburgs exhausted the treasury. The Spanish church’s suspicion of innovation, in addition to the ease with which gold and silver could be imported from America, extinguished the economic vitality of Spain. The tension between christians and newly converted Jews (conversos) gave the intellectual controversies of this period an almost racist flavour; the ‘golden century’ turned leaden long before it was over. Cervantes, writing when the economic consequences of the furious Spanish pursuit of grandeur were being already felt, made Don Quixote, the greatest character in Spanish literature, the archetype of the knight errant in search of vain glory; and the quixotic maintenance of a medieval set of judgements in the new world of post-renaissance Europe swiftly became the mark of the country which had been the first to reveal the real New World beyond the Atlantic. The ideas of social justice preached by the theologians reinforced a pre-commercial outlook as much reminiscent of scholasticism as anticipatory of socialism. The decline of the church continued, so that learned men in the greatest university of Spain, at Salamanca, were solemnly discussing, in the eighteenth century, what language the angels spoke and whether the sky was made of wine-like fluid or bell metal.1 During these years, there was hardly a protestant in Spain, and hardly a critic of the church’s hold over the mind of the nation. Spain possessed, until the eighteenth century, the largest empire in the world. But Spanish culture became, like the customs of the court, over-formal, and declined after the death of Velázquez in 1660. The free institutions of the provinces, once the most living of Spanish things, decayed under the dead hand of the bureaucracy of the Habsburgs and their Bourbon descendants.

  In the eighteenth century, the ideas of the French philosophes began to be popular at the court of the Spanish Bourbons. But, after the collapse of the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars, the church, gaining popularity from its opposition to Napoleon, became the centre of resistance to liberal ideas. Its most violent protagonists grouped themselves into the Society of the Exterminating Angel. The First Carlist War followed.

  The liberals’ greatest success was to disentail the church lands in 1837. Though the church received compensation, it was in cash. The land could not be repurchased from the middle-class speculators who had bought it up. Henceforth, though the church maintained an implacable opposition to liberal ideas, its hold over the working class was reduced.2

  The development of the Free Institute of Education in the late nineteenth century, coincided with, or was inspired by, a revival of the church. The losing battle which Rome had fought in France, Germany, and Italy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century caused the elaboration of a policy to keep at least one country—Spain—‘safe from liberal atheism’. Thousands of Spanish clergy returned from the newly lost colonies of Cuba or the Philippines. Many French and, later, Portuguese priests came too. A burst of religious building followed, with the consolidation of the church’s wealth in capital. The Jesuits and Marianist fathers were, rightly, believed to hold fiefs in all sorts of concerns, from antique-furnishing businesses to, later, dance-halls and cinemas. The interpretation put by the orders upon the modernizing encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI was, indeed, that they permitted the clerical accumulation of clerical capital. A prominent Catalan businessman made a famous calculation in 1912 that the orders controlled a third of the capital in the country. In a popular catechism published in 1927, the question ‘What kind of sin is committed by one who votes for a liberal candidate?’ elicited the answer, ‘Generally a mortal sin’. But the answer to ‘Is it a sin for a Catholic to read a liberal newspaper?’ was, ‘He may read the Stock Exchange News’.1 Yet the new Catholicism was not a cynical movement. Though it favoured the status quo and the better off, it was charitable, evangelical, educational. Certain orders, especially the Jesuits and the Augustinians, had excellent, if conventional, secondary schools (such as that at El Escorial, where Azaña was educated).

  The state claimed to provide primary education free to all and, in every provincial capital, there was a state secondary school often poor in quality. But the schoolmasters were mainly Catholics, and children spent much time saying the rosary. (Schools were too few—in 1930 in Madrid alone there were 80,000 children who did not go to school.) Through its authority in the state schools as well as those run by orders, the church was able to maintain its influence over the young. The liberals’ attempt to change this had won some concessions but, in the end, failed. As in France at the turn of the century, the position of the church in both the education and hence the general culture of the country was becoming a matter of obsession for those who rejected it. Workers came to think of the orders’ missions in working-class suburbs as the most pernicious of evils, particularly if they had a state subsidy and even more if, under the guise of education, they seemed to peddle a false ethic to the ignorant. Writers such as Manuel Azaña or the film maker Luis Buñuel could not forget the priests, even if they rejected religion.

  As for the church, when Cardinal Segura made his attack on the republic in May 1931, he did not speak for all his flock. Many members of the hierarchy and the orders might be as monarchist as the primate, through fear of what might come rather than from loyalty to what had passed away. But the educated Catholics who wrote for the Madrid newspaper El Debate favoured a more liberal Catholicism which might perhaps capture the urban proletariat. Cardinal Segura had denounced El Debate as a ‘liberal rag’. A controversy occurred between El Debate and the monarchist ABC during the first weeks of the republic over the ‘accidentalist’ interpretation which the first gave to the republic: namely, that, while the church was eternal, forms of government were temporal. ABC regarded that attitude as cowardly.

  Thus no clear statement can be made of the political attitude of the church as such. It was true, certainly, that, since the confiscation of ecclesiastical lands during the previous century, the orders had been capitalists. But many monks and most priests (except for those in fashionable quarters of large cities) received as small a wage as their parishioners.1 The hierarchy was rightly regarded as the ally of the upper classes. But the village priest, and even the priest in a poor part of a big town, was often looked upon as a comparatively amiable counsellor who could, sometimes with success, intervene with the authorities on behalf of the oppressed. The Spanish working class, however, were maddened when a priest showed himself hypocritical, by flagrantly contradicting Christ’s teaching on poverty, or showing himself a respecter of well-born persons. Then no fate would be considered too unpleasant for him, and his church would be in danger of fire. (Asked for the keys of his church by anarchist incendiarists during the events of 1909, the priest of Palamós cunningly replied: ‘Certainly, let’s burn the church, but let’s also burn the factory. Both of us will thus lose our daily bread. Let’s begin with the factory.’ The priest started off down the hill, but in the end neither edifice was attacked.)1 During the riots of 1909, the working class of Barcelona showed ignorance of, as well as interest in, what transpired in nunneries. Some of these mysterious buildings were supposed to harbour the bodies of martyred girls, as well as stocks and shares. But the corpse exposed in the school of the sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Puerto Seco turned out to be that of the embalmed Leonor of Aragon who died before 1450. It was also widely supposed that nuns must be rich if they were able to live a contemplative life. Every nunnery was thus held to be a ‘conspiracy against democracy’.

  It was always rare, even in moments of revolution, for villagers to kill their own priest or to burn his church, unless he were known as a friend of the bourgeoisie. In those circumstances,
even then, the act would often be left to people who might come in from other pueblos. It was certainly uncommon for Spaniards to destroy the effigy of a local Virgin or a local church. The archbishop of Valladolid once remarked that ‘these people would be ready to die for their local Virgin, but would burn that of their neighbours at the slightest provocation’.2 Still, in the Tragic Week of 1909, workers carried away with hatred of religion had beheaded and quartered religious images, prised open tombs, and sought above all to destroy. The secretive orders continued to be held responsible for every cataclysm; a belief which suited, and was stimulated by, anarchists and republican anti-clericals alike.

  The Spanish church in the twentieth century embarrassed the Vatican. The public demonstrations of superstition seemed not to show a true religious spirit.3 Pope Pius XI was in 1931 at least as liberal as the Madrid writers on El Debate. His secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, was already toying with those ideas for christian democratic parties which he brought to more successful fruition when Pope (as Pius XII) after the Second World War. When, on 22 May 1931, the government issued a decree proclaiming religious freedom, Cardinal Segura travelled to Rome, where Pope Pius suggested to him that the tactful caution of the nuncio, Monsignor Tedeschini, was the best policy for the church in Spain. But Segura made a public attack from Rome on the government. His reputation was not enhanced when, a month later, he returned secretly across the Pyrenees, without passing a customs post. He reached Guadalajara before being apprehended. The government then escorted him from the country, under guard. (It had become known that Segura had been interested in selling ecclesiastical treasures to help the church to build up a fund with which to fight the republic.) The cardinal did not return to Spain until 1936. After some delicate diplomacy, Monsignor Gomá, a scholar who had been bishop of Tarazona, was named to succeed him as primate and archbishop of Toledo.1