The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  Property to be taken over was, first, owned by a single person in a single municipality above a certain maximum, that maximum to vary according to crop (grain, 730 acres; uncultivated land, 1,600 acres; vineyards, 360 acres). Second, land near the municipality was expropriatable if it were not cultivated, and if the owner also had more than 1,000 pesetas’ worth of land in that same township. ‘Feudal’ lands (with signorial jurisdiction), badly cultivated lands, lands that could be irrigated and were not, and continuously leased lands could also be seized. Only the lands of grandees of Spain—the highest rank of nobility—were affected on a national, not a municipal, basis, in the sense that these noblemen were limited to a maximum holding regardless of where it was.

  All these provisions were hedged in by qualifications, so that, in the end, except for grandees, the properties of great landowners were not affected much if they were widely spread. Why, it was quite fairly demanded, should grandees be treated in one way and nouveaux riches in another? Forest and pasture were also exempted. The laws worried farmers without transforming the basis of agriculture. Largo Caballero said that the law was ‘an aspirin to cure an appendicitis’.

  The agrarian politicians, led by the Carlist José María Lamamié de Clairac, attacked the law day after day in the Cortes, with great perseverance. Then the republicans, including Azaña and even the minister, Marcelino Domingo, neglected to attend many of the debates on the agrarian law. Their first concerns were the church, the Catalan question, a free press, and a good educational system. Their knowledge of economic matters was as modest as their interest. Hence the law, though finally passed, was changed during its discussion, and many doubts were raised about it, these being shared by several of its sponsors. The debates alternated in the summer of 1932 with those on the statute of Catalan autonomy. When the Agrarian Law was finally passed, there was no urgency to put it into effect. The minister seemed still to regret his time at the ministry of education. Yet great hopes had been aroused among agricultural workers. These expectations would soon turn sour when thwarted. Agrarian reform had become in Spain, as elsewhere, a myth. Like the phrase ‘general strike’, or the words ‘liberty’ or ‘revolution’, it seemed a programme in itself, regardless of the fact that big and small farms have as different problems as wet and dry regions. Something could be done to alleviate the misery of agricultural life in Spain by legislation and investment but since water control, drainage, irrigation, and the provision of chemical fertilizers are all dependent upon investment and industry, the only real solution to the agrarian problem was to find a way to reduce the population on the land by encouraging industry.

  7

  A plebiscite had been held in Catalonia. This had given 592,961 votes for home rule, and only 3,276 votes against. In no free elections anywhere, perhaps, has so overwhelming a vote been given. By the summer of 1932, a Catalan statute had become law. The four provincial councils would be reorganized as a Catalan government, with the name of Generalidad, the ancient name for the medieval governorship-general of Catalonia. Catalan and Spanish would both be official languages. Catalonia, like Ulster, would continue to send deputies to the central parliament, as well as to the new local chamber in Barcelona. The Generalidad had, however, no powers in respect of foreign affairs, defence and frontier control; and acted as the ‘agent’ of the central government in respect of public order, justice, education, communications and public works. The Catalan parliament could only initiate legislation in respect of local administration, health, poor relief and civil law. Any conflict of interest was to be resolved by a Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees. But, even so, it was a great moment when Colonel Maciá appeared with Azaña on a balcony in the Plaza de San Jaime in Barcelona to receive the cheers of the crowds, who had waited for so long for the satisfaction of their desires. ‘I have every confidence’, said Maciá, ‘in the goodwill with which you will receive this statute. But it is not the statute for which we voted.’ Thus began the short, tragic history of the Catalan republic.

  Meantime, another bid for home rule was being made by the Basques.

  The Basques were a race of about 600,000 people who had lived from the earliest times around the western end of the Pyrenees. Of these, about 450,000 lived in Spain, the rest in France.1 The origin of this people is unknown. Those anxious to belittle the differences between Basques and Spaniards have identified the traditional Basque dance, the ‘Espata Danza’, with the ‘Tripidium’ of the Iberians, observed by Strabo. They have, therefore, argued, persuasively though not conclusively, that the Basques are Iberians who have preserved, in their remote valleys, their identity. The Basque language is close to what is known of Iberian. It is a primitive one, without much of a literature. The only certainty, though, about Basque history is the existence of an independent-minded people in the mountainous Spanish provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, and Navarre2 (and, to a lesser extent, among the Basques in France) since before records began.

  The main characteristics of this society have been, from time immemorial, religious devotion, political isolation, and agricultural self-sufficiency. Since the church here remained close to the land, the churches stayed the centres of civic life. Local councils customarily still met in verandahs on the side of these squat buildings. The Basque priests claimed that, in 1936, almost all the agricultural population of Guipúzcoa, Alava, and Vizcaya and over half of those in industrial areas (among those who were Basques by blood)3 were practising Christians.4

  Politically, from the early middle ages at least, assemblies composed of representatives of all men over twenty-one would meet every two years under an oak tree at Guernica, in Vizcaya. There, the monarch, or his representative, would swear to respect Basque rights. An executive council would then be elected by lot to rule for the next two years. Both the oak tree and the city of Guernica acquired a sanctity for the Basques, suggesting a transference to political life of an ancient worship of the oak. These enlightened customs were well developed even before the arrival of the Moors, by whom the Basques were never conquered. Yet the Basques had never been independent.1 Much of Castile was, indeed, colonized by Basque settlers, when it was reconquered from the Moors. The first movement to assert themselves undertaken by the Basques was in the early nineteenth century when, due to their Roman Catholicism, as well as to the strength of their local feeling, they formed the heart of the armies of the Carlists in their war against the liberals. As a result, in 1876, their local rights were abolished.

  The anger caused by this was, in the late nineteenth century, exacerbated by industrialization. The Basques had long been known for ship-building. The Basque anchor was a famous export in the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, Bilbao became a large industrial town, due to the easily shipped iron-ore deposits around it. By the twentieth century, 45 per cent of the merchant fleet of Spain came from the Basque provinces, as did nearly all Spain’s iron. The Spanish steel industry was also established in the Basque country and, in the 1930s, Vizcaya produced three-quarters of the steel and half the iron of Spain.2 About a third of total Spanish investment was Basque. A comfortable but progressive middle-class security was expressed by great Basque banks. These broke beyond the bonds of the family firm and came to occupy a dominant place in Spanish banking. The bankers remained understandably centralists, through social and economic interest, but the rest of the Basque middle class, like the Catalans, added their sober weight to that of the romantics who, led by Sabino de Arana (son of a Carlist and a man who became a Basque nationalist in Catalonia!), began in the 1890s to demand the revival of those local rights abolished, after all, such a short time before.

  At the beginning of the 1930s, the Catholicism of the nationalist movement meant that it could not agree with the republican parties. The Basque party was indeed prejudiced in its discouragement of marriage to non-Basques and talk of expelling Castilians. The Basque church strongly backed the nationalist movement and hoped that a day would come when Basques would cease to
learn Castilian, ‘the language of liberalism’. Thus it was no surprise when the Basque deputies walked out during the discussion of the clerical clauses of the constitution. The Basques seemed so far to the Right in 1931 that their leader, José Antonio Aguirre, was approached in that year by the inveterate monarchist plotter, General Orgaz, to join a military plot against the republic. ‘If you put at my disposal the 5,000 young Basque nationalists who the other day paraded at Deva, I would rapidly make myself master of Spain,’ said the general. A few days later, Aguirre was also approached by an envoy from King Alfonso who said: ‘The King desires to make up for the wrongs suffered by the Basques. The means of restoring your fueros [ancient laws] are being studied.’ Aguirre, a young lawyer who owed much of his political success to his good looks and to his onetime prowess as a football player at the Bilbao athletic club, rejected both proposals.1 A Basque statute was soon brought forward which would have given the Basques the same degree of autonomy as that enjoyed by the Catalans. (They already had achieved the Concierto Económico, a separate arrangement for collecting taxes, and some other items of administrative autonomy.)

  In June 1932, delegates from the four provinces met in Pamplona. Those from Navarre rejected the new statute, by the narrow margin of 123 to 109. Henceforward, Navarre’s ways diverged from those of the Basques. The delegates from the other three provinces meantime approved the statute by a large majority. This endorsement was subsequently confirmed in a plebiscite of the three provinces.2 For, by this time, all classes in the Basque provinces3 (many of whom were immigrants from Asturias, Andalusia, or Galicia), backed the demand for limited home rule, if not independence. A large majority, indeed, gave their support to the ancient Basque slogan, ‘For God and our old laws’.

  Culture played less of a part in the Basque revival than it did among the Catalans. There was no opera house in Bilbao, no Basque equivalent to Catalan artists or architects such as Sert or Gaudí. Their movement gathered momentum through the anti-clericalism of the republic. Unlike the nationalists of Barcelona, the Basques’ best markets were outside Spain. They half-believed that they could live by themselves from their wood and iron. It is easy to understand, therefore, why they felt that they had had enough of Spain. It is an ironic tragedy that this distaste for the Spanish connection drew them into the civil war and destroyed them. Equally ironic, the middle-class Basque leaders were mostly Castilian speakers and in some cases spoke the Basque tongue with difficulty.1

  The growing success of the two separatist parties in Catalonia and the Basque provinces had repercussions elsewhere. A movement in Galicia had been begun during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. A statute for Galician autonomy was being planned by Casares Quiroga, minister of the interior in Azaña’s government. There were similar stirrings among the Valencians, and even among the Andalusians. It did indeed seem to some that Spain might be geographically disintegrating. This was yet one more cause of fear, and a disposition to sanction force, among those who believed that their country might lose from such apparent dismemberment.

  The church and many of the middle class had been estranged from the republic by the religious clauses in the constitution. The landowners had been angered by the Agrarian Law. It was the army who were most offended by the Catalan statute and the developments in the direction of a federal Spanish state.

  The days were past when a Frenchman such as Brantôme could feel pride in the human race when he saw the Spaniards riding to their wars in Flanders, ‘like princes in their arrogant and insolent grace’. Indeed, in recent times, the Spanish army had shown few signs even of competence. Wellington thought the Spaniards fighting by his side brave but ill-disciplined. English observers of the Carlist Wars had noted the same. The First Carlist War was concluded not by a victory in the field, but by a treaty (at Vergara, the word being henceforth a synonym for a humiliating compromise), enabling Carlist officers to join the regular army at full pay. That arrangement had begun an era of preponderance of officers to men in the Spanish army. In the last years of the monarchy, there were 17,000 officers (including 195 generals) for about 150,000 men1—a proportion of one officer for every nine men.2 This excessive size had been the main reason why, in Morocco, the army had been unable to afford good hospitals, tanks or modern manoeuvres.

  It was a commonplace to say that this large force was maintained not to fight Spain’s enemies abroad, but to enforce order at home. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the officers of the Spanish army had been accustomed to a political life. There had been innumerable pronunciamientos, successful or unsuccessful, between 1814 and 1868. Between 1868 and 1875, the army, ragged, ill-equipped and disorderly though it was, had deposed the monarch, brought in as king another prince from Italy, established a republic, restored order, and, finally, restored the Bourbons. Generals had not intervened openly in politics between 1875 and 1923, but they had been consulted, and favoured by both Kings Alfonso XII and XIII, who, as commanders-in-chief, had a special relation with the army. The insults ‘made against her honour’ by a Catalan newspaper in 1905 secured the amazing concession, in the Law of Jurisdictions, by a government under duress, that criticisms of the army should be tried by military law.3 In 1917, the army had crushed the general strike, though itself partly restless at that time. From 1923 until 1930, General Primo de Rivera had maintained a military dictatorship, and he had only left office when he had received notice (from fellow generals) that the garrisons were against him. Meantime, the Moroccan Wars had, from 1909 until 1927, given many opportunities for illusions of grandeur, as well as of misery. It was inconceivable that the army should for long remain out of the limelight in the republic.

  Azaña, when minister of war, determined to reduce the power of this overmighty institution. With his usual fatal facility for creating a phrase which would be remembered, he announced that he would ‘triturate’ the enemies of the republic.1 He attempted to do this by abolishing the Law of Jurisdictions. He also abolished the Supreme Council of the army (and the navy), bringing the services under the ordinary courts. He did away with the vice-regal rank of captain-general. As has been seen, he gave all officers a choice between swearing loyalty to the republic and retiring on full pay. Azaña also made various dismissals intended to make the army a more efficient, if smaller, force. But others of his measures—the annulment of promotions won by gallantry in the field—were bound to make Azaña unpopular. His language was often excessive, his actions high-handed, his advisers taken from an unpopular ‘black cabinet’ of liberal officers. The army were also bitter at such interference in their ceremonial, or symbolic, life as the abolition of the Oath to the Flag. True, when the chief of staff of the army, General Goded, the highly political general who had helped in Primo de Rivera’s pronunciamiento, and then had risen against him, arrested a republican colonel, Julio Mangada, for crying ‘¡Viva República!’, after he had himself cried ‘¡Viva España!’ at a mess dinner, Azaña supported Goded, and imprisoned Mangada for insubordination. Afterwards, however, Goded was replaced by a less ambitious officer, General Masquelet.2 There were other such incidents.

  Throughout the republic, the Spanish officers numbered 10,000. These were supposed to command 150,000 men who, except for the Foreign Legion and the native Moorish troops (these being known as ‘the Army of Africa’), were conscripts doing their national service.1 The period of conscription was for a year, but it rarely reached nine months: the 150,000 was a nominal figure. This army was spread about garrisons established in the capitals of the provinces. Azaña’s reforms did not, however, succeed in cutting the military budget, training was not improved, and preparation for combat was neglected.

  Most of the leading officers of the army had fought in the wars in Morocco, to whose brutal atmosphere of comradeship under fire many looked back nostalgically. As the years passed, they forgot the blood and remembered the glory. Though many of their comrades had been killed in Morocco, there had been opportunities for swift promotion and unfettered military r
ule. Many believed, wrongly, that political incompetence at Madrid had caused them to fight that war on a shoestring, without adequate arms or supplies. After Primo de Rivera, with the aid of the French, had defeated the Riffians, the officers who had made their name in those campaigns, the africanistas, looked with scorn on those of their colleagues (peninsulares) who had not volunteered for the imperial adventure. The Moroccan War had so often been so near to failure, the events of 1921 in particular had been so terrible, that the ultimate victory gave the veterans a special pride. Since the King had been an enthusiastic influence in favour of the protectorate, it was natural that many of these officers should be monarchists. These men could scarcely be described as old-fashioned, for they, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, had been conquering territory, not withdrawing from it. The africanistas were an offensive élite, romantically moved by having ‘written a glorious page’ in history, by riding in triumph to sacred Xauen. Many of them had had a desire to improve, in a paternal way, no doubt, the lot of the sixty-six tribes of Spanish Morocco: Silvestre, the general who lost at Annual in 1921, had exclaimed in horror when he saw the prisons in Larache: ‘This is horrible, inhuman: I will not stand it in a country which is under our protection’.2 The French General Beaufre, across the hills, wrote ‘We fought these colonial wars with a clear conscience, sure that we were bringing with us civilization and progress, certain that we would help these people to emerge from their backward state’.1 Such were officers’ memories; a sergeant recalled: ‘For the first twenty-five years of this century, Morocco was a battlefield, a brothel and an immense tavern’.2