The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. Paul Preston
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Church so much as the shared rituals that were so important in much of provincial life. Municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In many towns and villages the banning of religious processions was gratuitously provocative. When processions did take place, they often clashed with new laic festivals. In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession in the city. Many, but not all, of the members of the cofradías were militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista. Their gesture led to the popularization of the phrase ‘Sevilla la mártir’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see that the processions went ahead. The issue was manipulated politically to foment hostility to the Republic by creating the impression of religious persecution.
In January 1932, Church cemeteries passed under the jurisdiction of municipalities. There were cases of left-wing mayors (alcaldes) imposing a tax on Catholic burials or funeral processions being prohibited altogether. The state recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding were required to visit a registry office. The removal of crucifixes from schools and of religious statues from public hospitals, along with the prohibition on the ringing of bells, caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. There were many cases of left-wing alcaldes placing a local tax on the ringing of bells, to make the Church contribute to social welfare. Religious friction at both local and national level created an ambience that rightist politicians found easy to exploit. The attribution of the Republic’s reforming ambitions to a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot went hand in hand with claims that it must be destroyed and its supporters exterminated.
Indeed, the right soon demonstrated that it would not scruple to use violence to change the course of the Republic. Army officers enraged by the military reforms and autonomy statute were joined by monarchist plotters in persuading General José Sanjurjo that the country was on the verge of anarchy and ready to rise at his bidding. General Sanjurjo’s attempted coup took place on 10 August 1932. Badly planned, it was easily defeated both in Seville, by a general strike of CNT, UGT and Communist workers, and in Madrid, where the government, warned in advance, quickly rounded up the conspirators. In a sense, this attack on the Republic by one of the heroes of the old regime, a monarchist general, benefited the government by generating a wave of pro-Republic fervour. The ease with which the Sanjurjada, as the fiasco was known, was snuffed out enabled the government to generate enough parliamentary enthusiasm to get the agrarian reform bill and the Catalan statute of autonomy through the Cortes that September. Nevertheless, among those who supported the coup were the same rightists who had taken part in the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in 1931. They would soon be at liberty and with plenty of time to repeat their exploits in 1936.
The government’s prestige was at its height yet the situation was much less favourable than it appeared. The Sanjurjada showed the hostility with which the army and the extreme right regarded the Republic. Moreover, while the government coalition was crumbling, the right was organizing its forces. This process was aided by the insurrectionism of the CNT. The rightist press did not make subtle distinctions between the CNT, the UGT and the FNTT. Although the CNT regarded the Republic as being ‘as repugnant as the monarchy’, its strikes and uprisings were blamed on the Republican–Socialist coalition which was working hard to control them. However, while the extreme right in the pueblos (villages) was content to engage in blanket condemnation of disorder, the more far-sighted members of the rural bourgeoisie, who had found a home in the Radical Party, were able to use the CNT’s hostility towards the Socialists in order to drive wedges between the different working-class organizations. The most dramatic example of this process took place as a result of a nationwide revolutionary strike called by the CNT for 8 January 1933 and of its bloody repercussions in the village of Casas Viejas in the province of Cádiz. In the lockout conditions of 1932, four out of five workers in Casas Viejas were unemployed for most of the year, dependent on charity, occasional road-mending jobs and scouring the countryside for food in the shape of wild asparagus and rabbits. Their desperation, inflamed by an increase in bread prices, ensured a ready response on 11 January to the earlier CNT call for revolution. Their hesitant declaration of libertarian communism led to savage repression in which twenty-four people died.
The rightist press moved swiftly from issuing congratulations to the forces of order to a realization that the situation could be exploited. The subsequent smear campaign, in which the right-wing papers howled that the Republic was as barbaric, unjust and corrupt as all the previous regimes, ate into the morale of the Republican–Socialist coalition. The work of the government was virtually paralysed. Although the Socialists stood loyally by Azaña, who bore the brunt of rightist abuse for Casas Viejas, the incident heralded the death of the coalition, symbolizing as it did the government’s failure to resolve the agrarian problem. Henceforth, at a local level, the FNTT was to become more belligerent and its attitude filtered through into the Socialist Party in the form of a rejection of collaboration with the Republicans. The anarchists, meanwhile, stepped up the tempo of their revolutionary activities. The Radicals under Lerroux, ever-anxious for power, drew increasingly to the right and began a policy of obstruction in the Cortes.
The latent violence at local level was transmitted to national politics, where there developed increasing hostility between the PSOE and the newly created rightist group, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA). The new party, which had grown out of Acción Popular and at least forty other rightist groups, was the creation of José María Gil Robles. In his closing speech at the founding congress in Madrid, in February 1933, he told his audience:
When the social order is threatened, Catholics should unite to defend it and safeguard the principles of Christian civilization … We will go united into the struggle, no matter what it costs … We are faced with a social revolution. In the political panorama of Europe I can see only the formation of Marxist and anti-Marxist groups. This is what is happening in Germany and in Spain also. This is the great battle which we must fight this year.
Later on the same day, at another meeting in Madrid, he said that he could not see anything wrong with thinking of fascism to cure the evils of Spain. The Socialists were convinced that the CEDA was likely to fulfil a Fascist role in Spain, a charge only casually denied by the Catholic party, if at all. A majority in the PSOE led by Largo Caballero came to feel that if bourgeois democracy was incapable of preventing the rise of fascism, it was up to the working class to seek different political forms with which to defend itself.
In the meanwhile, throughout 1933, the CEDA was spreading discontent with the Republic in agrarian circles. Gil Robles specialized in double-edged pronouncements, and fuelled the Socialists’ sensitivity to the danger of fascism. Weimar was persistently cited as an example by the right and as a warning by the left. Parallels between the German and Spanish Republics were not difficult to find. The Catholic press applauded the Nazi destruction of the German Socialist and Communist movements. Nazism was much admired on the Spanish right because of its emphasis on authority, the fatherland and hierarchy – all three central preoccupations of CEDA propaganda. More worrying still was that, in justification of the legalistic tactic in Spain, El Debate pointed out that Hitler had attained power legally. The paper frequently commented on Spain’s need for an organization similar to those which had destroyed the left in Germany and Italy, and hinted that Acción Popular/CEDA could fulfil that role.
It was in such an atmosphere that elections were called for November. In contrast to 1931, this time the left went to the polls in disarray. The right, on the other hand, was able to mount a united and generally bellicose campaign. Gil Robles had just returned from the Nuremberg rally and appeared to be strongly influenced by what he had seen. Indeed, the CEDA election campaign showed that Gil Robles had learned his lessons well. Determined on victory at any price, the CEDA election committee decided for a single anti-Marxist counterrevolutionary front. Thus, the CEDA had no qualms about going into the elections in coalition with ‘catastrophist’ groups such as Renovación Española and the Carlists or, in other areas, with the cynical and corrupt Radicals.
A vast amount of money was spent on the right’s election campaign. The CEDA’s election fund was enormous, based on generous donations