A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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to denounce the ‘disorder’ of the Republic.
Among the Republic’s enemies two of the most powerful were the Church and the Army. Both were to be easily drawn into the anti-Republican right, in part because of errors made by the Republic’s politicians. On 7 May, the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura, declared war on the Republic in a pastoral letter calling on Catholics to take up arms against the destroyers of religion. This did nothing to soften the Republican view that the Church was the bulwark of black reaction. Thus, on May 11, when a rash of Church burning spread through Madrid, Malaga, Seville, Cadiz and Alicante, the cabinet refused to call out the Civil Guard. Manuel Azaña, the immensely talented left Republican Minister of War, proclaimed that ‘all the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of one Republican’, a phrase which was exploited by the rightist press to persuade its middle class readership that Azaña somehow approved of the actual burnings. On May 22, full religious liberty was declared. The monarchist daily ABC and the Catholic El Debate howled abuse and were briefly closed down by the government.
Several issues were to cause friction between the Republic and the Armed Forces but none more than the new regime’s readiness to concede regional autonomy. On 14 April, Colonel Macià, the leader of the Catalan Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia), declared an independent Catalan republic. A deputation from Madrid persuaded him to await government action by promising a rapid statute of autonomy. Inevitably, this aroused the suspicions of the Army which had shed so much blood in the fight against Catalan separatism. To make matters worse, the Minister of War, Azaña, began in May to prepare reforms to cut down the inflated officer corps and to make the Army more efficient. It was thereby hoped to reduce the political ambitions of the Armed Forces. It was a necessary reform and, in many respects, a generous one, since the 8,000 surplus officers were retired on full pay. However, military sensibilities were inflamed by the insensitivity with which various aspects of the reforms were implemented. Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 for the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) reopened some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars. Many distinguished right-wing generals including Francisco Franco faced the prospect of being reduced to the rank of colonel. The commission carrying out the revision took more than eighteen months to report, causing unnecessary anxiety for the nearly one thousand officers affected, of whom only half had their cases examined. On 30 June 1931, Azaña closed the General Military Academy in Zaragoza for budgetary reasons and because he believed it to be a hot-bed of reactionary militarism. This guaranteed Azaña the eternal enmity of its Director, General Franco.
Since Azaña’s reforms involved the abolition of the Army’s jurisdictions over civilians thought to have insulted it, many officers regarded them as a savage attack. Those that were retired, having refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic, were left with the leisure to plot against the regime. This was encouraged by the conservative newspapers read by most Army officers, ABC, La Época and La Correspondencia Militar, which presented the Republic as responsible for the economic depression, for the breakdown of law-and-order, disrespect for the Army and anticlericalism. In particular, a campaign was mounted alleging that Azaña’s intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the Army). Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. In fact, far from depriving the Army of funds and equipment, Azaña, who had made a life-time study of civil-military relations, merely ensured that the military budget would be used more efficaciously. If anything, Azaña tended to be punctilious in his treatment of a shambolic and inefficient force which compared poorly with the armies of countries like Portugal or Rumania. Ironically, the military readiness of the Spanish Army in 1936 owed as much to the efforts of Azaña as to those of his successor, the rightist José María Gil Robles. Azaña was converted by the rightist propaganda machine into the bogey of the military because he wanted to provide Spain with a non-political Army. For the right, the Army existed above all to defend their social and economic interests. Azaña therefore was presented as a corrupt monster, determined to destroy the Army, as he was allegedly determined to destroy the Church, because it was part of the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy to do so. Curiously, he had a much higher regard for military procedures than his predecessor General Primo de Rivera. A general who presumed to ‘interpret the widespread feeling of the nation’ to Azaña was told forthrightly that ‘Your job is merely to interpret regulations’. That was not how Spanish generals expected to be treated by civilians.
The first major political contest of the Republic had taken place before the right was properly organized. The June 1931 elections were won by the Socialists in coalition with the left Republicans. Republicanism tended to be a movement of intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie, more an amorphous improvised grouping than a united left-wing force. The only centre grouping, the Radicals, had, on the other hand, started out as a genuine mass movement in Barcelona in the early years of the century. Led by the fiery orator, and corrupt machine politician Alejandro Lerroux, the Radicals were to become progressively more conservative and anti-Socialist as the Republic developed. They did immense damage to the Republic by their readiness to opt for the winning side at any given time. The polarization brought about by the pendulum effect of a big left-wing victory in the 1931 elections followed by an equally dramatic rightist triumph in 1933 was greatly intensified by the fact that the Radicals had changed sides.
The centrifugal dynamic of Republican politics was in itself the inadvertent consequence of a set of electoral regulations which were drawn up in such a way as to avoid the political fragmentation of the Weimar Republic. To ensure strong government majorities, in any given province, 80 per cent of the seats were given to the party or list with most votes over 40 per cent of those cast. The other 20 per cent block of seats went to the list that was second past the post. Accordingly, small fluctuations in the number of votes cast could lead to massive swings in the number of parliamentary seats actually won. The pressure to form coalitions was obvious. The 1931 elections therefore registered a heavy victory for the united Socialists, the left Republicans and the Radicals. The former gained 250 seats, Alejandro Lerroux’s Radicals 90, and the somewhat heterogeneous Right 80. By 1933, however, the success of rightist tactics in blocking reform and the consequent disappointment of the left-wing rank-and-file had provoked a significant realignment of forces. By then, the anarchists who had voted for the leftist parties in 1931 were committed to abstention. The Socialists had so lost faith in the possibilities of bourgeois democracy that they refused to make a coalition with the left Republicans. The apparatus of the state was thus allowed to slip out of the grasp of the left in the November 1933 elections.
That change was a reflection of the enormity of the task that had faced the 1931 parliament, known as the Constituent Cortes because its primary task was to give Spain a new Constitution. For the Republic to survive, it had to increase wages and cut unemployment. Unfortunately, the regime was born at the height of the world depression. With agricultural prices falling, landowners had let land fall out of cultivation. The landless labourers, who lived near starvation at the best of times, were thus in a state of revolutionary tension. Industrial and building workers were similarly hit. To make matters worse, the wealthy classes were hoarding or exporting their capital. This posed a terrible dilemma for the Republican government. If the demands of the lower classes for expropriation of the great estates and take-overs of the factories were met, the Army would probably intervene to destroy the Republic. If revolutionary disturbances were put down in order to appease the upper classes, the government would find the working class arrayed against it. In trying to tread the middle course, the Republican-Socialist coalition ended up enraging both sides.
This was demonstrated within a week of the Cortes’ first session. A general strike called by the anarchists led to thousands of CNT telephone workers leaving work. The strike achieved its most notable successes in Seville and Barcelona, and was an intense embarrassment to the government which was anxious to prove its ability to maintain order. The Ministry of Labour declared the strike illegal, and the Civil Guard was called in. In Seville, the CNT attempted to convert the strike into an insurrection. Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior, decided on drastic action: martial law was declared and the Army sent in to crush the strike. The revolutionary nature of the strike frightened the upper classes, while the violence with which it was put down – 30 killed and 200 wounded – confirmed the anarchists in their hostility to the Republic. The CNT was increasingly