Even if Mola’s political plans for the post-rising regime were somewhat more sophisticated than this description allows (see below), the young officer in Morocco could easily see the need for pacifying the mainland.
—Things couldn’t be allowed to continue as they were. The burning of churches, armed hold-ups, censorship of the press, surveillance of private mail. And if that wasn’t enough, there was separatism. Not only in Catalonia and the Basque country, for by now regions which had never before considered it, like Andalusia and Castile, were infected …
This viewpoint, expressed by Lt Julio de la TORRE of the Foreign Legion, was shared by many young officers; it was among them that the determination to rise was the strongest. ‘The senior officers, the old men, were prepared to put up with the situation, to see what would happen.’ Many of the junior officers felt sympathetic to the Falange.
—We saw there the principles of discipline and order, the sense of the Fatherland. Although I wasn’t a member, I felt that the Falange represented my ideals. It was evident after the Popular Front elections that the influence of communists and masons was increasing daily – even in the Army of Africa! In order to get a decent posting you had to be a mason – most of the people who held high civil and military posts were members …
Another threat faced the Army of Africa, according to Lt de la TORRE: a sergeants’ revolution. Communist organization among legionary NCOs was having its effect; cells already existed.
—We feared they were going to stage a rising. There was a moment in March or April 1936, when regulares had to be brought in to surround certain legionary units. The sergeants had been promised by the communists that they would be promoted to officers … 100
The Popular Front victory served to increase the strength of the soldiers’ and corporals’ organization in Madrid. In ABAD’S No. 6 infantry regiment, the number enrolled rose to about 300. Popular Front committees, in which soldiers of all anti-fascist parties and organizations participated, were also set up. ABAD attended the first conference of the anti-militarist organization of the Madrid garrison, under communist party auspices, on 1 January 1936. During the threatened uprising that spring, the soldiers’ and corporals’ organization was on full alert, taking over the barracks’ main entrances and the armoury.
It was not only communist party members who organized among the troops. Revolutionary workers of other organizations formed barracks committees when called up for military service. Such was the case of Ramón FERNANDEZ, a POUM carpenter from Barcelona, who was posted in October 1935 to an infantry regiment in Jaca, Aragon. It was the regiment which Capt. Fermín Galán and Lt García Hernández had led out on an abortive attempt to overthrow the monarchy in December 1930; both were executed as a result. FERNANDEZ became one of an eight-member barracks committee which ‘controlled’ one of the companies and the detachment in charge of the artillery accompaniment.
—We knew that a major and a lieutenant were the head of the UME in the barracks. We managed to lay our hands on documents they were circulating about the need for an uprising. When we took these documents to republicans and socialists in the town they simply laughed. They didn’t believe any of it …
His barracks committee laid plans in case the regimental officers attempted to rise. The men would seize the armoury, then harangue the troops and open fire on ‘anyone wearing an officer’s hat’. One night the men were awoken by the sound of firing. They took over the armoury – a corporal member of the committee had the key – only to find that the noise came from a sandal factory in town which had caught fire: the asbestos sheeting on the roof was exploding from the heat.101
During the spring of 1936, the UME grew rapidly, claiming some 3,400 officers on active service and 1,800 reserve or retired officers.102 Most of the groups, however, functioned more or less in isolation. Its opposite number, the republican military anti-fascist union, UMRA (Unión Militar de Republicanos Anti-fascistas), was smaller. Capt. ORAD DE LA TORRE, who was a member, estimated that at best it had something like 200 officers, most of them in Madrid.
—But if there were few officers, there was a greater number of warrant officers and sergeants, for UMRA was open to other ranks. In about 1933 we received an anonymous letter threatening all UMRA officers with death. We took no notice. But on 9 May 1936, Capt. Carlos Faraudo, a member officer, was gunned down in the street as he was walking with his five-year-old daughter. The reason for his assassination was that he had been training the socialist militia – as though that were a reason. It was then that we drew up a statement saying that we would not reply in kind on our brother officers, but rather on a politician if such an assassination were repeated … 103
As the pre-revolutionary ferment grew throughout the spring, attitudes in the officer corps began to harden, as they did amongst their civilian counterparts. Violence between left-wingers and officers increased. Socialists and anarchists were resolutely anti-militarist; and the left was in no doubt as to the threat of a military rising. The slogan of a red army had been raised in the May day parade in Madrid. The rumours of a communist plot to establish a soviet in Spain were widely believed by right-wing officers. And yet the bulk of the peninsular officer corps was not prepared to rise.
Officers were now jeered at by the middle classes for their refusal to take action. Invited to a military dance in Madrid, middle-class women threw chicken feed on the floor to show their disgust at the officers’ ‘cowardice’.104 The bourgeoisie looked to the army to defend it yet again. When Laura KELLER, who was pregnant, went to a clinic in Madrid for a check-up, the gynaecologist looked at her officer husband.
—‘And you officers – what are you doing?’ he asked my husband as we went up in the lift. The gynaecologist was very right-wing, had attended the queen in the past. But ever since the Popular Front elections, people had been saying things like that to my husband, thinking that because he was an officer he must be right-wing …
Mola hoped to be able to stage the rising by the end of June. In one of his first directives, he made explicit the means and ends of the operation: ‘It will be borne in mind that the action, in order to crush as soon as possible a strong and well-organized enemy, will have to be very violent. Hence, all directors of political parties, societies, or unions not pledged to the movement will be imprisoned: such people will be administered exemplary punishments so that movements of rebellion or strike will be strangled.’105
Mola planned to retain a republican regime – but under a five-man directorate which would exercise power ‘in all its amplitude’. The 1931 Constitution would be suspended, the president of the republic and the government dismissed, and all laws not in accord ‘with the new organic system of the state’ abrogated. All political and social organizations and sects which were ‘inspired from abroad’ would be outlawed. Among Mola’s ‘social’ points were: the separation of church and state and freedom of worship; unemployment pay; the abolition of illiteracy; a public works and irrigation programme, and a solution to the agrarian problem based on smallholdings and collective farming where possible. All the directorate’s decrees would be approved in the future by a constituent parliament ‘elected in a manner to be determined’.106
Sanjurjo, now in exile in Lisbon, would be president of the directorate. The difficulties of organizing the rising when only a minority of the officer corps in the peninsula was willing actively to participate led to the postponement at the end of June. Despite protestations to the contrary, the Madrid government was aware that something was afoot. In June two cavalry regiments were transferred from Madrid because of doubts about their loyalty. On 29 June the director of the security forces travelled in person from Madrid to Pamplona with a large police escort, ostensibly in search of contraband arms. Mola had been warned the day before by his contact, the Madrid chief of police, and had taken precautions.107
Well aware that the rising could not be a pronunciamiento in the old military style, Mola had sought civilian support: in his plan a
twin military–civilian structure to the rising was envisaged. However, this led to imbroglios with the Carlists and, to a lesser extent, with the Falange. The Carlist leadership broke off relations with him because they were not assured of being in charge of the new state’s ‘organic and corporative’ reconstruction and because the rising was to take place under the republican, not monarchist flag.108 Agreement was reached only two days before the rising in Morocco, on the basis of an anodyne compromise suggested by Sanjurjo. Meanwhile José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, was both suspicious of military conspirators and concerned by the postponement of the rising. From his prison in Alicante he demanded that a firm date be fixed. Mola set a new date: 12 July.
During June, Mola had sent four messages to Franco; none of them had received an answer. On 23 June, Franco wrote a letter to the premier and war minister, Casares Quiroga, in which he suggested that the left’s anti-military campaign was sapping the army’s spirit, and protested against the removal of right-wing officers. He warned the premier of the peril involved ‘for the discipline of the army’. This letter, as Hugh Thomas observes, ‘was a final statement by Franco “before history”, that he had done his best to secure peace, though he must have known that little could be done at that late hour’.109
Preparations were still not completed by 12 July. The dispute between the Carlists and Mola was still unsettled. On 14 July, Mola received a coded message from Madrid that Franco was not going to participate. By then Mola had sent a message to the Army of Africa to prepare for the rising from 2400 hours on 17 July. On 15 July a new message was received rectifying the previous one concerning Franco.110 While the error was no doubt due to garbled communications, it was certain that Franco had not finally made up his mind to join the rising until a few days before.
The assassination of Calvo Sotelo in reply for the murder of Lt Castillo in Madrid ensured that, whatever the outcome, the rising could be postponed no longer. But even then, only two days before the event, Eugenio VEGAS LATAPIE, editor of the monarchist Acción Española, discovered that the officers of the artillery academy in Segovia had received no instructions. Nor had his brother who was an officer in the signals regiment stationed at El Pardo outside Madrid.
—It was the day after Calvo Sotelo’s funeral. I was talking to an artillery major in Segovia when his father, a retired colonel, insulted his son in front of me for not having risen yet. ‘If I were a young officer I wouldn’t tolerate this situation a moment longer.’ It impressed me that an old man, who would normally be concerned only to lead a quiet life, should be inciting his son to action like that …
1. It was, of course, not the only possibility. A different model in the post-war Franquista era had the desired effect, using the mechanisms of repression to ensure low agrarian wages, and the black market to ensure high profits which, via the banking system, were transferred into industrial development. See J. Leal, J. Leguina, J. M. Naredo, L. Tarrafeta, La agricultura en el desarrollo capitalista español (Madrid, 1975).
2. See E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, pp. 77, 223, 359. Also J. Martínez Alier, ‘¿Burguesía débil o burguesía fascista?: La España del siglo XX,’ Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico (Paris, January-June 1975).
In 1936, the agrarian reform bulletin referred to the evolution of a ‘half-feudal, half-bourgeois agriculture towards a capitalist agriculture’. It quoted thirty-four cases of feudal dues and services which had been abolished over the past three years. J. Maurice, citing this (in his La reforma agraria en España en el siglo XX, Madrid, 1975), adds that only one of these cases referred to Andalusia. This is hardly surprising, since historically feudalism had not established itself in Andalusia. The contemporary confusion about the ‘semi-feudal’ noble character of the latifundia can perhaps best be explained by: (a) the fact that by far the greatest part of the upper nobility’s land holdings was concentrated in the latifundist regions; (b) the fact that the rural bourgeoisie adopted seemingly ‘aristocratic’ (extensive, undercapitalized, unmechanized) modes of farming. ‘The large domains were managed without initiative or imagination … their owners failed to apply modern farming techniques and the rate of capital investment in the land was minimal’ (Malefakis, op. cit., p. 78). That the bourgeois landowning class ‘displayed little of the enterprising spirit that distinguished its counterparts in north-western Europe’, did not prevent its being a capitalist class. The problem lay in the full development of capitalist farming, not in the introduction of capitalism into farming. (Capitalist economic rationale underlay even the apparently ‘backward’ extensive system of farming known as ‘al tercio’ compared to the more intensive ‘año y vez’ which reduced fallows. Without mechanization, the former was more profitable than the latter. See J. Naredo, ‘Estudio de las motivaciones del paso del cultivo al tercio al de año y vez’, typescript, Madrid, no date.)
3. The problem was expressed in the provisional republican government’s first declaration of principles. ‘Private property is guaranteed by law and is consequently not expropriable except for public utility with due indemnity. Nevertheless, the government, conscious of the conditions in which the immense mass of peasants live … adopts as a norm of policy the recognition that agrarian legislation should correspond to the social function of the land.’ (Cited in Malefakis, op. cit., p. 166.)
4. To the thirteen latifundist provinces (see Map, p. 20) had been added Almería, to the east of Granada, as a result of its great poverty rather than because it contained many large estates (see Malefakis, op. cit., p. 217, n. 19).
5. Grandees owned 38,522 hectares in the province (Maurice, op. cit., p. 93) out of a total of 633,000 hectares of farms above 50 hectares in size (C. de Castro, Al servicio de los campesinos (Madrid, 1931), cited in Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, vol. 1, p. 273). Between 1933–4, effectively the only period of active agrarian reform until after the Popular Front electoral victory, 33 per cent of the grandees’ land was expropriated and 883 land workers settled on the 13,000 hectares (Maurice, op. cit., p. 131).
6. Landless labourers, peasants owning less than 10 hectares, tenants and sharecroppers working less than 10 hectares, and legally constituted agricultural workers’ societies were entitled to be settled on the land, to which the state retained the property rights. The societies’ members could choose whether they would form collectives or work the land in individual plots. ‘However, at the end of one article it was explicitly stated that if a workers’ society in any municipality demanded that expropriated land be handed over to be worked collectively, the demand had to be met,’ recalled VERGARA. But believing that the peasants did not favour this solution, sponsored by the socialist Landworkers’ Federation, he ignored it and distributed the land in individual holdings.
7. ‘A predominantly rural country does not generate sufficient National Income to repay, in a few years, the capital which has produced that income. This was the nub of another problem’(VERGARA). None the less, despite its backward economy, Spain at the time had the world’s fourth largest gold reserves. Obsessed by financial orthodoxy – the first two years of republican regime ended with budget surpluses – the Agrarian Reform Institute (IRA) was allocated only 50 million pesetas a year, little more than 1 per cent of the national budget and less than half of what was spent on the guardia civil. To develop capitalist farming was going to require capital; agrarian reform did not receive it. After three years of operation, the IRA had managed to spend less than half the budget allocated.
8. A number of socialist-sponsored decrees, including the municipal boundaries law, in the first months of the republic, increased real wages and ‘swung the balance of legal rights from the landowners to the rural proletariat’ (see Malefakis, op. cit., p. 70).
9. For particular cases of the rural bourgeoisie’s political ‘shirt-changing’ see p. 358; also Fraser, In Hiding, p. 112.
10. See Balcells, Cataluña contemporánea II (1900–1936), p. 127 et seq.
> 11. See Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, vol. 1, pp. 123–4. See also Militancies 3, pp. 94–7, for an Andalusian anarcho-syndicalist day-labourer’s reasons for rejecting agrarian reform.
12. Of nine estates taken over in Seville province, six were worked collectively; in Toledo province, four out of nine. When the IRA decided that four estates in Espera (Cádiz) should be worked individually rather than collectively because the collective was not making a profit, there were well-publicized clashes between partisans of both solutions. Otherwise the question seems to have been peacefully resolved.
13. J. Maurice, ‘Problemas de la reforma agraria en la segunda republica’, in Sociedad, politica y cultura en la España de los siglos XIX-XX (Madrid, 1973).
14. Cited in Maurice, ibid.
15. The schematic use of the terms ‘provincial’ and ‘urban’ in connection with two sectors of the petty bourgeoisie is patently arbitrary, but is an attempt to differentiate between ‘small town’ life and that in the major capitals. Obviously, members of each sector could be found in the other’s geo-social location, and the usage should be considered descriptive rather than analytic.
16. See also Militancies 10, pp. 313–16.
17. The question of whether a petty bourgeois base for fascism in Spain existed before the war was posed by Andreu Nin, the POUM leader. Unless the revolution were made, he wrote in February 1936, the petty bourgeoisie, which was unable to resolve its own problems, would ‘throw itself into the arms of reaction – and in that case, fascism will have found the social base it has lacked until now’. (‘Después de las elecciones del 16 de febrero’, in Los problemas de la revolución española.) Nin did not pursue the analysis. Theoretically, the absence of a large industrial petty bourgeoisie deeply marked by the contradictions of capitalist development, empirically, the very slow growth of the Falange prior to the 1936 elections, and the mass support for the clerical-conservative CEDA (significantly, the Vatican continued to back the CEDA when it had abandoned the Italian and German Catholic parties for Mussolini and Hitler), suggest the accuracy of Nin’s perception that such a base did not exist at that moment. However, a close analysis of the class, for which data is unavailable, would be necessary to confirm his supposition.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 88
