Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  —It was much too delicate to permit radical solutions. That was true of Catalonia and all the more for much of the rest of Spain. At the same time it was necessary to make the church, especially the hierarchy, much more aware of the need to be close to the people as Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona and a few others were managing to do …

  Although ROIG LLOP did not favour the separation of church and state, this – objectively considered – might have been accepted by Catholics had it not been for the fear that the republic was attacking Catholicism in general and religious education in particular. The church burnings and the subsequent legislation reinforced the fear.24

  It was no accident that the liberal republicans pressed home their attack on the ruling class with more vigour at the ideological than at the economic level. The republicans were heirs of the nineteenth-century anti-clerical radicals; they had suffered more from ideological-cultural than socio-economic problems; and they had no wish to destroy the capitalist system, but rather to reform it. Their concern for cultural problems was amply demonstrated during the first two years of the republic when great progress was made in schooling.

  None the less, in the matter of establishing a parliamentary democracy, the bourgeoisie’s two related bases of power could not be separated. Agrarian reform threatened economic power as lay education threatened ideological dominance. The opposition saw this plainly. Ernesto CASTAÑO, one of the prime movers in mobilizing catholic agrarian reaction in Salamanca to the agrarian legislation (see also section A), had no doubts that defence of one involved defence of the other.

  —Material and religious interests were, necessarily, intertwined. In the bitter struggle that was taking place, we had to recruit every possible force which was opposed to republican violence. We were in the front line, the trenches. The constitution confirmed the republic’s sectarian, anti-religious position, allowed Azaña to say that Spain was no longer catholic,25 just as other measures plainly showed that the republic wanted to encourage class war on the land …

  It was only later, during the war, that CASTAÑO began to see the church in a different light, realizing that it had not played a christian, educational role.26 But before the war, and in particular in the first two years of the republic, defence of religion, defence of the family, defence of property, defence of the social order were the constituent parts of the overall bourgeois counter-offensive which was summed up in the phrase ‘At the service of Spain’.

  C. Two nationalisms

  The problem confronting the petty bourgeois republicans of finding new forms of expressing and legitimizing bourgeois domination under the new regime included the task of satisfying the petty bourgeoisies of Catalonia and the Basque country in their desire for home rule. Success would reinforce these bourgeoisies in their own countries and thereby reinforce the republic in the centre. The republican-dominated coalition understood this in respect of Catalonia, which received an autonomy statute in 1932; but the Basque country had to wait until the war. The difference was not accidental.

  —The Catalans got their statute because they were on the left. But we Basque nationalists were neither black nor white, we fitted no definition, we were disliked by everyone …

  This view, expressed by Juan Manuel EPALZA, member of a leading Bilbao PNV family, pointed to a widely accepted reality. The Catalan petty bourgeoisie and its political party, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, stood firmly to the left of the PNV whose slogan was ‘God and the Old Laws’. Members of the future Esquerra had subscribed to the San Sebastián pact of 1930 which laid the political foundations of the new republic; the PNV had not. Francesc Macià, the Esquerra’s leader, declared the Catalan republic a few hours before the second Spanish republic was proclaimed in Madrid on 14 April, 1931;27 the PNV did not emulate this dramatic move. It waited three days to welcome the republic and call for an autonomous Basque regime within a federal republic which would recognize the ‘freedom and independence of the Catholic church’.28

  The PNV was a liberal, anti-socialist and Catholic party; the Esquerra was a radical party whose programme included ‘the socialization of wealth for the benefit of the collectivity’.

  The differences between the two nationalist parties expressed deeper socio-economic differences between the two countries – and between them and the rest of the Spanish state.29

  Catalan capitalism, based on family-owned enterprises, mainly in textile consumer goods, required a large Spanish market. The agrarian oligarchy under the monarchy consistently prevented the expansion of this market by its failure to ‘modernize’ agriculture and increase domestic purchasing power. Lacking finance capital with which to penetrate the Spanish economy, the Catalan bourgeoisie retrenched into Catalanism the better to take over and ‘renovate’ the Spanish state – something it signally failed to do. At crucial moments, when its class interests appeared threatened by the proletariat, it sacrificed nationalism to the central government’s intervention.

  Unlike its Catalan counterpart, the industrial and financial Basque bourgeoisie did not espouse nationalism. Basque industry, producing mainly capital goods, and finance capital was much less dependent on the Spanish consumer market and much closer to the landed oligarchy. Only one of Spain’s major six banks in the first quarter of the twentieth century was not directly or indirectly linked to Vizcayan capital, and two were actually founded in Bilbao. Unlike Catalan enterprise, Vizcayan capital operated in joint-stock companies. Thanks to its resources – the major one, iron ore exports, was totally independent of the Spanish market – the Basque bourgeoisie was better placed to ‘cash in’ its economic weight in political terms in Madrid. It needed no nationalism to give it weight.30

  By the 1930s, both the large and petty bourgeoisie in Catalonia was able to sustain separate nationalist, class-based parties, the Lliga Catalana and the Esquerra. In the Basque country, only the inter-class PNV, whose policies were closer to the liberal conservative Lliga than to the Esquerra, represented nationalism.31

  Politically speaking, both Esquerra and PNV displaced their respective oligarchies under the republic. Both were also supported by broadly the same social class: peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie – small industrialists and artisans. But there the similarities ended.

  Tomás ROIG LLOP, a Catalan nationalist lawyer who joined the Lliga under the republic, believed that the differences could be easily felt. As a member of a Catalan commission invited by the PNV to visit the Basque country in 1933, he was impressed by the intense nationalist and religious feeling he saw there. Intuitive nationalist sentiment in the Basque country was much deeper than in Catalonia.

  —I was tremendously impressed to see workers, priests and the middle classes spontaneously mingling together, united by their intense nationalism. What was lacking in Basque nationalism was the cultural element. Catalans live and feel their culture, their traditions, their language in particular, very strongly …

  Whatever the differences, it was, he felt, a great mistake of the republic not to have granted an autonomy statute to the Basque country at the same time as to Catalonia.

  In August 1931, a draft statute was drawn up and approved by 75 per cent of the Catalan electorate. In Barcelona, with 370,000 non-Catalan inhabitants in its population of 1 million, only 3,000 votes were recorded against the draft. The working class had, patently, voted for home rule. The CNT left its members to act as they wished. Josep COSTA, a lifelong CNT militant in the textile industry, sympathized with the concept of Catalan autonomy. Although the libertarian movement maintained that voting was a ‘stupidity which would resolve no problems’ – a position with which, ideologically, he identified himself – he voted for the draft.

  —I wasn’t alone. Large sectors of the CNT in Catalonia were more or less Catalanist. Immigrant workers, on the other hand, tended to be hostile. Posters appeared before the war in La Torrasa district of the city saying: ‘It is forbidden to speak Catalan here.’ It was this type of newly arrived immigrant w
orker who backed the extremist elements in the CNT …

  But when the statute was granted in September 1932, COSTA got a shock. He realized suddenly that, although Catalonia now had its own government, economic interests remained the same as before.

  —My boss was a Catalanist. He went on screwing me and the rest of us workers as he had done before. I realized I had to choose where my real interests lay – and there couldn’t be much doubt about that …

  The autonomy statute approved by the constituent assembly in Madrid did not provide for the ‘autonomous state’ which three quarters of the Catalan electorate had voted for. Instead, it referred to Catalonia as an ‘autonomous region’ and conferred a considerably smaller portion of internal tax contributions than had been demanded.32

  The new statute recognized Catalan as the official language alongside Castilian, and gave the Generalitat – named after the medieval parliament of the kingdom of Aragon-Catalonia – the following major areas of competence: schooling, internal police services, road, rail and water transport, public works, justice and certain tax-collecting.

  The Spanish right was up in arms over the statute; and the phrase was no metaphor. The monarcho-militarist rising by General Sanjurjo in Seville in August 1932, was an attempt to prevent parliamentary passage of the bill (see section F, p. 564). Four months earlier, Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader, had termed the bill a ‘spoliation of sovereignty and a theft of patrimony’.

  Underlying this outburst by General Primo de Rivera’s former finance minister was a certain economic reality: the Spanish state received just under 19 per cent of its total revenue from Catalonia while spending only 5 per cent of its total budget in Catalonia.33

  Significantly, opposition in the constituent assembly was not confined to the right but stretched to include liberal republicans. Hostility to ‘separatism’ was one of the few ideological areas in which the old monarchical ruling class had hegemonized large sectors of other classes, including the working class, outside the advanced Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards.

  In fact the Esquerra was never separatist, although its enemies liked to maintain the myth.

  —Separatism was supported by only a small minority in Catalonia and never played a dominant role. But one thing must be remembered, stressed ROIG LLOP: as soon as Catalans of different tendencies begin to group under the banner of Catalan nationalism, people in Spain who previously have shown a lively sympathy for Catalonia start to view our problem with considerable hostility …

  This was explicable by the fear of separatism, something which, in his view, it was impossible to conceive of geographically, economically or ‘mentally’. Catalonia was the transit route of Spain to the rest of Europe.

  —But as soon as there is the slightest threat of Catalan separatism, then all the factions in Madrid automatically combine to combat the threat; and the army has been the leader in putting down the threat …

  Victorious in the 1931 municipal elections that led to the republic’s proclamation, the Esquerra thereafter was not only the dominant Catalan political party but the majority governing party. Its task, of course, was to resolve the fundamental bourgeois crisis. The autonomy question having received a solution (even if that solution did not satisfy all nationalist aspirations), there remained the working class. The former could help solve the latter, more difficult task. A radical working class required radical social solutions which could be taken within the framework of a self-governing Catalonia.

  Given the economic situation, it was not easy to achieve such solutions, however. Although the Catalan textile industry was less affected by the depression for the first two years of the republic than other industrial sectors, the paucity of financial means afforded to the Generalitat by the central government and the absence of Catalan finance capital, made it difficult to re-activate the Catalan economy. The latter, obviously, was an important element in ‘incorporating’ the working class. Unemployment amongst building workers, an anarcho-syndicalist stronghold, was massive in Barcelona. None the less, they fought a bitter three-and-a-half-month strike in mid-1933, the worst year of the depression. The influence of the FAI ‘purists’ within the CNT made the petty bourgeois republicans’ task even harder. For in fact the Esquerra required working-class votes to remain in power.

  Sebastià CLARA, one of the signatories of the treintista manifesto which had split the CNT in 1931 (see section D), became an Esquerra supporter, though not a member. Had there been a Catalan socialist party with the same chance of attracting working-class support he would have preferred to work with it.

  —But the CNT masses wouldn’t have shared my point of view. The CNT was not a-political, it was fundamentally anti-political. And, within that perspective, CNT militants were far more hostile to authoritarian marxist parties which defended the need for a state than they were to a petty bourgeois republican party like the Esquerra. With the support of working-class votes, the Esquerra became and remained the dominant party in Catalonia … 34

  The Esquerra maintained itself in power by an electoral strategy of incorporating elements known for their political and social leftism, including socialists, in order to attract the radicalized petty bourgeoisie and proletariat; independent republicans and representatives of the liberal Catalan bourgeoisie; and peasant leaders to ensure the important support of the rabassaires, the Catalan peasant union.35

  —Progress didn’t frighten the Esquerra, recalled Josep ANDREU ABELLO, one of the party’s deputies in the Catalan parliament. Though it lacked a clear socialist position, it was a progressive party which included members of the bourgeoisie, left-wing progressives, socialists and even a certain number of CNT members …

  By 1934, when a centre government with CEDA parliamentary support was in power in Madrid, Catalonia alone in the Spanish state remained under left republican rule. Confrontation was almost inevitable. It arose – paradoxically in an industrial region – over agriculture: the Llei de contractes de conreu, the Esquerra’s land reform, was opposed by the upper bourgeoisie and judged to be ‘unconstitutional’ (see section A). This, and the slow transfer of powers under the autonomy statute, provoked the Esquerra into joining the October 1934 uprising.

  In the preceding year, one wing of the party had become increasingly nationalistic and proto-fascist. Its leader, Dencàs, Generalitat councillor of public order, and his loyal follower Miquel Badía, Barcelona police chief, harried the CNT, which used this as a pretext for not joining the rising. On the evening of 6 October, Lluis Companys, the Esquerra leader and member of the party’s democratic republic wing, declared – once again – the Catalan state within the Federal Spanish republic. Dencàs’s green-shirted escamots (squads), who had wished for a declaration of independence, took to the streets. Without the CNT, no rising in Barcelona could hope to succeed. Within less than twelve hours, the Generalitat surrendered to a small army force, and the uprising was over. Dencàs fled before the surrender. Companys and the members of the Generalitat government were arrested and sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. The autonomy statute was suspended.

  The defeat had one important effect on the Esquerra. It meant the end, within the party, of the extreme nationalist and proto-fascist Estat Català wing. Henceforth, the democratic republican tendency, which was more closely linked to the petty bourgeoisie, was dominant. As a result, the Esquerra became increasingly moderate and sought a modus vivendi, within the republican regime, with the Lliga Catalana, representative of the large bourgeoisie.36

  In February 1936, the Esquerra, as the leading member of the Left Front of Catalonia (as the Popular Front was known there), was restored to its dominant political position. The Left Front won 59 per cent of the popular vote against 41 per cent for the right. Companys and his government were released from prison. At the same time the Lliga Catalana adopted a more centralist position than its anti-liberal, anti-autonomy posture of the election campaign and prepared to become a loyal opposition. This, in ROIG LLOP’s opinion,
was in accord with middle-class Catalan tradition. ‘Coexistence, conciliation, dialogue, a hatred of violence – in short, the English model, which for us represented the political ideal … ’

  Catalonia, despite the weight of the CNT, could arguably be said to be the only area within the Spanish state before the war where an advanced bourgeois democracy was establishing solid roots.

  Compared to the Esquerra, the PNV pre-war was a non-governing party in a non-autonomous country confronted by a socialist-led working class strongly influenced by Prieto’s centrist line. Nationalism and religion provided the PNV’s ideological ‘cement’, EPALZA, of the party’s youth movement Mendigoixales, likened the PNV to a harlequin’s costume.

  —It covered everything: upper class, middle class, workers, peasants. United by a deep sense of religion, Basque patriotism and democracy.37 It had its left and right wings; it was like a resistance movement. When the oppressor had been got rid of and freedom won, the party would almost certainly split into its constituent parts. Meanwhile, it represented the spectrum of a future Basque parliament, for the other parties had excluded themselves by their refusal to espouse the nationalist cause …

  But what did ‘freedom’ mean in terms of the future? An independent nation state, or autonomy within the Spanish state? The PNV, in Luis MICHELENA’s view, was always ambiguous about its aims. A Basque nationalist party militant from the age of fifteen (and later the leading philologist of the Basque language), he knew that the party avoided coming out in favour simply of home rule.

  —But it also avoided defining itself as separatist. In fact, I believe that the bulk of its supporters really wanted an autonomy sufficient to defend the ‘personality’ of the Basque country …