The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939

By GABRIEL JACKSON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1965 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05154-3

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………….vOrganizations and Political Terms……………………………………..ix1. The Background of the Spanish Republic………………………………32. The First Days of the Republic……………………………………..253. The Creation of a Constitution……………………………………..434. The Politics of the Azaña Government……………………………565. Economic Problems During the Azaña Era………………………….786. The Defeat of the Left…………………………………………….987. Government by the Center-Right……………………………………..1218. The Revolution of October 1934……………………………………..1489. Politics and Ideologies in 1935…………………………………….16910. The Popular Front Election………………………………………..18411. From February to June 1936………………………………………..19612. The Approach of the Civil War……………………………………..21813. The Pronunciamiento of July 17–20…………………………….23114. The Beginnings of International Intervention………………………..24715. Military Developments, August–October 1936…………………….26216. Revolution and Terror in the Popular Front Zone……………………..27617. Authority and Terror in the Insurgent Zone………………………….29318. The Assault on Madrid…………………………………………….31019. Politics and War in Early 1937…………………………………….33320. Guadalajara and the Unification of Nationalist Spain…………………34921. The Fall of Largo Caballero……………………………………….36022. The War in the North……………………………………………..37523. The Initiatives of the Negrín Government……………………….39224. The Development of Nationalist Spain……………………………….41325. Efforts to Limit Suffering and Destruction………………………….43026. The Ebro and the Fall of Catalonia…………………………………45127. The End of the War……………………………………………….46528. The Spanish Tragedy………………………………………………478A. Chronology……………………………………………………….501B. The Black Legend of the Spanish Republic…………………………….510C. The Elections of the Second Spanish Republic…………………………518D. Deaths Attributable to the Civil War………………………………..526Bibliography………………………………………………………..541Index………………………………………………………………559

Chapter One

THE BACKGROUND OF THE SPANISH REPUBLIC

THE Spanish Republic of 1931 was born of a unique set of circumstances: a long-term political crisis, the conjunction of domestic economic problems with the world depression, and an intellectual renaissance of great vigor and optimism. Another way of stating the situation is to say that Spain in 1930 was simultaneously a moribund monarchy, a country of very uneven economic development, and a battleground of ardent political and intellectual crosscurrents. Each of these elements must be understood, both separately and in relation to one another. In determining the republican form of the new government, however, the political crisis was the primary factor, and I shall therefore outline first the political background of the Republic.

From the days of Ferdinand and Isabella to the end of the Napoleonic era, the national consciousness and the national unity of the Spanish people were indissolubly bound up with the institution of the monarchy. This factor remained constant despite the weak character of many kings, and despite the dynastic struggle involved in the War of the Spanish Succession at the opening of the eighteenth century. But upon the death of Ferdinand VII, in 1833, a seven-year civil war began between the partisans of his infant daughter, the future Queen Isabella II, and the partisans of the late King’s brother, Carlos de Borbón. Underlying the dynastic quarrel in this “Carlist” uprising was the deeper question of the role of the Spanish monarchy. Should it welcome the growth of capitalism, centralize and standardize its governing methods, permit a certain degree of liberty in the press and the universities, and avail itself of the accumulated wealth of the Church—all of which things had occurred in France? Or should the monarchy reaffirm the exclusively Catholic, predominantly agrarian and decentralized character of traditional Spain? Successive Isabeline governments contained the Carlist forces, but the civil war sputtered on even after the establishment of general peace in 1840. The deeper issues were never resolved. The Queen as a grown woman turned out to be only a lascivious mediocrity, and the coincidence of her character with the always latent civil war produced three very serious results: the person of the monarch no longer commanded respect; the monarchy as an institution no longer was the symbol of national unity; and most important, the government was forced to depend entirely on the generals who had saved Isabella’s throne from the Carlists. Between 1833, the opening of the Carlist War, and 1875, when the Constitutional Monarchy was established, the Spanish Army directed the political destinies of the country. The only method of changing governments was that of pronunciamiento, a brief, and by common consent relatively bloodless, uprising by a general around whom the opposition forces had gathered as their only hope of change.

In 1868 Isabella II was dethroned as the result of one such pronunciamiento. In the seven years that followed, the nation experimented with a Liberal Monarchy under a conscientious but not very strong Italian prince, Amadeo of Savoy; and with a short-lived First Republic in which four presidents served in a period of less than twelve months. Neither a new dynasty nor a republic was able to establish its authority, its “legitimacy,” in the existing circumstances. At the same time, it was perfectly evident that no one would again accept the irresponsible absolutism, punctuated by pronunciimientos, which had been characteristic of the decades prior to 1868.

A practical solution to the immediate problem was worked out by the able conservative statesman Cánovas del Castillo. Cánovas believed that only the Bourbon dynasty could be considered the legitimate fountainhead of authority in Spain. But he was convinced also that civil peace would depend upon at least a measure of political liberty, and upon the removal of the army from the center of the political stage. He was a great admirer of the British monarchy, but at the same time, he believed that the period 1868–74 had amply demonstrated that Spaniards were not ready for any such degree of self-government as existed in England. Possessing the full confidence of the royal family in exile, he also gained sufficient military backing so that a successful pronunciamiento at Sagunto, in December 1874, restored the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII.

The constitution of 1876 was the personal creation of Cánovas. Under this constitution Spain possessed an elective Cortes. Genuine freedom of speech existed in that Cortes, independent political parties could be formed, and for the most part, the press enjoyed complete liberty. However, the Cortes was in no sense a responsible governing body comparable to the British Parliament. The Prime Minister was freely named and removed by the King, and legislative initiative remained almost entirely the royal prerogative. Limitations of suffrage, and the process of counting the votes in advance, deprived elections of all real meaning until the early twentieth century. Governors and mayors were appointed rather than elected; rural politics was controlled by local bosses known as caciques, from the Indian word for the chieftains through whom the Spaniards had ruled their American empire. The term is indicative of the political psychology of the Spanish ruling class. Having lost their American empire early in the nineteenth century, they ruled rural Spain, especially in the south, as they had once ruled naive and ignorant Indians.

Two fairly coherent parties developed under the Restoration: the Conservative Party, led by Cánovas; and the Liberal Party, which was distinguished principally by its more secular orientation, under Sagasta. An informal pact, jocularly known as the turno político, existed between Cánovas and Sagasta. On their initiative, with the consent of the King—and with the necessary cooperation of the Minister of the Interior, the caciques, and the Civil Guard—elections were arranged in such manner as to alternate the two parties in power. It was probably Canovas’ intent that gradually the system should evolve into a true constitutional monarchy, just as the rotten boroughs and arbitrary prerogatives of eighteenth-century England had evolved toward responsible parliamentary government. ultimately undermined rather than developed the sense of political responsibility in Spain. Each change of party involved a large turnover in government jobs. Besides interfering with the already mediocre performance of public services, this Spanish version of the “spoils system” created a whole new class of unemployed civil servants, the cesantes, living on pitiful commissions, and on influence peddling, while waiting for the next turn of the political wheel.

In 1897 Cánovas was assassinated by an anarchist, and in 1898 Spain lost the vestiges of her overseas empire in the brief war with the United States. From that time until 1917, the Conservative and Liberal parties steadily disintegrated. The Monarchy seemed incapable either of asserting its authority under the existing system or of evolving genuinely representative institutions. Once again the Army, but recently humiliated in Cuba and the Philippines, became a protagonist in Spanish politics. Its only remaining field of military action was Spanish Morocco. The young Alfonso XIII salved the wounded pride of his officer&, made sure that the Parliament voted them large budgets, and followed with keen interest the never-ending “mopping up” operations in the Atlas mountains. Three times during his reign, King and Army found themselves under simultaneous attack. In 1909 anarchist agitation, and popular protests set off by exaggerated reports of casualties in Morocco, led to the famous “Tragic Week” in, Barcelona. After anarchist terrorists and agents provacateurs had committed bombings and arson, the intellectual anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer was executed for “moral responsibility.” In 1917) following the overthrow of the Czarist autocracy in Russia, a series of revolutionary strikes, clearly directed against the Monarchy, broke out. The Anny, as the apostle of order, broke the strikes and saved the throne. In 1921 a disastrous defeat in Morocco led to a parliamentary investigation which implicated the King personally in the military debacle. By late 1923 the frequently changing coalition cabinets were completely paralyzed, and the Monarchy seemed about to collapse. Once again a military coup, by General Miguel Primo de Rivera, gave the Monarchy its last reprieve.

Primo de Rivera was a man of considerable intelligence and generous instincts. He dealt successfully with the acute military problems in Morocco; he encouraged public works and industrial development; and in contrast with Mussolini, he cooperated with socialist labor unions. But with his rise to power, Spain lost the considerable intellectual and slight parliamentary liberty she had achieved since 1875. Corruption, inefficiency, and- military influence in politics expanded steadily. Primo’s highly personal regime lasted through the prosperous 1920’s, but when the world depression struck Spain at the end of 1929, King Alfonso, always agile but never generous, dropped Primo de Rivera. For fifteen inglorious months the King experimented with another military dictator, General Berenguer, and finally with a “government of concentration.” On April 12, 1931, municipal elections in the large cities—the only unfixed elections in Spain at the time—showed a strong antimonarchical trend. Discreet inquiries by the King indicated that the Army would not take up arms to save him as in 19J 7. In one of the more dignified episodes of his career, Alfonso XIII decided quietly and quickly to leave Spain. The Republic was proclaimed in the streets of Madrid during the very hours that he pondered his decision.

From even so brief an outline of the political history of the century preceding 1931, it will be clear that the Bourbon Monarchy had lost its authority, and a large share of its sentimental hold over the Spanish people. When we ask why the Constitutional Monarchy was unable to preserve its authority, why it feared truly to become a parliamentary monarchy, why, by 1917, there seemed to be no middle ground between a thoroughgoing social revolution and a military dictatorship, we approach the deeper problems of Spanish life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The critical economic problems of Spain provided the second set of factors underlying the revolution of the 1930’s. The vast majority of the people depended on the land for their living, but favorable geographic and social conditions for agriculture existed only on the northern and Mediterranean peripheries of the peninsula. In Galicia, in the narrow provinces north of the Cantabrican mountains, and in the Basque country, rainfall is plentiful and the soil satisfactory, if not rich. The farmers either own their land, or work it on long-term leases at low rentals. Most of the terrain is too hilly for the use of machinery, but prosperous truck gardens, orchards, and dairy farms cover the countryside. Along the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia and the Levant provinces, truck farming, vineyards, rice, olives and citrus fruits all flourish. Rainfall is scanty. However, Catalonia is watered by the Ebro river and its many branches descending from the Pyrenees mountains. Further south, long-established water tribunals in the communes of the Levant regulate the intricate irrigation systems in the regions of Valencia and Alicante. Here, as along the northern coast, land is widely distributed. The sunny climate and the careful use of water resources make this Mediterranean coast the most prosperous agricultural area of Spain.

These favored regions constitute less than 10 per cent of the surface of the country. Central Spain is dominated by a great meseta covering León, Old and New Castile, and large parts of Aragon and Extremadura. A land of harsh wind and SUD, of dramatic sierras, of thin soil and scattered rainfall. Wherever water flows there are well-kept farms and neat rows of poplar trees. But much of the countryside is bare and empty. The southern-most province, Andalusia, possesses all the natural prerequisites for agricultural prosperity, but in this area, history, race prejudice, absentee landlordism and economic errors of the nineteenth century have combined to produce a venomous social context. This was the portion of Spain longest ruled by the Arabs, and until the late Middle Ages it was the wealthiest part of Spain. When the Reconquest moved forward swiftly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the kings of Castile distributed huge tracts of land—and the population working that land—to military Orders and to leading war captains. From that time on, these landed estates were entailed, and a master class of Castilian warriors and descendant8 of warriors lived on the labor of a despised mass of half-Berber, frequently Moslem, peasants.

This form of land ownership, the latifundia system, remained stable until the nineteenth century, at which time the beginnings of capitalism and the influence of Liberal economic doctrine altered the situation. The Liberals wished to reduce the institutional power of the Church and also believed that the latifundia were uneconomic units. In 1837 a Liberal ministry decreed the disentailment of the estates belonging to the Church Orders. They placed the land on public sale, hoping thereby to encourage the development of a class of small independent farmers such as constituted the leading element in French society. But the land was bought by the only people who had the money to pay for it—a relatively small group of businessmen and wealthy landlords. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, land ownership was perhaps even more concentrated than in previous centuries.

The steady population increase during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had several important effects on Spanish agriculture. The growth of the industrial regions of Catalonia and Bilbao, and of the capital, Madrid, provided larger markets for the farmers of those regions. The rising European standard of living, and the availability of transport, led to greatly increased exports of wine and citrus fruits. The farmers of the already-prosperous northern and Mediterranean provinces, along with the new businessmen-farmers of Andalusia, were the principal beneficiaries of this development.

In Galicia, and generally along the Atlantic coast, where farms were already small, the population increase created the problem of minimifundia—farms so subdivided that they could not support the families living on them. To some extent the pressure was relieved by emigration to industrial cities and to America, but the availability of arable land became a most serious problem in the north.

Another response to the population growth was the increase in commercial wheat production on the central meseta. This meant that new lands were brought under cultivation in an area already suffering from water shortages. High costs of production brought a demand for heavy tariff protection, without which Argentine and American wheat would have been cheaper in Madrid than Castilian. Increasingly in the decades preceding 1931, the Spanish government chose to protect the wheat growers at the expense of the Spanish consumer. The high cost of bread represented a permanent obstacle to raising living standards, and the wheat tariff encouraged the uneconomical use of thousands of acres of tableland.

Much more important in Spanish consciousness, however, than either the problem of minimifundia or of uneconomic wheat production was the steadily growing number of landless peons in Andalusia. By 1900 the royal governments, Conservative and Liberal alike, recognized the gravity of the land question. Population and land statistics were compiled, presumably with a view toward initiating a gradual, compensated land reform. No actual change followed the taking of the land census. But the people of northern and central Spain became aware that in the south a growing landless proletariat eked out a miserable existence with about forty days’ poorly paid work per year, that debilitating diseases undermined the health of the entire working population, that the caciques controlled all available employment, and that the Civil Guard kept order as in an occupied territory. In a country of idyllic climate, such a situation could not possibly be justified. In 1931 the question of land reform in Andalusia bulked larger than any other single issue in the political consciousness of the public.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939by GABRIEL JACKSON Copyright © 1965 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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