A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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in the way of social and economic reform.
However, the establishment of the Republic meant that for the first time political power had passed from the oligarchy to the moderate left. This consisted of representatives of the most reformist section of the organized working class, the Socialists, and a mixed bag of petty bourgeois Republicans, many of whom were idealists and some of whom were cynics. Together, they hoped, despite considerable disagreement over the finer details, to use state power to create a new Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church and the Army, by sweeping away the structure of the latifundio estates and by meeting the autonomy demands of Basque and Catalan regionalists. However, social and economic power, ownership of the land and control over those who worked it, the banks and industry remained unchanged. Those who held that power were united with the Church and the Army in being determined to prevent any attacks on property, religion or national unity. They were quick to find a variety of ways in which to defend their interests. Ultimately then the Spanish Civil War was to grow out of the efforts of the progressive leaders of the Repubic to carry out reform against the wishes of the most powerful sections of society.
When the King fled, power was assumed by the Provisional Government whose composition had been agreed in August 1930 when Republican and Socialist opponents of the King had met and forged the Pact of San Sebastian. The Prime Minister was Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a landowner from Cordoba and an ex-minister of the King. The Minister of the Interior was Miguel Maura, the son of the celebrated Conservative politician Antonio Maura. Both Alcalá Zamora and Maura were Catholic conservatives and served as a guarantee to the upper classes that the Republic would remain within the bounds of reason. The remainder of the cabinet was made up of centre and left Republicans and reformist Socialists, unanimous in their desire to build a Republic for all Spaniards. Inevitably, therefore, the coming of the parliamentary regime constituted far less of a change than was either hoped by the rejoicing crowds in the streets or feared by the upper classes.
Socialist ambitions were restrained. The PSOE leadership hoped that the political power that had fallen into their hands would permit the improvement of the living conditions of the southern braceros, the Asturian miners and other sections of the industrial working class. They realized that the overthrow of capitalism was a distant dream. What the most progressive members of the new Republican-Socialist coalition failed to perceive at first was the stark truth that the great latifundistas and the mine-owners would regard any attempt at reform as an aggressive challenge to the existing balance of social and economic power. However, in the days before they realized that they were trapped between the impatient mass demand for significant reform and the dogged hostility to change of the rich, the Socialists approached the Republic in a spirit of self-sacrifice and optimism. In Madrid on 14 April, members of the Socialist Youth Movement prevented assaults on buildings associated with the right, especially the royal palace. The Socialist ministers acquiesced in Maura’s refusal to abolish the Civil Guard – a hated symbol of authority to workers and peasants. Also, in a gesture to the wealthy classes, the Socialist Minister of Finance, Indalecio Prieto, announced that he would meet all the financial obligations of the Dictatorship.
However, the potential state of war between the proponents of reform and the defenders of the existing order was not to be ignored. Rightist hostility to the Republic was quickly revealed. Prieto announced at the first meeting of ministers that the financial position of the regime was being endangered by a large-scale withdrawal of wealth from the country. Even before the Republic had been established, followers of General Primo de Rivera had been trying to build barricades against liberalism and republicanism. They started to collect money from aristocrats, landowners, bankers and industrialists to publicize authoritarian ideas, to finance conspiratorial activities and to buy arms. They realized that the Republic’s commitment to improving the living conditions of the poorest members of society inevitably threatened them with a major redistribution of wealth. At a time of world depression, wage increases and the cost of better working conditions could not simply be absorbed by higher profits.
From the end of April to the beginning of July, the Socialist Ministers of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, and of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, issued a series of decrees which aimed to deal with the appalling situation in rural Spain, shattered by a drought during the 1930–31 season and thronged by returning emigrants. De los Ríos rectified the imbalance in rural leases which favoured the landlords. Eviction was made almost impossible and rent rises blocked while prices were falling. Largo Caballero’s measures were much more dramatic. The so-called ‘decree of municipal boundaries’ prevented the hiring of outside labour while any local workers in a given municipality remained unemployed. It struck at the landowners’ most potent weapon, the power to break strikes and keep down wages by the import of cheap blackleg labour. In early May, Largo Caballero did something that Primo de Rivera had tried and failed to do – he introduced arbitration committees (known as jurados mixtos) for rural wages and working conditions which had previously been subject only to the whim of the owners. One of the rights now to be protected was the newly introduced eight-hour day. Given that, previously, the braceros had been expected to work from sun-up to sun-down, this meant that owners would either have to pay overtime or else employ more men to do the same work. Finally, in order to prevent the owners sabotaging these measures by lock-outs, a decree of obligatory cultivation prevented them taking their land out of operation. Preparations were also set in train for a sweeping law of agrarian reform.
The response of the right was complex. In general, its powerful press networks began to present the Republic as responsible for all the centuries-old problems of the Spanish economy and as the fount of mob violence. At a local level, landlords simply ignored the new legislation, letting loose their armed retainers on the trade union officials who complained. More specifically, there were two broad responses, known at the time as ‘accidentalist’ and ‘catastrophist’. The ‘accidentalists’ took the view that forms of government, republican or monarchical, were ‘accidental’ as opposed to fundamental. What really mattered was the social content of a regime. Thus, inspired by Angel Herrera, the leader of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, the ‘accidentalists’ adopted a legalist tactic. Under a dynamic leader, the ACNP stalwart, José María Gil Robles, the old Catholic Agrarian Federations were forged into an organization called Acción Popular. Its few elected deputies used every possible device to block reform in the parliament or Cortes. Massive and extraordinarily skilful efforts of propaganda were made to persuade the small-holding farmers of northern and central Spain that the agrarian reforms of the Republic damaged their interests every bit as much as those of the big landowners. The Republic was presented to the conservative Catholic small-holders as a Godless, rabble-rousing instrument of Soviet Communism poised to steal their lands and dragoon their wives and daughters into an orgy of obligatory free love. With their votes thereby assured, by 1933 the legalist right was to wrest political power back from the left.
At the same time, the various ‘catastrophist’ groups were fundamentally opposed to the Republic and believed that it should be overthrown by some great catastrophic explosion or uprising. It was their view which was to prevail in 1936, although it should not be forgotten that the contribution of the ‘accidentalists’ in stirring up anti-Republicanism among the small-holding peasantry was crucial for Franco’s war effort. There were three principal ‘catastrophist’ organizations. The oldest was the Traditionalist Communion of the Carlists, anti-modern advocates of a theocracy to be ruled on earth by warrior priests. Antiquated though its ideas were, it was well supplied with supporters among the farmers of Navarre and had a fanatical militia called the Requete which, between 1934 and 1936, was to receive training in Mussolini’s Italy. The best financed and ultimately the most influential of the ‘catastrophists’ were the one-time supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. These Alfonsine monarchists, with their journal Acción Española and their political party Renovación Española, were the general staff and the paymasters of the extreme right. Both the rising of 1936 and the structure and ideology of the Francoist state owed an enormous amount to the Alfonsines. Finally, there were a number of unashamed fascist groups, which finally coalesced between 1933 and 1934 under the leadership of the Dictator’s son, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as Falange Española. Also subsidized by Mussolini, the rank-and-file Falangists supplied the cannon-fodder of the ‘catastrophist’ option, attacking the left