The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Herrera and his friends on the newspaper El Debate, meantime, launched a constitutional Catholic movement, National Action (Acción Nacional), in late April 1931, whose purpose was an electoral organization to bring together ‘the elements of order’. But some of the members of this supposedly ‘liberal’ party, such as Antonio Goicoechea and the Conde de Vallellano, were authoritarian monarchists. The poet José María Pemán, the ‘man of ideas’ in Primo’s Patriotic Union, also a member, was a romantic in love with the past.2 It seemed an unpromising beginning to Spain’s first conservative mass movement; yet such it eventually became, playing on the fears of those outraged by the anti-clericalism of the government and its friends.

  Anti-clericalism was understandable in Spain in the 1930s, and the liberals who were moved by the cause of removing the stranglehold of Catholicism over education and culture were acting within a great nineteenth-century tradition. But the real cultural problem in Spain was lack of education. Nearly twenty Spanish provinces, for example, had an illiteracy rate of 50 per cent or over and only two provinces (Barcelona and the Basque province of Alava) had one less than 25 per cent. It would have been wiser, and more long-sighted, if the republic had concentrated on the creation of new schools, rather than attacking orders which maintained good if exclusive ones, however much Azaña had been distressed by the Augustinian school. Further, like it or not, the church in Spain did incorporate a long tradition in Spanish life; indeed, it had created the pattern of that life. It was easy, therefore, to represent anti-clericalism as being an element of ‘anti-Spain’: which many did.

  5

  On Sunday 10 May 1931, within a few days of the publication of Cardinal Segura’s pastoral letter, a group of army officers loyal to King Alfonso were observed gathering at a house in the Calle Alcalá, one of the main streets of Madrid. Nominally, they were merely founding the Independent Monarchist Club ‘to serve as a link between the elements wishing to work for the substantive ideals of monarchy’. It was a right-wing, monarchist response to the ‘liberal’ Catholics’ National Action. But the old ‘Royal March’ was played on a gramophone. A crowd gathered. Two monarchists (one of them was the Marqués Luca de Tena, editor of ABC, the monarchist daily newspaper) who arrived late were delighted by the number of people in the street, and shouted, ‘¡Viva la Monarquía!’ Their taxi-driver replied by crying, ‘¡Viva la República!’ The monarchists protested to the driver, and a rumour immediately spread that they had killed him. The crowd became infuriated, and set fire to several motorcars of the monarchists attending the meeting inside. In a moment, the number of people in the street seemed to increase one hundredfold. The republic’s honeymoon was over. An angry crowd set out for the offices of ABC, which they proceeded to burn. The minister of the interior, Miguel Maura, threatened to resign unless he was able to call out the civil guard,1 but the government hesitated. Azaña said that all the convents of Madrid were not worth one republican life. The crowds eventually dispersed. But the next day, the riots took on a new lease of life. The Jesuit church in the Calle de la Flor, in the centre of Madrid, was burned to the ground. On its charred walls the words ‘The Justice of the People on Thieves’ were chalked up.1 Several other churches and convents in Madrid were also burned during the day.2 Within a few days the fires had spread to Andalusia, especially to Málaga. Maura got permission to use the army instead of the hated civil guard, and martial law was proclaimed. There was widespread alarm all over Spain. No one died, though several monks escaped only just in time. Even so, the republic had clearly stained its record. Some hundred churches had been damaged throughout Spain. The government publicly blamed the monarchists for provoking the riot, and suspended not only ABC but also El Debate.

  Some of those gathered in the house in the Calle Alcalá would have liked an insurrection against the republic. They did not have, for this, the approval of King Alfonso (then in Paris), who had encouraged his friends (including army officers) to serve the republic.3 Some days before, he had given a dignified interview to ABC, in which he had said: ‘Monarchists who wish to follow my advice will not only refrain from placing obstacles in the government’s path, but will support it in all patriotic policies. High above the formal idea of republic or monarchy stands Spain.’4

  Though, no doubt, he saw this method as the best means of being able to return to the Spanish throne, Don Alfonso obviously did not wish to make matters impossible for the new government. As a result, a majority of the officers of the army, air force and navy took an oath to the new régime.1 But some had no intention of working with the republic.2 The leading spirits among these potential plotters were Generals Orgaz, Cavalcanti, and Ponte. Others active were the Marqués de Quintanar, busy looking for money; Ramiro de Maeztu, once a member of the Generation of 1898, who had since then been attracted by anarchism, been also an ambassador, a journalist, and was now almost a fascist; the Carlist intellectual, Víctor Pradera; and young monarchists, such as Sáinz Rodríguez, enormously fat (‘a latifundium of flesh’, as he was once described), erudite, and bohemian. These conspirators soon decided to form a new and legal monarchist party; they would found, under the inspiration of Action Française in France, a review, Acción Española (not to be confused with the party known as Acción Nacional), under Ramiro de Maeztu’s editorship, which would publicly argue in favour of an insurrection against the republic (the editorial office would also form a centre of studies to ‘collect texts on the question of the legality of an insurrection’); and they would found an organization to create ‘the ambience of revolution’ in the army. Other right-wing political groups were soon in being: Acción Castellana; a Valencian regional right-wing movement headed by an ex-Carlist journalist, Luis Lucía; and an agrarian party of Castilian landowners. The old Carlist movement was also busy. Other monarchists discussed how they could disrupt the government’s economic policy by encouraging the flight of capital. These Spanish monarchists of the 1930s were influential, rich, more authoritarian than the King whose cause they supported, and showed more imagination in their efforts to overthrow the republic than they had in trying to defend the King.3

  As for those who protested against them that Sunday morning in 1931, some were simply citizens of Madrid walking down the main street of the capital: a frequent custom on Sunday morning. But the church-burnings (and the burning of the headquarters of ABC) were the work of anarchists.1

  The aspirations of the Spanish anarchists in 1931 had been modified, though not changed, since the arrival in Spain of Bakunin’s first emissary in 1868. Before then, revolutionary socialist ideas had had few Spanish adherents. A few intellectuals of the artisan class had been attracted by federalism; and Proudhon had been translated into Spanish by Pi y Margall, one of the leaders (and for a time Prime Minister) of the First Republic. In 1868, however, there arrived in Madrid Giuseppe Fanelli, an Italian deputy, once a companion-in-arms of Garibaldi, now a passionate admirer of Bakunin, the leading figure in the International. Although Fanelli spoke no Spanish, and though only one among his tiny audience (mainly printers) understood French, his ideas had an extraordinary effect.2 Fanelli brought Spanish workers into contact with Europe and suggested the need for organization. Two Spaniards later visited Bakunin in Basle. By 1873, there were 50,000 ‘Bakuninists’ in Spain, at first known as ‘internationals’ and, later, by the more accurate name of anarchists. To these, a new truth seemed to have been proclaimed. The state, being based upon ideas of authority, was evil. In its place, there should be self-governing communes—municipalities, professions, or other societies—which would make voluntary pacts with each other. All collaboration with parliaments, governments and organized religion was condemned. Criminals would be punished by the censure of public opinion.

  Bakunin was influenced, like Tolstoy, in forming such views by a nostalgia for the Russian village life which he had known in childhood. The Spaniards, among whom his ideas so fruitfully spread, can also be represented as hankering for a similar simplicity of the days bef
ore the grasping modern state, of the medieval village societies which had flourished in Spain as in the rest of Europe. Money in much of Spain was then still an innovation. Anarchism was thus as much a protest against industrialization as a method of organizing it to the public advantage. The church, which was to suffer so much in consequence, may have helped to prepare the way; its hostility to the competitive instinct, particularly of its Spanish practitioners, made the ideas of Fanelli seem merely an honest continuation of an old faith; perhaps even a real reformation which had never come. This was a time when landlords (especially the new ones who had taken over church lands) recognized fewer and fewer obligations towards peasants, who became increasingly a landless proletariat without rights.1

  The dispute between Marx and Bakunin in the International divided its branch in Spain. The mass of the Spanish movement, the anarchists, continued, almost alone in Europe, to follow Bakunin. A minority, the socialists, formed a party of their own, following Marx. The first anarchist initiates—printers, schoolmasters, and students—began a deliberate policy of education, directed mainly at the Andalusian labourers. Revolutionary militants moved about from village to village, living like wandering friars. They organized night schools, where peasants learned to read, to become teetotal and vegetarian, to be faithful to their wives, and perhaps to discuss the moral evil of tobacco or coffee. Though the government banned the internationals in 1872, anarchists took the lead among the cantonalist revolutionaries of those years. In a strike that year at Alcoy (Alicante), the anarchists transformed the local council into a committee of public safety, killed the mayor and the civil guards, and carried the heads of the latter around the town in triumph—a hint of many troubles that were to follow.

  The movement went underground. Numbers shrank, quarrels ensued, as bitter as they can only be when they are in the void, old militants were calumniated and betrayed. Several middle-class radicals, such as the heroic Fermín Salvochea from Cádiz, became anarchists. Preaching freedom, such men were self-disciplined. Opponents of conventional marriage (as well as of the abolition of middle- and upper-class moral standards), they lived like saints. Their followers strove to emulate them, often attempting to hasten the millennium by some violent, spontaneous act which would be repressed with a ruthlessness which itself bred further violence. Throughout the south of Spain, however, during the eighties, nineties, and the first ten years of the twentieth century, anarchism continued to spread as if it were a religion, hampered by persecution, but never conquered, with more and more agricultural workers coming to believe that one day, perhaps after the very next seizure of land, the fabric of the old Spain, with the priest and the landlord, would fall away, ushering in the world of love, and the redistribution of large estates. Those who would have been bandits in the 1840s became anarchists in the 1880s. Andalusia, for so long neglected by the aristocracy, had its revenge by advocating a creed whose day of triumph would mean the physical destruction of that upper class and its friends or servants. Many peasants learned to read under anarchist instruction, and they were likely to believe implicitly much of what they read in ill-printed tracts by Bakunin and Proudhon. When they found that Bakunin had said that the new world would be won only after the last king had been strangled in the guts of the last priest, they would be inclined to wish to test whether that was so. With a pistol and an encyclopedia, could not everything be achieved? This millenarian mood, conceived in clandestinity, survived long into the time of freedom.

  The landowners and the civil guard continued in a semi-permanent state of panic at the threat apparently presented in revolutionary Andalusia, and began to act as if they too lived as far from practicality as their enemies, whom they credited with a degree of organization removed from the truth. The most famous incident was the conspiracy of la Mano Negra (the Black Hand) in 1883, which the civil guard claimed to have staunched, after a number of crop burnings and shootings of rural guards, and just before the whole upper class of Andalusia were to be massacred. Though there was no such plan, fourteen militants were garrotted in the main square of Cádiz, as a result, after a perfunctory trial. This temporarily put an end to anarchist activity in Andalusia, though most villages had still their obrero consciente, the worker who kept the anarchist conscience.1 Nine years later, 4,000 peasants armed with sickles marched into patrician Jerez, shouting ‘¡Viva la Anarquía!’, and killed a number of mercenary shopkeepers. The rising was put down by cavalry, four men were executed and many condemned, even one (Salvochea) who was in prison at the time of the great march.

  ‘The Idea’ (as anarchism was known to its followers) also reached Barcelona, partly as a result of the immigration of Andalusian workers to the textile factories. Catalan anarchists numbered 13,000 by 1880, Andalusia having about 30,000. Catalan anarchism was always a more organized affair than that of Andalusia; from the start, the workers realized that planning was necessary to defeat both rival unions (based on cooperative ideas) and the industrialists. On the other hand, the impoverished landless labourers of the south dreamt of running their own village without the brutality of the landlord’s agent and the civil guards, the mercenary slyness of the village shopkeeper and the patronizing interference of the priest. Disputes between these two schools in the libertarian movement rumbled on at innumerable congresses in the 1890s, with the former denouncing the latter as criminals, the latter describing the collectivists as only interested in a higher standard of living. But, even in Barcelona, terrorism caught the imagination of the unskilled and often illiterate workers who had recently come into the city from the country, and even the most high-minded were unable to deny the value of the ‘propaganda of the deed’, as the Italian anarchist, Malatesta, put it: some sudden outrageous act which would throw the bourgeoisie into panic. There was a famous attempt on the captain-general, Martínez Campos, in 1893; his would-be assassin was executed; and a friend of his in revenge threw a bomb into the Liceo Theatre, Barcelona, killing twenty-one. The assassin, as well as several innocent people, were shot in reprisal. There was another bomb attack on a Corpus Christi day procession, killing ten. Anarchist responsibility was never proved, but five anarchists were executed, and others herded into Montjuich castle, where several died of neglect. An international scandal followed, and the Prime Minister, Cánovas, was murdered in turn by an Italian anarchist paid for by Cuban rebels. By then, though friendships existed between Spanish anarchists and their comrades beyond the Pyrenees (including the Russians), the movement now seemed indigenously Spanish, chiefly through its absorption of the lower-middle-class federalism of Pi y Margall, which underlay much Spanish political speculation (as late as 1937, a leading anarchist intellectual, Federica Montseny, would declare herself closer to Pi than to Bakunin).1

  In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of rationalist schools were started in Barcelona aiming to give a more sophisticated version of anarchism, the most celebrated being the Escuela Moderna at Barcelona run by Francisco Ferrer, a mason, agitator, conspirator, gambler on the stock exchange, philanderer and optimist.2 These schools were radical educational experiments, in the tradition of Tolstoy, which, in the Catholic atmosphere of Spain, were certain to cause scandal: Ferrer, for instance, deliberately flouted convention by taking his pupils for a picnic on Good Friday. It was scarcely an accident that the would-be murderer of the King and Queen at their wedding in 1906 was Mateo Morral, employed by Ferrer in his publishing firm in Barcelona. Ferrer himself, on the other hand, almost certainly had little to do with the preparation of the Tragic Week in Barcelona, though he was tried and shot for being ‘the chief planner’ of it, on the mendacious evidence of a few radicals anxious to destroy him. (He was in truth executed because he had long advocated a revolution, even if he had not organized one.) Ferrer’s death gave the anarchists an internationally-known martyr and damaged the radicals, who had made inroads into the anarchists’ strength among Catalan workers.3 The government assumed that the anarchist labour federation in Barcelona had been the
instrument through which Ferrer had worked, helped by the French workers, not to speak of international freemasonry; anarchists were persecuted; and the workers turned more and more towards them in consequence, and away from political programmes, such as those of the radicals. Thereafter, too, moderate labour leaders lost ground to more violent ones, ready to look romantically on the Tragic Week as a Spanish version of the Commune de Paris, an ‘epic’, if possible to be reenacted.

  The Tragic Week led too to the formation in 1910 of the first nationwide workers’ federation, the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, CNT,1 which was from the start dominated by anarchists. The CNT’s leaders combined the ideas of the survivors of Bakunin’s generation with those of Prince Kropotkin, Malatesta and Ferrer, and were also influenced (as Ferrer had been) by ideas from France, the articulate leaders of whose working class were in the full flood of enthusiasm for ‘syndicalism’ and the idea of economic warfare to the death. No doubt members of the CNT were still in a minority even among organized workers in Barcelona. But their verve commanded attention. Their tactics included sabotage, riots and anti-parliamentarianism, above all, the revolutionary general strike, carefully planned and ruthlessly carried out, which became the central hope of Spanish workers as the means of achieving the goal of ‘libertarian communism’. Since it was supposed that a properly timed strike would be immediately effective, there was no strike fund, nor could many anarchist workers have afforded to contribute to one. Nor, until 1936, was there more than one paid official of the union. At meetings, there were no agendas, and there were no headquarters, apart from the offices of the newspapers and the printers.