by Hugh Thomas
These interests were represented in the new cabinet of 1931 by several men. There was the minister of justice, Fernando de los Ríos, a nephew of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, himself professor at the University of Granada, theoretically a socialist but, with his flowing and beautiful Castilian speech, above all a humanist and too gentle to be a Marxist. There was the minister of marine, Casares Quiroga, the Galician lawyer who was to be Prime Minister at the start of the civil war.1 There was the jacobin from Asturias, Álvaro de Albornoz who, with the experienced Catalan republican, Marcelino Domingo, were leaders of what they called the Republican Radical Socialist party, modelled on the French party of Clemenceau and Ferry. They were ministers of ‘development’ and of education, respectively. There was, too, the new minister of war, Manuel Azaña, who, though not himself an old pupil of the Free Institute, reflects its effect.
Had he lived in a less turbulent country, Azaña might have given his life to literature. As it was, his brilliant translations of George Borrow, G. K. Chesterton, and Voltaire, an autobiographical novel about his schooldays, and a number of critical and polemical works are all that he left behind—save for a collection of speeches and a remarkable diary.2 For he was drawn into politics by the conditions of his country. He regarded ‘politics as an art, with the people as the palette’.3 Azaña was born in 1880, in a house between two convents in Alcalá de Henares, the crumbling cathedral city twenty miles from Madrid, the birthplace of Cervantes. He came from a family known in Alcalá for public service. His mother died when he was nine. Azaña lost his religious faith at the Augustinian college at the monastery of El Escorial against whose formal education he rebelled. He then took a law degree, and studied in Paris. He passed into the civil service, becoming chief clerk at the registration office (the Spanish equivalent of Somerset House). Living alone either at Alcalá or in Madrid, carrying on literary work, translating here, reviewing there, Azaña seemed representative of many other middle-class intellectuals of the period—and not only in Spain. Several things, however, marked out Azaña from others. First, he was ugly. His consequent self-consciousness led him to keep very much to himself, to subject himself to constant self-analysis in his writings and even in his speeches, to shun society (especially that of women), even to be scorned by his fellow-writers—and, in consequence, to lay up within himself reserves which were to bring him to the leadership of Spain and which help to explain his bitter tongue and his lonely arrogance, shown in times both of victory and of defeat. Unamuno said that Azaña was ‘capable of starting a revolution to ensure that his books would be read’. Fastidious and sensitive to a degree, he was accused of being a homosexual, though there is no evidence for that. He did eventually marry, in 1929, at forty-nine, the much younger sister of Cipriano Rivas Cherif, a collaborator on his literary magazine. He was eloquent. He showed this first in many speeches at the Ateneo, the club in Madrid which had been the centre of progressive activity in Spain since the early nineteenth century. As a result, Azaña became connected with, and respected by, other republican leaders. His speeches were cold and monotonous, but fascinating and well constructed. He became editor of a political journal, España, the Ateneo’s president, and then founded Republican Action, a republican party of his own. Azaña became minister of war in 1931, since no one else among the unmilitarily-minded liberals had troubled to inform themselves about the army. Immediately, Azaña sought in his speeches and conduct to imbue the new republic with a dignity which only time could really have given it, but which it needed immediately to be able to survive at all.
An admirer of Cromwell, Azaña knew no economics. He cultivated a superhuman detachment which led him to overlook some of the existing facts of Spanish life. Utterly unself-seeking, the enemies who quickly gathered were forced to personal insult in order to attack him. Yet at times thousands were to regard him as the ‘strong man of the republic’. Adored by those who knew him well, he often seemed bitter, scornful and narrow-minded to his opponents. He chose men badly. He believed the republic should be radical or cease to exist. Always lucid, master of every subject on which he spoke, vacillating at critical moments, ironic in the face of disaster, given to bouts of dictatorial intransigence and of optimism tempered by despair, he was a physical coward though he took pains to conceal that fact. Azaña was the most cultivated of the republic’s politicians. Unfortunately, the two strongest political drives in his mind were hostility to the church and to the power of the army.1 He lacked a mass party and, therefore, had to choose whether to ally with Lerroux’s radicals or with the socialists. He chose the latter.
Azaña, Domingo, and Albornoz stood for a republicanism which had grown vigorously in the last years of the dictatorship: 450 republican clubs, with a membership of nearly 100,000, had Azaña’s views and outlook. Azaña inherited also many old liberals, who had played such an important part in the politics of the Restoration. But this following was Azaña’s only on sufferance: the artisans, teachers, doctors, civil servants who voted for Azaña in 1931 could be, and were, tempted away both by more radical and more conservative leaders.2 Azaña was certainly a statesman; but like other Spanish politicians of distinction, he found it hard to hold an elusive following. Nor was he an innovator; many of his policies had antecedents in the programmes of the liberals of Canalejas’s time or in the ideas of the reformist republicans to which Azaña had himself for a time belonged.
In addition to Fernando de los Ríos, there were two other socialists in the first cabinet of the republic. These were Indalecio Prieto and Francisco Largo Caballero, the secretary general of the general trade union, the UGT.3 The socialist party had some 20,000 members and the union a little less than 300,000.4 Founded in 1879 by those Spaniards who supported Marx in his quarrel against the anarchists,1 the growth of both party and union had, until just before the First World War, been slow. Neither could gain much foothold in industrial Barcelona, where the anarchists were so powerful. Hence the socialists found their members among the typographers and building workers of Madrid, among the coal miners of Asturias, and in the industrial areas growing up around Bilbao, particularly among unskilled non-Basque immigrants from Castile or Galicia, who, indeed, caused the first serious strikes in Spain, in the 1890s.
Three new developments later began to stimulate membership. The first, copied from the radical party, was the idea of the casas del pueblo, socialist club houses, in which were to be found the committee-rooms of the local trade-union branch, a free lending library, and a café. The barracks of the civil guard, the church, and the town hall were now accompanied in most of the cities and whitewashed pueblos of Spain by a fourth building, also, like them, the expression of a centralizing idea, but one combining Marxist thought with education. The second development was a tactical alliance with middle-class republicans, which gave the socialists a seat in the Cortes and hence brought the leaders into parliamentary politics. The third was the war of 1914–18, which brought prosperity to Spain, greater political consciousness, and greater interest in the affairs of the rest of Europe. Immigrants into the cities from the country were easily persuaded into socialism, particularly when the socialists supported workers in their struggle to avoid being called up to fight in Morocco. The socialists were consistently against Germany in the Great War, and were in touch with Cambó and others in their regeneratory schemes in 1917 with, as has been seen, temporarily bad results for them.2 The socialist party was first tempted by, and then broke with, the Russian bolsheviks.3 A few socialists left to found, with certain discontented anarchists, the Spanish communist party, which remained, however, for a long time, insignificant.4
In 1925, the venerable, single-minded, patient and incorruptible father of the Spanish socialists, Pablo Iglesias, died. As a young printer, he had helped to achieve the break with Bakunin in 1872 and ever since had shrewdly and honourably led the party through innumerable vicissitudes. His successor, in the party and the UGT, was his chief lieutenant, Francisco Largo Caballero, a plasterer who had
spent his life as a union official and as a conscientious member of the Madrid Municipal Council, successfully setting up insurance schemes and libraries, arranging courses of lectures and negotiating with employers.1 Aged sixty-two in 1931, Largo Caballero had taken part in Madrid’s first strike of building workers, in 1890, and was a man without liking, or talent, for parliaments. He was no speaker. He believed in committees, not theories. He had given no encouragement to any who had wanted to strike when Primo de Rivera ‘pronounced’. He had even agreed to collaborate (if briefly) with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera as ‘councillor of state’. The explanation for that was to be found in the socialists’ contempt for the monarchy and in Largo’s morbid fear of losing ground to his rivals in the working class, the anarchists, who, though disorganized, were still more numerous than the socialists. The UGT had, for a long time, been respected by the bourgeoisie for its discipline, its effective ‘machine’, with its myriad committees, its practical, even reasonable, behaviour in strikes (in contrast with the anarchists), and its centralist flavour. It was not surprising that Largo Caballero should become the first minister of labour under the republic. The arbitration committees of employers, unions, and a governmental casting vote, which he had set up under Primo to resolve wage disputes, were the predecessors of a similar system which he introduced in 1931. Largo Caballero owed his popularity to the fact that thousands of Spanish workers saw in him a reflection of their own struggles; he was the man par excellence of the casas del pueblo, who had risen through his own fortitude, persistence and honesty, as well as a resolve to avoid intemperate revolutionary action.
Indalecio Prieto, his colleague in the republican cabinet—he was minister of finance—was a different sort of socialist. Born in Oviedo, he removed as a child with his widowed mother to Bilbao, where he worked as a newsboy. His quick brain attracted the attention of a Basque millionaire, Horacio Echevarrieta, who made him first his homme de confiance and, later, editor of his newspaper, El Liberal de Bilbao. In 1918, Prieto was elected as a socialist to the Cortes where his easy eloquence attracted attention—and the jealousy of Largo Caballero. Thereafter, the antagonism between the two marked the Spanish socialist party, being itself the reflection of a division of attitudes as to what sort of party it should be. Prieto had become prosperous. Bald, with a double chin and small eyes, his head set on a diabetic body of gigantic dimensions, he behaved more as an enlightened member of the upper classes than as a labour leader. ‘The first quality of Prieto is his great heart,’ wrote Miguel Maura of him. ‘I have known few, tremendously few, people more self-sacrificing, more compassionate, more disinterested than Prieto.’1 He was mercurial, but surprisingly dedicated to party discipline. As a successful parliamentarian, he had opposed collaboration in the government of Primo de Rivera, and it had been he who had persuaded the socialists to join the conspiracy against the monarchy of 1930. Aged forty-eight in 1931, Prieto was popular with the middle class. But, among workers, the sterner figure of Largo Caballero always commanded more affection.
The president of both the UGT and the party until 1931 was Julián Besteiro, the third most influential Spanish socialist, professor of philosophy and, though theoretically a Marxist, in party politics a moderate. But he was against the idea of the socialists serving in the government. As a result, he soon resigned from the presidency of both party and union. Besteiro was humane, friendly, wise, learned, but reserved; no one ‘tutoyered’ him.2
The Spanish working class in the 1930s comprised about 8 million, out of a population of 24 million. About 4½ million worked on the land; and the socialists, as yet, had little following there, though they soon would. The socialists were also badly represented in Catalonia, where nearly three-quarters of Spanish industry was concentrated. But if they had in consequence few members in Spain’s largest industries—the 300,000 who worked in the clothes manufacturing and the textile industries—they had backing among the 270,000 builders, the 200,000 who worked in food industries, the 100,000 miners, and the 120,000 metallurgical workers. They also had strength among the 60,000 transport workers, and among the half million or so artisans.
The last member of the republican cabinet of 1931 was a Catalan classical historian, Nicolau d’Olwer, who became minister of ‘the national economy’. Though he had been active in Catalan politics in the 1920s, he was less of a professional politician than anyone in the cabinet; his inclusion in it was intended to please the Catalan nationalists. As an economist, it was said of him, he was ‘a great hellenist’.
Five of the members of this government had one attribute in common: they were freemasons and, therefore, suspected by their conservative enemies of anti-Spanish loyalties.1
In the nineteenth century, most Spanish liberals had been members of one or other of the masonic lodges which, though introduced into Spain in the eighteenth century, spread during the Napoleonic Wars. In the twentieth century, progressive persons seem, in Spain and elsewhere on the continent, to have felt obliged to join a lodge largely as a gesture. Although they subscribed to the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity on their induction, masons, however, formed a secret society without any real policy. Yet though without overt political purposes, Spanish masonry was anti-religious.2 Since to disbelieve in God in Spain was an act with political consequences, churchmen and the Right believed masonry to be a devilish international plot, organized in the City of London, yet designed to establish atheistic communism. To the Jesuits, masonry seemed especially vile since its secret ways appeared a profane parody of their own order.3 Such hostility, of course, would be likely to increase the secretiveness of the masons. But the latter did not, even so, have any political front. The French masons may have financed anti-clericalism in other countries and the Spanish lodges were useful meeting-places for plotting against Primo de Rivera. But later, there were divisions within them. Some generals, such as Goded, Queipo de Llano, and Cabanellas, belonged to a military lodge, some of whose members were fervent republicans. The relation of masonry to Marxism was also hotly debated. Men of the Free Institute were rarely freemasons. The freemasons cannot, therefore, be regarded as of determining importance in the 1930s, though some politicians, such as Martínez Barrio, did owe some of their influence to their rank in the masonic order.1
The problem of Catalonia was the first with which the new republic had to deal. The four provinces of Catalonia had enjoyed a medieval past of commercial pre-eminence upon which it was easy for romantics to dwell. Industrialization and the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, as has been seen, created a desire for home rule which, when thwarted, turned into a nationalist movement. Richer than any other part of the Peninsula, with a modern class structure and a Mediterranean culture, Catalonia might have been prosperous within a Spanish federal state. It was certain to be rebellious within the centralized, unimaginative Bourbon structure. Hostility to free trade and a desire for protection played a part in the rise of Catalan nationalism. Catalans also believed themselves a ‘vital member’ attached to the ‘dying body’ of Castile.
Catalanism owed its strength to a combination of this economic interpretation with a literary renaissance expressed by the Floral Games which had begun in 1859, the poetic competitions in Catalan, as well as by the works of several poets, headed by the romantic priest Verdaguer. In the early years of the twentieth century, Catalonia’s importance was increased by the development of hydro-electric power in the eastern Pyrenees. Power was brought to Madrid from Catalonia, while the electricity supply itself was concentrated in the North American ‘La Canadiense’ (the Barcelona Traction Company). Meantime, the Bible was translated into Catalan by the monks of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, a flood of both original and translated literature poured from Catalan presses, a dictionary was compiled, and newspapers were founded. Catalan was more widely spoken than ever, and became the customary language of town councils. Excursions to rediscover inland Catalonia, the cult of the national dance (the
‘Sardana’), the creation of popular choirs, even the adoption of a national deity (Mare de Déu de Montserrat) were the cultural manifestations of a nationalism which, despite setbacks, still held the loyalty in 1931 of most of the Catalan middle class. The church gave some backing to the Catalan movement, since Catalanism was antiliberal in the sense that all regional movements had once been so. But the federalism into which Catalanism might easily fit was nevertheless more Left than Right.