A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections’. Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.
Challenges to the system did arise, however, and they were linked to the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialisation and to the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, especially in the countryside. Land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as the southern labourers came under the influence of anarchism. The arrival of anarchism in the 1860s had given a sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Its message of justice and equality found eager converts among the starving day labourers or braceros. They took part in outbreaks of sporadic violence, crop-burnings and strikes. In January 1892, an army of braceros, armed only with scythes and sticks but driven by hunger, seized the town of Jerez. Anarchism also took root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry.
The system was rocked in 1898 by defeat at the hands of the USA and the loss of the remnants of empire including Cuba. This was to have a catastrophic effect on the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. Barcelona was the scene of sporadic strikes and acts of terrorism by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Moreover, by the turn of the century, the growth of coal, steel and textile industries in the north saw the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. In the two decades before the First World War, the working class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao, and the coal-miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Surprisingly, however, when the inevitable explosion came, it was precipitated not by the rural anarchists or the urban working class but by the industrial bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, once the crisis started, proletarian ambitions came into play in such a way as to ensure that the basic polarisation of Spanish political life became starker than ever.
The geometric symmetry of the Restoration system, with political power concentrated in the hands of those who also enjoyed the monopoly of economic power, was shattered by the coming of the First World War. Not only were political passions aroused by a bitter debate about whether Spain should intervene and on which side, accentuating growing divisions within the Liberal and Conservative parties, but massive social upheaval came in the wake of the war. The fact that Spain was a non-belligerent put her in the economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products. Coalmine-owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, Catalan textile magnates all experienced a wild boom which constituted the first dramatic take-off for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted somewhat. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernisation.
The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen them mount challenges to the Spanish establishment by sponsoring regionalist movements – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga Regionalista. Now the reforming zeal of industrialists enriched by the war coincided with a desperate need for change from a proletariat impoverished by it. Boom industries had attracted rural labour to towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing inflation and plummeting living standards. The Socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) were drawn together in the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then reform. While industrialists and workers pushed for change, middle-rank army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the Army.
Military complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. Known as ‘Regenerationism’, it associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the right or the left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate caciquista system by democratic reform and those who planned simply to crush it by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed empty ‘Regenerationist’ clichés were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. Had the movement been successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the civil war would not have been necessary. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 merely consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.
Despite a rhetorical coincidence of their calls for reform, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the system survived by skilfully exploiting these differences. The Prime Minister, the Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded the officers’ economic demands. He then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers, forcing the UGT to act before the CNT was ready. Now at peace with the system, the Army was happy to defend it in August 1917 by crushing the striking Socialists with considerable bloodshed. Alarmed by the prospect of militant workers in the streets, the industrialists dropped their own demands for political reform and, lured by promises of economic modernisation, joined in a national coalition government in 1918 with both Liberals and Conservatives. Yet again the industrial bourgeoisie had abandoned its political aspirations and allied with the landed oligarchy out of a fear of the lower classes. Short-lived though it was to be, the coalition symbolised the slightly improved position of industrialists in a reactionary alliance still dominated by the landed interest.
By 1917, Spain was divided more starkly even than before into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the small-holding peasantry. Significantly, in the years before and during the First World War, efforts were made to mobilize Catholic farmers in defence of big landholding interests. With anarchism and Socialism making headway among the urban workers, the more far-sighted landowners were anxious to stop the spread of the poison to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary syndicates were financed by landlords from 1906 but the process was systematized after 1912 by a group of dynamic social Catholics led by Angel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain before 1936. Through his organization of determined social Christian activists, the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, Herrera helped set up a series of provincial Catholic Agrarian Federations which tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery in return for their adoption of virulent anti-socialism. Many of those recruited were to play an important role when the landed oligarchy was forced to seek more modern forms of defence in the 1930s first by voting for the legalist parties of the right during the Second Republic and later by fighting for Franco.
In the aftermath of the crisis of 1917, however, the existing order survived in part because of the organisational naïvety of the left and even more because of its own ready recourse to armed repression. The defeat of the urban Socialists in 1917 did not mark the end of the assault on