by Hugh Thomas
The inclusion of such sweeping anti-clerical clauses in the constitution of the republic was ambitious, but foolish, whatever the merits of the case might be. It might have been that the application of such conditions would ultimately have made for a juster Spain. Nevertheless, it would have been wiser to have delayed before the presentation of total disestablishment. It would have been better too to have held back dissolution until the place of the Augustinian and Jesuit schools could have been taken by lay establishments of comparable quality. For, with all their shortcomings, these orders had created the best secondary schools in the country—for those who could pay. Even liberal newspapers denounced these measures. Yet Azaña thundered in the Cortes: ‘Do not tell me that this is contrary to freedom. It is a matter of public health.’ Unfortunately, Spanish liberalism had come to look on the church as a scapegoat for all Spain’s ills; but no such simple explanation was, in fact, honest. Furthermore, these ideas were far from innovations: the Jesuits had been expelled before, and compulsory religious education had been dropped in 1913, to be restored by Primo de Rivera. The difficulty was that Spanish Catholics were forced into having to oppose the constitution if they wished to criticize its educational policy.1
The debates in the Cortes on these clerical clauses brought the first of many governmental crises in the Second Republic. Alcalá Zamora, the Prime Minister, and Miguel Maura, the minister of the interior, both Catholic ‘progressives’, resigned in October. The Speaker of the Cortes, the serene Besteiro, assumed the temporary rank of President of Spain and called on Azaña to form another government. Since Azaña had assumed the leadership of the government parties in the Cortes, he was the obvious choice: he was the one success of the new régime. But his promotion outraged the radical Lerroux, who regarded himself as representing the senior conscience of republicanism and who soon passed, with his ninety followers, into opposition.2 Thereafter, the government was strictly anti-clerical, being a coalition of republicans of Azaña’s way of thinking, and of socialists. Alcalá Zamora admittedly became the first President of the republic. So it could not have been said that the Catholics were wholly excluded from the régime.
The constitution became law at the end of 1931. It remained for the government to introduce the legislation which would enact all its clauses. The ministers busied themselves first with a law ‘for the defence of the republic’. The constitution provided for the suspension of all guarantees of freedom for thirty days, in the case of an emergency. The scheme empowered the minister of the interior to suspend public meetings. A modest income tax was introduced for the first time in Spain. These things were vigorously fought by the few right-wing deputies. Then, on the last day of 1931, a terrible incident occurred which caught the attention of the whole country.
In the wild and empty region of Estremadura, near the monastery of Guadalupe, there stood a small pueblo of nine hundred inhabitants named Castilblanco. The conditions here were much as they were elsewhere in the region. There was no special shortage of food. Violence was previously unknown. The local socialists desired to demonstrate, along with others in other pueblos, against the unpopular civil governor of Badajoz. Permission to do so was refused. They determined to go ahead. The civil guard then came to the defence of the authorities.
The civil guard (‘la Benemérita’, the ‘well deserving’, as it was known by the middle class) numbered about 30,000. It had been established in 1844 to keep order in the countryside, then agitated by bandits using guerrilla methods successfully employed against the armies of Napoleon. The civil guard was led by a general and serving officers. Many of the rank and file were ex-regular soldiers. With their green uniforms, three-cornered hats, their Mauser rifles, and gaunt barracks, this police force was regarded as an army of occupation. Members of the civil guard never served in the part of Spain from whence they came. They were not encouraged to be friendly with anyone in the village where they were quartered. They had a reputation for ruthlessness. ‘When one joins the civil guard,’ wrote the novelist Ramón Sender, ‘one declares civil war.’1 The personnel during the republic, being the same as those of the monarchy, were as rough in the 1930s as they had been in the 1920s.
In Castilblanco in 1931, the civil guard were as unpopular as elsewhere in Spain. Their fate was terrible. When they tried to prevent the holding of the socialist meeting, the village fell upon them. Four were killed. Their eyes were gouged out. Their bodies were mutilated. On one of the bodies thirty-seven knife wounds were afterwards discovered; and, as in the town of Fuenteovejuna in Lope de Vega’s play of that name, there was no possibility of bringing the killers to trial. The village, no single person, was responsible.2 This tragedy was followed by several comparable, but less dramatic, events in other pueblos. In Arnedo (Logroño) the civil guards wreaked vengeance and killed seven peaceful demonstrators. The civil guard were everywhere on the offensive after Castilblanco. But in Sallent, in the valley of the Llobregat near Barcelona, the CNT took over the town, raised a red flag on the town hall, abolished private property and money, and declared themselves an independent society. The government took five days to recapture the town. Many anarchists from all over Spain were deported as a result. Among them were the solidarios, Durruti and Francisco Ascaso. The latter wrote from his prison ship: ‘Poor bourgeoisie which has to have recourse to such action to survive. But of course they are at war with us, and it is natural that they defend themselves by martyrizing, murdering, and exiling us.’1 This punishment did not prevent the FAI, worried at the growth of numbers in the socialist agricultural workers’ union, from virtually declaring war on the republic and the rural bourgeoisie for the rest of 1932. It was a terrifying time for the landlords’ agents and their friends.
The frequency of these explosions encouraged the government to broach a discussion of those fundamental social problems which lay at the heart of Spanish working-class unrest, particularly the problem of agriculture.
Spain was a dry land with bad soil. Its natural aridity had been increased by deforestation and the grazing of the famous flocks of sheep which, for centuries, had roamed central Spain. Forests had been destroyed by donkeys, goats, the demands of building (houses and ships) and peasant prejudice against trees. A lack of fodder prevented animals from being used as much as elsewhere in Europe; while agricultural machinery scarcely existed in 1930. Rainfall was low except in the north-west, and the unpredictability of such rain as there was made farming even more hazardous. The ‘golden fringe’ of the Mediterranean, and a few favoured valleys and irrigated plains, produced much of the available food. The social contrast between these prosperous regions and the poor, windy deserts of the centre was striking. Many farmers slaved all their lives on sterile soil. Water and fuel preoccupied farmers far more of the time than they did in northern Europe. Yield was lower too: for example, the acreage in vineyards was the same as in France but it produced only about two-thirds of what France did.2 Long distances between villages and fields, bad transport, bad roads, shortage of manure and ignorance of modern possibilities all kept low the incomes of those who worked on the land. Though distribution of food had been improved because of the railway and road programmes of Primo de Rivera, it still took too long to take perishable goods from the rich Valencian irrigated land or the Guadalquivir valley to mountain villages or to Madrid: hence the limited food available.
Spanish agriculture had been, for several generations, the object of debate, as was understandable since it was still the main source of wealth in the country. It accounted for about two-fifths of the Spanish national income in the 1930s though most labourers’ wages did not bring them enough to buy their food. Still, well over half the population lived from the land. Agrarian reform had been discussed since the eighteenth century but, along with many other good ideas suggested by the enlightened ministers of King Charles III, little had come of it. The economist Joaquín Costa, a member of the famous Generation of ’98, had argued that irrigation, internal colonization and a collective appr
oach might work wonders. With much unrest on the land, those things seemed to be desirable, but, apart from the setting up of a few technical schools, little was done. Yet the subject was extensively discussed and several laws for, at least, the improvement of agriculture were introduced, and usually cut to pieces in the Cortes.1
In the 1930s, the land was characterized by three main problems: first, the problems of the tiny farms, or minifundia, which could not give their owners an adequate living, and which were often much split up. These farms existed specially in rainy Galicia, but were also to be found elsewhere in northern Spain: while Soria, in Castile, had some of the most extreme examples. Second, there were also many large estates, latifundia, often owned by absentees, farmed negligently, and sometimes giving the owners or their representatives a dominant economic position in the locality. The characteristic land of latifundia was western Andalusia and Estremadura, beautiful and mountainous if rough and stony. Third, there were problems arising from different sorts of tenancies. Most of Castile, for example, was an area of poor tenant farmers insecure from a variety of reasons. In other regions, such as the Basque country, the Levante, and the Cantabrian coast, farms were often prosperous, being well irrigated; they presented no social problem, since they employed only a few people apart from the family of the farmer.
The problem of the latifundia seemed the most severe one in Spain. Accurate statistics on this matter are difficult to find. Though the church since the nineteenth century had ceased to be a large proprietor, the nobility continued to be: noble property constituted a quarter of the land in Toledo, an eighth in Cáceres, while perhaps 6 per cent of cultivated land as a whole was in the hands of families of title. Old families, such as those of the Duques de Medinaceli, Peñaranda, Villa-hermosa, or Alba, all owned estates of more than 75,000 acres. Nevertheless, most great estates belonged to the bourgeoisie, rather than to the nobility. It is difficult, because of the duplication of holdings and the combination of families, to know quite how important the latifundia were in the economy, but over half of cultivable Spain was owned by people whose holdings exceeded the, by Spanish standards, quite large farm of 250 acres. On these estates, the cultivation of traditional crops (particularly olives and wine) was usually pursued, and promising new ones (cotton, rice, wheat) often neglected, for lack of capital investment. Fertilizers, irrigation and mechanization were also ignored and much land (though little fertile land, probably) left uncultivated. Many such estates, it is true, were let at high prices. But all who worked on these farms lived in the large white dormitory towns of the south and west, and were hired, or not, as the case might be, by the proprietor’s agent at dawn and paid an insignificant wage (3.50 pesetas a day, say) except at harvest.1 Labour was twice as great as demand. The annually increasing population could be absorbed by new industry neither in Madrid nor in Catalonia—nor by emigration to the Americas (that possibility ceased after 1930). Unemployment was, therefore, rife: the average year’s work in Andalusia was between 180 to 250 days a year, often 130. Wages during the harvest were close to the average in towns, but local workers then found themselves in competition with migrant, or even Portuguese, workers. There was always new labour to be brought in, and the only strikes which could begin to have any effect were those mounted during the harvest, and many conscientious workers would shrink from anything so destructive.
The landless labourers of the Spanish south were, however, the most potentially revolutionary group in the country. Their conditions had worsened in the hundred years since the disentailment of the church’s lands. A hundred small alleviations available in the old inefficient ‘feudal’ system had vanished with modern capitalist farming—from the possibility of gleaning, to the availability of common lands for grazing and the collection of firewood. Few landless labourers even had gardens. Thus peasants responded to the appeal of anarchism, and most Andalusian and Estremaduran agricultural workers were either entirely or partially anarchists by, say, 1920. The socialists were beginning to make headway in these areas too. The labourers concerned had no tenure and, being underemployed if not unemployed, were easily accessible to revolutionary propaganda: and once it became known that so-and-so was an anarchist, his chances of getting back to a job were correspondingly less.
There were also problems for small owners. Most of those whose estates seemed to be tiny—over three-quarters of smallholdings (that is, those under 25 acres) were under one and a quarter acres—were often gardeners growing potatoes who had other jobs as fishermen, migrant workers or day labourers. In the 1930s, pressure on these farmers was the greater because the old outlet of emigration to the Americas, particularly important in Galicia or Asturias, had stopped. As for tenant farmers proper, few had their leases fixed by a written agreement and, if they did, it was for a short time. Tenants could not pass on their farms as of right to their sons; and, if the estate were sold, or the owner died, the new proprietor could renounce existing leases. Many tenant farmers were in debt to moneylenders. Then there was the problem of the ‘rabassaires’ of Catalonia (from rabassa morte, dead vine, in Catalan). These were farmers who had grown vines on the edge of certain large estates, and held them until the vine was dead: in the past, usually fifty or sixty years. The wine disease of phylloxera in the late nineteenth century caused new vines to be planted, with shorter lives, of twenty-five years. The rabassaires were trying to secure ownership of the land concerned. During the republic, their position would become more radical. Apart from them, few sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or private farmers joined revolutionary parties. All were conscious of their status, which they regarded as above that of a mere worker.
The socialists had been interesting themselves in agricultural questions since the early 1920s. An ‘agricultural secretariat’ in the UGT had been founded in 1927. Their plans included a general agrarian reform, comparable to that of Mexico, or of east Europe after 1919, to be passed by the Cortes after due consultation of experts and analyses on the spot. Their ideas were those introduced as decrees by Largo Caballero as minister of labour, in May 1931. Henceforth, tenant farmers could only be evicted if they had not paid rent or had not cultivated land. Tenants who gave up their leases were to be paid by the landlords for improvements, if any. Tenants could get their rents reduced in the event of a bad harvest, or if the rent exceeded the income of the farm. Collective approaches, from groups of farmers, were to be favoured in applications for leases (the socialists desired to encourage collectivization, though not to force it on the unwilling). An eight-hour day would be normal, permitting overtime pay for extra work. Mixed arbitration boards, or ‘juries’, of landowner and peasant would decide wage disputes: a chairman would either be elected or, if there were no agreement, he would be appointed by the (for the moment, socialist) minister of labour. The law of Términos municipales, municipal boundaries, meant that employers had to offer jobs to people of the town concerned before making offers to outsiders; and a law entitled Laboreo forzoso, obligatory labour, caused landowners to farm their estates in the ‘traditional’ manner of the region—that is, they could not turn over to something new in order to thwart, or out-manoeuvre, labourers, so as to keep wages down.
Of these, the law of Términos municipales had a decisive effect in removing the proprietor’s freedom of action to hire whom he wanted and to go outside the village in order to defeat a local strike. But the decree adversely affected migrant workers. Its effect was to prevent a further drift of labour to the cities and did nothing to encourage the investment in the land which alone could have created more work there.1 Nevertheless, agricultural workers were impressed. No matter that their expectations were extravagantly aroused so as to hope that the eventual agrarian reform would give real power to the poor. No matter that the decrees on leases overworked the courts. Workers began to join the agricultural section of the UGT, the FNTT (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra), in such numbers that, by 1932, there were some 450,000 socialist, mostly landless, farm workers, now o
utnumbering the anarchists on the land for the first time. Furthermore, these workers constituted half the members of the UGT, whose character, therefore, was changing: instead of a city-based union of the traditional proletariat, practical and disciplined, in the next year or two it became partly, at least, millenarian and irregular, in expectation and style. Meantime, the new decrees had another effect, by paving the way for higher wages: earnings doubled between 1931 and 1933, in consequence of Largo’s mixed arbitration boards’ decisions.
Work began too on an agrarian reform proper. The first plan, which had the advantages of simplicity, efficacy and political practicability, sought to resettle 60–75,000 landless labourers a year on land ‘temporarily’ sequestered from the largest proprietors, the whole to be paid for by a surtax on all large landowners. This scheme was too modest for the socialist party, and too extreme for the radicals. Alcalá Zamora introduced a scheme of his own, as did a Cortes committee on agriculture. All these plans were rejected. Finally, in March 1932, Marcelino Domingo, Azaña’s well-intentioned but ignorant new minister of agriculture, put forward a plan of great complexity. About half the surface of Spain was technically to be regarded as expropriatable, even if only a small amount was to be taken over to begin with. Peasants were to be settled either as individual farmers, or as members of a collective, according to the vote of the municipality concerned. All land taken over would be compensated for, except for the lands of grandees or others who had established their estates in the nineteenth century by foreclosing as private farms what had formally been theirs merely to administer under feudal arrangements abolished in 1811. Landless workers were to be at the head of the list of those who desired to go as settlers on new land, but private farmers could also apply. Settlers could not sell, mortgage or lease the land that they obtained: the state would be the new proprietor. An Institute of Agrarian Reform was set up to administer these arrangements, and to inspire technical education, investment and irrigation.