The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. Paul Preston
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the CEDA.
With a pliant Radical government in power, the success of Acción Popular’s ‘accidentalist’ tactics could hardly have been more apparent. ‘Catastrophism’ was for the moment eclipsed. Nevertheless, the extreme right remained unconvinced by Gil Robles’ democratic tactic and so continued to prepare for violence. Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the north and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. In March, representatives of both the Carlists and the Alfonsine monarchist party, Renovación Española, led by Antonio Goicoechea, went to see Mussolini who promised money and arms for a rising. Both groups were convinced that even a strong rightist government did not constitute an adequate long-term guarantee for their interests, because it would be subject to the whims of the electorate in a still democratic Republic. In May 1934, the monarchists’ most dynamic and charismatic leader, José Calvo Sotelo, returned after three years exile to take over the leadership from Antonio Goicoechea. Henceforth, the monarchist press, in addition to abusing Gil Robles’ weakness, began increasingly to talk of the conquest of the state as the only sure road to the creation of a new authoritarian, corporative regime.
Even Gil Robles was having trouble controlling his forces. His youth movement, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP), was seduced by the German and Italian examples. Great Fascist-style rallies were held at which Gil Robles was hailed with the cry ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ (the Spanish equivalent of Duce) in the hope that he might start a ‘March on Madrid’ to seize power. Monarchist hopes, however, centred increasingly on the openly Fascist group of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange Española, as a potential source of shock troops against the left. The Falange had been founded in October 1933 with monarchist subsidies. As a landowner, an aristocrat and well-known socialite, José Antonio Primo de Rivera served as a guarantee to the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not get out of their control in the way of its German and Italian equivalents. Falange Española merged in 1934 with the pro-Nazi Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista of the pro-German Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, becoming Falange Española de las JONS. Perpetually short of funds, the party remained during the Republican period essentially a small student group preaching a utopian form of violent nationalist revolution. The Falangist leader’s cult of violence facilitated the destabilization of the politics of the Second Republic. His blue-shirted militias, with their Roman salutes and their ritual chants of ¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA! and ¡ESPAÑA! ¡UNA! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡LIBRE! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡GRANDE!, aped Nazi and Fascist models. From 1933 to 1936, FE de las JONS functioned as the cannon fodder of the haute bourgeoisie, provoking street brawls and helping to generate the lawlessness which, exaggerated by the right-wing press, was used to justify the military rising. Its importance lay in the role played by its political vandalism in screwing up the tension which would eventually erupt into the Civil War.
The left was very aware of such developments and was determined to avoid the fate of the German and Austrian left. As 1934 progressed there were growing numbers of street battles between left and right. Events within the orthodox political arena did little to cool tempers. Lerroux resigned in April after Alcalá Zamora had hesitated about signing an amnesty bill which reinstated the officers involved in the Sanjurjo rising of 1932. Socialists and Republicans alike felt that the government was signalling to the army that it could make a coup whenever it disliked the political situation. The left was already suspicious of the government’s reliance on CEDA votes, since Gil Robles continued to refuse to swear his loyalty to the Republic. Moreover, since he made it quite clear that when he gained power he would change the Constitution, the left was coming to believe that strong action was necessary to prevent him doing so. In fact, even if Gil Robles was not quite as extreme as the left believed him to be, he managed to convey the impression that the Radical government, backed with CEDA votes, was intent on dismantling the progressive, reforming Republic that had been created in 1931.
In this context, it was difficult for the Socialist leadership to hold back its followers. Largo Caballero tended to give way to the revolutionary impatience of the masses, although his rhetoric, which they cheered to the echo, was unspecific and consisted largely of Marxist platitudes. No concrete relation to the contemporary political scene was ever made in Largo Caballero’s speeches of early 1934 and no timetable for the future revolution was ever given. However, rank-and-file pressure for the radicalization of the Socialist movement, particularly from its youth movement, the Federatión de Juventudes Socialistas (FJS), and its Madrid organization, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, developed throughout 1934. This led to important divisions within the PSOE. The right-wing of the party, led by the professor of logic Julián Besteiro, tried several tactics to slow down the process of bolshevization which was taking place within the party. This merely earned Besteiro the vehement hostility of the radical youth. The centre, led by the ever-pragmatic Indalecio Prieto, reluctantly went along with the revolutionary tactic out of party loyalty. The young followers of Largo Caballero came to dominate the party and the UGT, with the organizations of the Socialist movement falling into their hands in quick succession.
Thus, political tension grew throughout 1934. In March, the anarchists held a four-week strike in Zaragoza to protest against the maltreatment of prisoners taken after the December rising. Then the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an unmistakably anti-Republican gesture. In driving sleet, a crowd of twenty thousand met in a gathering which closely resembled a Nazi rally. They swore loyalty to Gil Robles, ‘our supreme chief’, and chanted ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’. The JAP’s nineteen-point programme was recited, with emphasis on point two, ‘our leaders never make mistakes’, a direct borrowing from the Italian Fascists. One CEDA deputy declared that ‘Spain has to be defended against Jews, heretics, freemasons, liberals and Marxists’. Another, the deputy for Zaragoza, Ramón Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law of General Franco and later architect of the post-Civil War National-Syndicalist state, denounced ‘degenerate democracy’. The high point of the rally was a speech by Gil Robles. His aggressive harangue was greeted by delirious applause and prolonged chanting of ‘¡Jefe!’. ‘We are an army of citizens ready to give our lives for God and for Spain,’ he cried. ‘Power will soon be ours … No one can stop us imposing our ideas on the government of Spain’.
The young revolutionaries of the FJS were convinced that Gil Robles was aiming to take over the government in order to bring the Republic to an end. Various Radical ministries were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’ Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises by complaining that the cabinet was too liberal. As a result, the Radical government was adopting an ever-more conservative veneer. On each occasion, Lerroux, who was desperate to stay in power, would force the more liberal elements of his party out of the cabinet. Accompanied by like-minded friends, they then quit the party, leaving the rump ever more dependent on CEDA whims. After the first of the reshuffles, in March 1934, Gil Robles found a Radical minister who enjoyed his unalloyed trust. This was Rafael Salazar Alonso, the Minister of the Interior and a representative of the aggressive landowners of Badajoz. One of his first acts as minister was to call in the Inspector General of the Civil Guard, Brigadier General Cecilio Bedia de la Cavallería, and make it clear that his forces should not be inhibited in their repression of social conflicts. Although Lerroux resisted the temptation to declare all strikes unlawful, he delighted the right by announcing that strikes with political implications would be ruthlessly suppressed. For both the CEDA and Salazar Alonso, all strikes were deemed to be political. He provoked a number of strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. The Radical–CEDA determination to undermine the Republic’s most loyal support became clear when the government clashed successively with the Catalans and the Basques.
The sympathy shown by the Constituent Cortes to autonomist aspirations was now dropped in favour of right-wing centralist bias. This was particularly the case with regard to Catalonia. Unlike the rest of Spain, Catalonia was governed by a truly Republican party, the Esquerra, under Lluis Companys. In April, Companys passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de contratos de cultivo, an enlightened measure to protect tenants from eviction by landowners and the right to buy