More violence followed, however, with Barcelona at the epicentre. For two or three years gunmen (pistoleros) engaged in shootouts between worker groups and big business in which up to one hundred and fifty people were killed. More strikes were called; further assassinations took place: prime minister Eduardo Dato was gunned down by anarchists in Madrid in 1921. Later that year came another ‘Disaster’, the massacre of thirteen thousand Spanish soldiers by Moroccans at Annual. It was another huge blow for Spanish morale, and added to the sense of a country on the brink.
The mood was summed up by playwright and leading member of the Generación del ’98 Ramón María del Valle-Inclán in his play Bohemian Lights, published around the same time. As Cervantes, Velazquez and Goya had done before, Valle-Inclán placed a mirror before his audience, this time in his depiction of the last night on earth of an ailing poet called Max Estrella. Slowly going blind from syphilis, and in despair at the decline of his country, Estrella eventually commits suicide after witnessing the shooting by police of a Catalan revolutionary. Yet Valle-Inclán’s mirror is not the simple glass of his predecessors: in Goya’s vision it was already becoming stained; now in the twentieth century the faithfulness of the mirror itself came into question. In central Madrid was a bar which had placed convex and concave mirrors in its windows to attract visitors, who would then stand in the street and stare at the deformed images of themselves. This warped looking glass formed the basis of Valle-Inclán’s new perspective, in it finding a reflection of Spain as nothing more than ‘a deformation of European civilisation’. There was, in fact, no hope for the country. Estrella – Valle-Inclán’s incarnation of Santiago the Apostle, the third face of the country’s patron saint – looked into the future and saw only darkness. And his response was to take his own life.
And then, on cue, the old patterns reasserted themselves. In September 1923 there was a military coup, the constitution was suspended, and a dictatorship set up. The new strongman was a general by the name of Miguel Primo de Rivera.
1 Recent historical research suggests the Spanish had nothing to do with the sinking of the ship, which went down because of an accident on board: at the time, most of the ship’s officers were busy enjoying the fleshpots and other delights of the Cuban capital while their vessel was heading to the deep.
2 Spain’s equivalent of the tooth fairy, el Ratoncito Pérez, was first dreamt up by a palace priest to explain how milk teeth could possibly fall out of the royal head.
A LITTLE DICTATORSHIP
It’s often forgotten that Spain in the twentieth century saw two dictatorships, not one. The first, that of Primo de Rivera, was short, lasting just six years, but it re-established a pattern which would have huge repercussions for the years to follow: the military were back in politics.
The coup was planned by a group of army officers involved in Morocco, soldiers who were known as Africanistas for their time spent on the other side of the Strait. This was now Spain’s only overseas territory, and the sole arena in which ambitious men could see frontline service and accelerate their rise through the ranks. Africanistas would henceforth play a large role in Spanish political life.
Primo de Rivera’s coup was welcomed by many as a necessary step to save the country from collapse. Industrialists, landowners, the Church, the middle classes, and the rest of the armed forces saw in the new dictatorship a way of halting a proletarian revolution, casting the anarchists as the principal villain of the piece. The Socialists of the PSOE party and UGT trade union remained neutral, fearing the anarchists almost as much as everyone else (the Spanish Communist Party at this point was minuscule). But importantly, Alfonso XIII hailed Primo de Rivera as ‘my Mussolini’, il Duce having risen to power in Rome less than a year before.
Miguel Primo de Rivera, however, was no firebrand or dramatic orator in the style of the Italian, nor did he appear to have any clear political ideas. Born into an aristocratic, landowning family from Jerez, he was by now in his fifties and generally regarded as a vividor, someone who enjoys carnal and worldly pleasures to the full. His time in power would alternate between his working long hours for stretches of time, only to disappear for some R&R in the bars and brothels of the capital, often seen wandering the streets in the early hours in an opera cape, heading back to his office where he would issue drunken communiqués which had to be rescinded the following morning.
Primo de Rivera is generally viewed unfavourably by history, not least for his uncanny ability to lose all his friends. Gradually, as his mandate extended beyond the initial ninety days that it was meant to last, his supporters abandoned his cause, for example wealthier Spaniards enraged by his new taxes on them to fund a public works programme. When that finance scheme proved unworkable, the dictator turned to raising money through public loans, which caused high inflation and led to a devaluation of the peseta.
Yet Primo de Rivera needs to be given some credit, if only for bringing to an end the long-running bloody rebellion in Morocco. He relieved inept commanders of their positions and struck a deal with the French to launch a joint campaign against Abd el-Krim and his Riffian fighters. The result was the amphibious landing at Alhucemas in 1925, regarded as the first assault in military history in which naval and air forces were combined. Armoured cars were landed on the beach in another military first, while thirteen thousand Spanish soldiers pushed into enemy territory, eventually defeating the rebels and bringing the long-standing war to an end. Almost twenty years later, Allied commanders preparing for the Normandy campaign of 1944 studied the Moroccan landings as part of their preparations.
Alhucemas was also where a new body within the Spanish military, the Legión, cut its teeth. Modelled on the French Foreign Legion and inspired by slightly dubious concepts about Japanese Bushido and the ‘Samurai code’, it was led by a one-eyed maniac called General Millán Astray, who told his men that he expected them to die in battle, and coined the curiously paradoxical (and somehow quintessentially Spanish) phrase ‘Long live death!’ (¡Viva la muerte!) His second in command was a young major rising very quickly through the ranks, a Galician called Francisco Franco.
From a centralist and law-and-order point of view, Primo de Rivera also put a lid on the street violence which was blighting Barcelona, as well as on Catalan independence moves. Singing of the Catalan ‘anthem’, Els segadors (a homage to the Catalan independence group of the seventeenth century) was banned, as was the raising of the Catalan flag. And by declaring a state of war, military rule was imposed and street fighting curtailed. When it surfaced again, for example with the murder of Barcelona’s official executioner, two hundred people were arrested, the anarchist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera was closed down and all anarchist union offices forcibly shut.
In addition, Primo de Rivera established state-controlled companies such as Telefónica (still in existence), the oil and petrol concern Campsa, and the Tabacalera. Yet these achievements were not enough to make him loved by any group within society, and slowly his power waned. Rising inflation and the growing effects of the Wall Street Crash on the economy didn’t help. Nor did his insistence on politicising the military, which alienated many of his fellow officers. In 1926 disgruntled generals, including the captain-general of the army and leading politicians, organised a coup attempt, La Sanjuanada, which was only foiled because Alfonso XIII learned about it and opted for the time being to stick with the dictator he already knew. Yet by 1930 Primo de Rivera saw clearly that he had the support neither of the rest of the army nor of the king. Not waiting to be overthrown, he resigned at the end of January that year and removed himself to a Paris hotel where, less than two months later, he died from diabetes.
Alfonso’s response was to name a new dictator, General Berenguer, who brought in what was viewed as a ‘softer’ dictatorship (a dictablanda, in the Spanish pun, as opposed to a dictadura, dura meaning ‘hard’, and blanda, ‘soft’). But too much damage had already been done. The monarchy was severely damaged by Alfonso’s association with P
rimo de Rivera. Perhaps if the king had supported the 1926 coup he might have saved himself, but by now many in the country, most importantly in the cities and large towns, were tired with Alfonso just as their predecessors had been with his grandmother Isabella in the 1860s. A group of politicians from both Left and Right signed an agreement to overthrow the monarchy and try for a republic again. Their leader, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, was charged with making contact with like-minded military officers to stage another coup.
In the end, however, and unusually for Spain, on this occasion violence wasn’t needed to bring about change. When municipal elections of the spring of 1931 showed a clear victory for anti-monarchy parties in the cities (votes from the rural areas took longer to count) spontaneous declarations of a new Spanish republic began to sweep across the country. Seeing how things were moving, Alfonso decided to follow Primo de Rivera’s example and scuttled off before anyone could overthrow him. Leaving his wife and children behind to find a different route out of the country, he hurried to Cartagena, from where a boat took him to Marseille. Landing on French soil, the deposed Bourbon king’s first reaction was annoyance on learning that the city’s brothels had already closed for the night.
Back in Spain, the Second Republic came into being on 14 April to great popular acclaim. The hated king was gone; the oligarchs and old regime had been swept from power. It was a new beginning, full of hope.
Yet the world economy was in collapse; Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, Mussolini Italy, and in Germany the Nazi Party was on the rise. Social unrest and political extremism were rocking Europe and much of the rest of the world. It was a less-than-auspicious time to be building a new state.
WHAT’S IN A REPUBLIC?
Historically speaking, the Second Republic is the prelude to the Spanish Civil War. How a person views the period is directly related to their perspective on the war which brought it to an end. Was the Republic good, or bad? Did it achieve anything, or was it a failure? Was it, in fact, doomed from the start (as hindsight can sometimes suggest), or could it have lasted? Did it sow the seeds of its own destruction, or was it an innocent victim of the forces which brought it down? Can we, indeed, even regard the Republic as an entity in itself, or was it never more than a very loose and temporary association of multiple groups and forces, most of which were pulling in mutually exclusive directions? The answers to these questions are entirely wrapped up with a person’s views on the Civil War itself.
In 1876, when asked to define what a ‘Spaniard’ was for the drafting of the new constitution, Cánovas had artfully answered that a Spaniard was someone ‘who could not be anything else’. It was a playful piece of sophistry which nonetheless highlighted the fact that Spain is both impossible to define and yet possessed of a powerful self-identity. But ‘What is Spain?’ and ‘Who are the Spanish?’ – these fundamental questions of national identity lay at the heart of most if not all the problems which beset the country. Which face of Santiago was the true one? Yet the problem was intractable because, as throughout its history, the one could never be divorced from the other, the Seeker and the Slayer were two sides of the same coin, aspects of the same collective self, no matter how much force and violence were employed in an attempt to settle the matter once and for all. Spain was about to repeat patterns of behaviour which had dominated its national life for many centuries. And as before, with consequences which would have a large impact on the international stage.
SECOND TIME AROUND
The authoritarian years of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship had served a dual function of both provoking and partially restraining the many tensions within Spain at the time. The fall of Alfonso combined with the proclamation of the Second Republic was subsequently both a liberation as well as the opening of a Pandora’s Box. In simplistic terms, the Republic finally fell because it failed to contain or channel the demons now freed and circling about unhindered. Whether that failure was its own fault, however, is the subject of ongoing and often heated debate.
Two developments at the very moment the Republic came into being demonstrate how explosive the situation was.
Firstly, in several cities Republican supporters celebrated the arrival of the new regime by burning down a number of churches. The Church was, not without reason, seen as part of the oppressive establishment along with the monarchy, landowners and others, who had done so much to prevent or restrict social progress over many centuries. And as such it was targeted. But to the surprise of many, these acts of vandalism were tolerated by the new government, and in a phrase which grew to haunt him, the then prime minister (and later president of the Republic during the Civil War) Manuel Azaña declared that ‘all the religious buildings in Spain were not worth the life of a single Republican’. Anticlerical violence, in other words, was effectively given a green light by the government. Which, regardless of one’s views of the Church at the time, did not send out good signals. In opposition to the usual pattern, a new regime had come into being without resort to violence, but within moments violence had resurfaced on the national stage.
Secondly, Catalan nationalism was reinvigorated. While spontaneous proclamations of a republic had been issued in towns and cities across Spain at the news of the 1931 municipal election results, in Barcelona the regional authorities had seized their chance and declared a Catalan Republic within an Iberian federation. For centralists, this was the nightmare scenario in which Spain could break apart (once more). At the time, the Catalans were persuaded to pull back in return for the promise of a statute of autonomy, which they accepted. But a clear statement of intention had been made which only served to make many in Spain nervous, and uncertain about the Republic. Over time, those uncertainties would grow, and when the Catalan statute went to parliament, in 1932, a new military coup was staged in an attempt to halt it. General Sanjurjo’s attempt on power failed – in part thanks to a prostitute who had overheard the rebels’ plans and passed information on to the police – but it demonstrated that the old patterns of behaviour remained, Republic or no.
But Catalan separatists and jumped-up generals weren’t the only people threatening the new regime. Rural Spain was in crisis, with a shocking contrast in living standards and way of life which was practically indistinguishable from the Middle Ages.1 Conditions were worst in Andalusia and Extremadura. During the ‘Reconquest’, Christian kings had tempted their vassals to join in (and help finance) the campaigns southwards through promises of tracts of captured lands. In the Crown of Aragon new territory had been divided a little more evenly, but in Castile great swathes of the landscape had fallen into the hands of a very few. And with the forced sale of Church and municipal lands in the nineteenth century, this situation had only worsened. The result was that in a country whose main economic activity was still, by a wide margin, agriculture, the vast majority of people in rural areas were illiterate peasants with very short life expectancy (well under forty), and with no assurance of any work thanks to the jornalero system of employing people on a day-by-day basis. Added to this was a peculiar absence of any spirit of noblesse oblige, so while country folk often went hungry, the owners on whose land they lived and worked – los señoritos – lived it up in the cities, ignoring the plight of their tenants and actively preventing them from scratching out a subsistence on unused fields. So bad were things getting that there were even claims that in some parts of the country, peasants were reduced to eating grass simply to stay alive.
It was during these early years of the Republic that the great Spanish film director, Luis Buñuel, made his short film Land without Bread after a friend agreed to finance it with money won from the National Lottery (the friend was later shot by the Francoists during the Civil War). Buñuel’s powerful images of the peasants of the Las Hurdes area drinking water from puddles and living like animals were partly staged, but he used poetic licence to describe a truth about the Spanish countryside at the time: conditions really were horrific in certain areas.
Politically, the peasants of
southern and south-western Spain felt unrepresented. But into this gap stepped the anarchists, who built one of their strongest power bases in the region.
No country in Western Europe proved to be such fertile ground for anarchist ideas as Spain. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, membership of the CNT anarchist trade union was one and a half million, around double the socialist UGT. The anarchists were a long way from being a coherent group and embraced many tendencies, from anarcho-syndicalism (the CNT) to espousers of violent anarchist revolution (the FAI), to more intellectual types promoting a libertarian reform programme of education, vegetarianism and even anarcho-nudism as solutions to society’s ills. Anarchism chimed both with a healthy disrespect of authority in Spanish culture, and with a sense that if things were ever going to change there would have to be a complete overhaul of the system. Communism, with its Church-like emphasis on discipline and authority, never caught on – until, that is, the outbreak of the Civil War. Anarchism, with its ideas of spontaneity, equality, and heroic and violent action to bring about radical change, was far more attractive on a mass scale.
Anarchists and many left-leaning and even centralist republicans shared many ideas when it came to social reform. Problems arose from the scale and speed of those reforms, however, and by the simple fact that anarchists wanted to bring down the entire workings of the State. They had claimed the lives of more than one prime minister, and the Barcelona shoot-outs they engaged in had been a major contributing factor in Primo de Rivera’s coup: the anarchists were destabilisers by definition and as much a threat to the Republic as the monarchists and other conservatives determined to smother it from the start.
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