The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  In April 1933, municipal elections were held in those areas which had returned monarchists in 1931, and which had been as a result deprived of representation. As in 1931, these elections were as important as national ones. For one thing, they were fought much harder than any other had been in Spain before. In hundreds of pueblos, the great issue was religion, as much as the class war, even though the two matters were often combined. Acting sometimes in anticipation of the government, local councils had often abolished certain processions during fiestas. Municipal bands had sometimes been forbidden to enter the church. Where processions had been allowed, young socialists had proudly said that they would throw those accompanying the floats or carriages into the local river. One priest in Andalusia had also been fined by a socialist magistrate for saying mass in his church whose roof had been destroyed by lightning: he had been charged with making a public display of religion. Another priest was fined as a monarchist for alluding to the Kingship of God in the festival of Christ the King. In one parish, the tolling of bells was taxed, in another the wearing of crucifixes forbidden. Churches were also robbed, and sometimes burned, and nobody seemed to make any attempt to apprehend the malefactors. In a church in a village in Aragon, the ‘Leftists’ soaped the doorway, and watched the faithful in a procession slide about, with ribald laughter. In many places, the names of famous saints or churchmen were removed from streets and squares.

  Then, slowly, a counter-revolution began. Old Spain began to protect the images of the Virgins in processions with armed men, who also stood on the street corners where she might pass. The faithful felt under an obligation to make all religious processions more solemn. Catholic Action began to be organized as a right-wing party designed to maintain the ‘slow traditional ways of doing things’ as opposed to ‘direct progressive and violent ideas and actions’.1

  In the municipal elections of 1933, the government parties returned 5,000 councillors, the Right 4,900, and the Centre opposition, led by Lerroux and his radicals, 4,200. It dawned on both Left republicans and socialists that, even in a democracy, they might lose power. The Right also won victories in the Cortes, particularly over the Rural Leases Bill, because the Left republicans did not attend the debate. Because of Casas Viejas, liberal papers turned against Azaña. In September, elections among municipal officials to elect judges for the Supreme Court gave a substantial majority to candidates opposed to the government. The opposition in the Cortes was vociferous and threatened passive disobedience if the bill forbidding the religious orders to teach were to become law. Exhausted and dispirited, Azaña sought first to reshuffle his cabinet and then, when the President made difficulties, resigned. He did so before the church schools were actually closed, and so they were given a further lease of life. After an unsuccessful attempt by Lerroux to form an administration, his lieutenant, Martínez Barrio, formed a caretaker government, and called for general elections on 19 November.

  Azaña and his friends went to the polls in defence of their achievements: there had been important laws on leases, arbitration, education, religious orders, agriculture, the army, and Catalan home rule. There had been a new and advanced divorce law, as well as one legalizing civil marriage, laws on rights for women, and a more fair system of recruitment for the civil service. There had been a new penal code. In one of the most touching experiments, republican students had, under the inspiration of the aged art critic Manuel Cossío, and the leadership of Luis Santullano, carried out travelling cultural missions into the remotest parts of Spain, bringing to poor peasants free performances of Lope de Vega or readings of García Lorca’s poems. But even so, many were disappointed with the republic: the Agrarian Reform Institute had as yet only installed 4,600 families.1 An expropriation commission was still working its way slowly through the legal problems caused by the dissolution of the Jesuits; it was making poor progress. Like so many others before and since, Azaña had frightened the middle class, without satisfying the workers. His minister of agriculture, Marcelino Domingo, lost votes because of his mismanagement of wheat imports. Above all, political emotions had been everywhere aroused. But the extent of Azaña’s defeat was unexpected.

  The Left lost in 1933 because, first, in a system favouring coalitions, they were disunited—the socialists gained 1,722,000 votes and won only 60 seats while the radicals with 700,000 votes won 104 seats. But the socialists were refusing to collaborate with a ‘bourgeois democracy’ anymore. Secondly, the lavish propaganda of the Right successfully misrepresented the positive work of the republic. There were clearly also some electoral frauds, efforts to intimidate and threats, on both sides. Finally, the introduction of votes for women, for the first time in Spain, profited the Right. Altogether, the parties which had supported the late government gained only 99 seats, of which Azaña’s party, Republican Action, gained only 8.

  As for the Centre, the radicals won 104 seats and the Lliga, the Catalan businessmen’s party, 24. The Right, on the other hand, won 207 seats. Of these 35 were won by an uneasy alliance between Carlists and orthodox monarchists, of whom the latter had been organized under the misleading name Renovación Española, and led by Antonio Goicoechea, an ageing dandy who had been the ‘young Maurista’ leader in 1913, a conservative minister of the interior in 1919, and first president of National Action in 1931. Excluded from that, he had been a conspirator, and imprisoned in consequence, in 1932. In late 1932, he had broken with Popular Action (Acción Popular) as National Action had by then become, and founded a movement of those Catholic, right-wing people who could not accept the ‘accidentalism’ of the Catholic party. There were also 29 ‘agrarians’, representing the interests of the Castilian growers of wheat and olives. But the largest group on the Right, and indeed in the entire Cortes, with 117 seats, was the new Catholic party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas).1 The core of the CEDA was Popular Action. The driving force was Angel Herrera, editor of El Debate, one of whose aims (like both Pope Pius XI and his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli) was to create a christian democratic party in Spain on the model of those successful after 1945 in Germany, Italy, and France. But the anti-clerical character of the constitution meant that the members of the CEDA could not accept the régime as it was then organized, and minor measures of anti-clericalism (such as the secularization of cemeteries, the insistence on civil funeral services unless the deceased had specifically requested Catholic burial in his will, and the cancellation of church parades in the army) caused as much anger as the more drastic laws.

  The CEDA, founded formally in March 1933 as an amalgamation of the many small right-wing Catholic groups which had grown up since 1931, was an alliance, from many points of view. According to its most enlightened member, Manuel Giménez Fernández, some thirty of the CEDA’s deputies were social christians; another thirty monarchists, or conservatives; and the remaining sixty, opportunists.1 José María Gil Robles, the eloquent young barrister who became the leader of the CEDA, had been the parliamentary leader of National, and Popular, Action in 1931 and 1932, and had made his name, still in his early thirties, in the debates on the clerical clauses of the constitution. He had been one of Angel Herrera’s main leader writers on El Debate and was a lawyer for the Jesuits. He continued to explain his position under the name of ‘accidentalism’: it was ‘accidental’ whether Spain had a monarchy or a republic, but it was ‘essential’ that the law should not conflict with the church.2 Hence, he had excluded from the CEDA such monarchists as Goicoechea. Nevertheless, Gil Robles would have liked a restoration and he met with, negotiated with and, when necessary, defended monarchist plotters. Yet he also permitted his followers—small-holders in Castile, the urban middle class (except in Catalonia and the Basque country), some landowners—to greet him at large meetings as Jefe, Leader, as if he were indeed a Duce, or even a Führer. He had visited Germany in 1933 to study Nazi propaganda, had been present at the Nuremberg rally and brought back to Spain some Nazi ideas for political campaigning—the use of radio, t
he dropping of pamphlets from aeroplanes, the well-organized psychological preparation of crowds at great meetings for wildly intoxicating speeches. Gil Robles was an accomplished parliamentarian who, nevertheless, disliked parliament and thought that it might soon be seen to have had its day. His representatives visited the King in Paris, but some of his speeches in 1933 showed sympathy with Dr Dollfuss’s Catholic state in Austria. His vagueness about his ultimate aims, and his reluctance to affirm loyalty to the republic, could only be provocative in the circumstances of the early 1930s, when tales of comparable behaviour elsewhere leading to fascism were frequent.

  His youth movement, the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular), was a hectic and impatient group of señoritos, who openly boasted of their anti-parliamentarianism: ‘the common good cannot be integrated by means of an assembly elected by an inorganic universal suffrage’, they would tell their followers in their journal on 8 December 1934. JAPistas were pressing Gil Robles towards counter-revolution. A dangerous situation was thus developing in Spain in the winter of 1933–4, since the Spanish socialist party, with all the weight of its prestige and its disciplined trade union, was also heading away from constitutionalism.

  This last change derived primarily from disillusion at the way that the Right had successfully used the constitution to block reform. The socialists were also distressed at the way that the constitution which they had helped to write had turned out to be so bad a friend to them at the polls. As expected, Largo Caballero had not been a very successful parliamentarian (unlike Prieto). The influx of peasants of the south into the FNTT, the socialist agrarian federation, also played a part. Those new recruits were closer to anarchism than they were to orthodox Marxism. They were very different from the disciplined factory and building workers of Bilbao and Madrid. Largo Caballero was speaking in language that they relished when he said that ‘If legality is no use to us, if it hinders our advance, then we shall bypass bourgeois democracy and proceed to the revolutionary conquest of power’. Furthermore, the violence of the anarchists in recent months persuaded Largo that he had to match them to win more of the Spanish working class for socialism. This, he believed, could only be done by breaking with the republican, middle-class parties, with whom the socialists had collaborated in the government, and by setting out to be the most extreme of all the Spanish proletarian parties. Actually, his conclusion was wrong, since the internal disputes, and probably the violence also, were causing people to abandon anarchism, which had many fewer followers in 1933 than it had had in 1931. Largo also listened to the arguments of his new advisers, the journalists Luis Araquistain and Julio Álvarez del Vayo, that collaboration with the bourgeoisie was bound to be a mistake.1 Meantime, many younger socialists were anxious for the revolution, and for action: ‘we greatly enjoyed bomb stories’ recalled the socialist youth leader.2

  Among the many new deputies in the Cortes, meantime, elected in 1934 on behalf of small parties, there were two of special interest. These were José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the barrister son of the old dictator, who proclaimed himself a fascist; and Cayetano Bolívar, who was returned as communist deputy for Málaga.

  Spanish fascism had been initiated, while Primo de Rivera was still dictator, by Ernesto Giménez Caballero.1 Beginning life, like most European fascists, as a socialist, this excitable would-be D’Annunzio of Spain had come to admire Mussolini through the influence of Curzio Malaparte, whom he had met in Italy in 1928. Returning to Spain, he propagated a theory of militant ‘latinity’. This attacked everything which had caused the decline of the Mediterranean countries. Germany was viewed at this time by Giménez Caballero with hatred, though, for a while, he surprisingly regarded Russia as an ally of the Mediterranean. But Rome was the centre of Giménez Caballero’s world, being the capital of religion, as well as of fascism. He revised these views after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in 1933.

  Even before that, the Nazis had their admirers in Spain. In March 1931, a poor ex-student of the University of Madrid, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, son of a schoolmaster in Zamora, founded a magazine, La Conquista del Estado (The Conquest of the State). In this he had proclaimed a policy resembling that of the Nazis. Ledesma carried his admiration of Hitler to the extent of copying his quiff. He was otherwise a man of puritan intolerance. In La Conquista del Estado, he announced that he did not seek votes, but ‘the politique of military feeling, of responsibility, and of struggle’. The cadres of the movement were to be ‘military-type teams without hypocrisy before the rifle’s barrel’.2 One man was immediately drawn to this steely programme. This was Onésimo Redondo, who, like Giménez Caballero and Ledesma, was of the middle class, and had studied law at Salamanca. He became a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Mannheim, where he admired ‘the imperturbable ranks of the Nazis’.3 Returning to his native Valladolid in 1931, he briefly worked as organizer of a syndicate of sugar-beet growers, and later founded his own weekly, Libertad, which argued the need for the ‘disciplined reaffirmation of the spirit of old Castile’. In September, Redondo and Ledesma drew together, though the former was a Catholic and conservative, the latter a lower-middle-class radical. In October, they announced the formation of a movement portentously named Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (known as the JONS). The programme was contained in the ‘sixteen points’ of Valladolid of 1931. These included a denunciation of separatism and of class war, the approval of Spanish expansion to Gibraltar, Tangier, French Morocco, and Algeria, and ‘the implacable examination of foreign influences in Spain’.1 Like comparable programmes elsewhere, the document included penalties for those ‘who speculated with the misery and ignorance of the people’, and demanded the control (the ‘disciplining’) of profits. Ledesma and Onésimo Redondo gave a place to the Roman Catholic religion, which they described as embodying the ‘racial’ tradition of the Spaniards. Catholicism seems to have meant the same to Redondo as Aryan blood did to Hitler. But they criticized the church in Spain at the time. They regarded the CEDA, for instance, as the committed ally of ‘reaction’, even though from the beginning the falangists spoke in much the same style as did the leaders of the CEDA youth: thus the JAP’s leader, José María Valiente, wanted to ‘forge new men, a new authentic youth, happy, optimistic, in short, Spanish, and not like that other youth, sad and sour, stuffed with Russian novels, the fitting offspring of the anarchic Generation of ’98’.2 Nor was there much difference between the Falange and the monarchists: ‘What is my position? That of a traditionalist? That of a fascist? A bit of each, why deny it?’ Such were the comments of the monarchist Goicoechea.3

  For the rest of 1931, and all of 1932, the activity of the JONS was slight. Lack of funds hampered them, and the middle class of Spain was still far from desperation. Redondo took a minor part in Sanjurjo’s rising of 1932, though Ledesma despised the officers as reactionaries. Meantime, a more reckless group of richer young men gathered around José Antonio Primo de Rivera.1

  José Antonio was a tall, handsome lawyer, then in his early thirties, unmarried (with an unhappy romance to forget), and filled with a desire to please. His enemies admitted his charm. A communist agreed that he ‘carried a dream in his head … dangerous for him and for our people, but a dream nevertheless’.2 His writings leave the impression of a talented undergraduate who has read, but not digested, an over-long course of political theory. He had begun his career as a monarchist, though he was disgusted at many monarchists’ treachery (as he saw it) to his father. He remained a Catholic. For the paper El Fascio (of which only one issue ever appeared), he wrote, in March 1933: ‘The country is a historical totality … superior to each of us and to our groups. The state is founded on two principles—service to the united nation and the cooperation of classes.’3 A year later, he announced:

  Fascism is a European inquietude. It is a way of knowing everything—history, the state, the achievement of the proletarianization of public life, a new way of knowing the phenomena of our epoch. Fascism has already triumphed in some cou
ntries and in some, as in Germany, by the most irreproachably democratic means.4

  José Antonio was always ready to fight anyone who criticized his father, and his career was in some ways simply an attempt to vindicate the old dictator. From his father, he inherited a contempt for political parties, a belief, instinctive in the father, rationalized in the son, in ‘intuition’—the triumph of experience over intellect. José Antonio’s point of view was paternalist. The liberal state, he said, has meant ‘economic servitude, because it says to the workers with tragic sarcasm: “You are free to work as you wish: no one can force you to accept such and such a condition of work. But as it is we who are the rich, we offer you the conditions we like; if you do not accept them, you will die of hunger in the middle of liberal liberty.”’1 With his charm, his aristocratic disdain for money, his willingness to take risks, José Antonio was a characteristic señorito, or playboy, from Andalusia, whence his family came. But he had a social conscience which was untypical of that milieu. José Antonio’s favourite poem was Kipling’s ‘If’. He would read sections of this, in Spanish, to his followers, before Sunday parades or possible street fights. He launched his own party, the Falange Española, in October 1933, though he was uncertain about his own potential as a leader: ‘The attitude of doubt and the sense of irony which never leaves those of us who have some degree of intellectual curiosity’, he wrote, ‘incapacitates us for shouting the robust, unflinching cries required of leaders of the masses’.2 ‘How I suffer seeing arms raised high saluting me’, he told Ximénez de Sandoval.