by Hugh Thomas
The events in Asturias caused a thrill of horror to run through the Spanish middle class. To them it seemed that anything, even a military dictatorship, was preferable to disintegration. Would General Franco take power now that he was chief of staff? Would Gil Robles and the CEDA make the best of their opportunity?
Lerroux was still Prime Minister. In the following months, the old pirate did his best to steer a middle path. Thus, when the monarchists demanded that the Catalan statute should be abolished altogether because of Companys’s revolution, Lerroux (here supported by the CEDA) secured its suspension only, with the Catalan provinces being administered by a governor-general. His minister of agriculture, the CEDA politician Giménez Fernández, continued to try and distribute land, for a time, and introduced legislation to protect smallholders. He desired, for instance, to settle 10,000 farmers during 1935. He was, however, continually thwarted by people, such as the Carlist Lamamié de Clairac, who had so damaged the first Agrarian Bill in its discussions in the Cortes.
The most difficult question for the government, however, concerned the punishment of the rebels of 1934. For, by February 1935, the military tribunals had named twenty death penalties. Of these, two were carried out.2 The condemned included Companys; socialist deputies, such as poor Teodomiro Menéndez, who had gone almost mad during his imprisonment because of the sounds of torture which he had heard; Ramón González Peña; Belarmino Tomás; and some officers who had sided with the rebellion in Madrid and in Catalonia. Meantime, many socialist-led municipal councils continued suspended, because their members belonged to the same party as the rebels of 1934. Lerroux, picturing the bitterness which would be caused by the execution of, say, Belarmino Tomás and González Peña (the two socialist deputies for Asturias), not to speak of Companys, favoured the commutation of all further death sentences. The CEDA ministers supported the death penalty. Gil Robles argued for it with energy. Lerroux was supported by the President, Alcalá Zamora, who recalled how General Sanjurjo and his co-plotters had been reprieved in 1933. The sentences were commuted. The CEDA ministers resigned. After a prolonged crisis, Lerroux reformed a cabinet in which the CEDA had five representatives, including Gil Robles as minister for war.
Gil Robles appointed Franco as chief of staff, bringing him back from command in Morocco where he had been sent the preceding winter. Thereafter, several right-wing officers were promoted, and others believed to be liberals or socialists lost their jobs. After the revolution in Asturias, the army understandably more than ever seemed to the Right a safe support for old Spain. Gil Robles also embarked on negotiations to buy arms from Germany. But there were no more executions. Companys and other leaders convicted of rebellion were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment—a sentence which no one believed would be carried out. Largo Caballero was detained with others without trial for months. Azaña was released, the charges against him having failed to gain a two-thirds majority in the Cortes, though it was clear from speeches made by politicians on the Right that many hoped to finish with him and the left republicans once and for all.1
The venom with which the two sides of the political spectrum now regarded each other was difficult to assuage. But the men of the Centre—and, in these circumstances, both the President and Prime Minister were so—had a chance to resolve matters. They wasted their opportunity. A revision of some clauses of the constitution was proposed. This might have modified the character of regional autonomy, established a senate, and altered the divorce and marriage laws. An independent, if orthodox, financier, Joaquín Chapaprieta, prepared to introduce a budget—which had not been seen in the republic since 1932. He desired to prune corruption and bureaucratic waste. These measures, admirable in themselves, would have cut government spending on education—including the still inadequate teachers’ salaries. But no budget and no constitutional revision were ever agreed.1 (The budget of 1932, repeated annually, was the republic’s only finance act.) Then the minister of agriculture, Giménez Fernández, was dismissed in May 1935, over a proposed alteration of the Agrarian Law: his humane ideas had given him the nickname of ‘the white bolshevik’ in monarchist circles, and his habit of invoking papal encyclicals to defend his drafts infuriated others. His eclipse spelled the end of any idea that the CEDA might modify, rather than shelve, the Law of Agrarian Reform. Chapaprieta formed a government, in which Lerroux became foreign minister. But the radical party was now ruined by scandal.
A Dutch financial adventurer, Daniel Strauss, had persuaded certain ministers to favour a new type of roulette wheel, the straperlo. Strauss promised that, in return for permission to introduce this wheel, he would guarantee profits. When the scandal broke, Lerroux’s adopted son was found to be intimately concerned with Strauss. Lerroux himself, whose finances had always been devious, was also implicated, as were Salazar Alonso, ex-minister of the interior and mayor of Madrid; the civil governor of Barcelona; and some others. The radicals resigned, amid execration, and the word straperlo passed into the language to signify a public scandal. Meantime, the radical party, which had played so important a part in the life of the republic, even though its policies had meant so little, fell apart, and the alliance which Lerroux had sealed with Gil Robles, and which had effectively governed Spain for a year, collapsed too.2 Within weeks, the Prime Minister quarrelled with Gil Robles, technically over Chapaprieta’s desire to introduce a land tax on large holdings and to increase death duties, to 3½ per cent from 1 per cent; but Gil Robles had provoked the crisis in order to make his final bid for the premiership.
Yet President Alcalá Zamora, who had interfered continuously in the day-to-day running of administration during the preceding year, was still determined to avoid asking the leader of the CEDA to form a government. While Gil Robles himself in late 1935 seemed to have matured from the experimental, Catholic corporativist which he had claimed to be in 1933,1 some of his followers, particularly the JAPistas, seemed impatient to take up arms: they had already taken symbols, as well as language, which resembled fascism. They carried a black cross from which hung the letters Alpha and Omega, set in white, and framed in red, hoping thus to symbolize Pelayo, the first king of the Reconquista. Gil Robles had also a programme of constitutional reform which Alcalá Zamora disliked.2 So the President tried a rash expedient; he asked one of his friends, Manuel Portela Valladares, a politician from Galicia of the days of the monarchy, to form a caretaker government and prepare for new elections.3 Portela, a freemason and the indefatigable historian of the Priscillian heresy, had been rediscovered as a politician by Lerroux on a beach in northern Spain in the summer of 1934. As minister of the interior earlier in 1935, he had been Alcalá Zamora’s informant as to what was going on in the cabinet. The President now hoped that Portela could reorganize the ‘forces of the Centre’ to take the place of the defunct radical party.
Gil Robles was outraged at Alcalá Zamora’s action. So was his under-secretary at the ministry of war, General Fanjul, who told him ‘If you give me the order, I will this very night move into the streets of Madrid with the garrison of the capital. General Varela thinks as I do.’ Gil Robles’s reply was not as explicit as it might have been: ‘If the army, grouped around its natural commands, believes that it must temporarily take over power with the object of saving the spirit of the constitution, I will not constitute the least obstacle.’ He told Fanjul to consult with the other generals. General Franco, chief of staff, gave his opinion that the army could not be counted upon to carry out a coup d’état. So none was embarked upon.1 Gil Robles left the ministry of war. General Franco wept.2 Portela formed a caretaker administration of extra-parliamentarians and centre politicians of the second rank. While the Right denounced Gil Robles for weakness, the press censorship was relaxed. Azaña had already begun to restore the fortunes of the Republican Left, with a successful oratorical performance to an audience of perhaps 100,000 in the autumn, outside Madrid, in a field at Comillas: the ‘clamorous ovation’ which greeted the speech had a resonance throughout the cou
ntry.3 Next, the casas del pueblo were reopened, and the Left reawoke: ‘October’ and ‘Asturias’ became sacred words, signifying a desperate struggle of heroic revolutionaries against the Foreign Legion—‘the Moors’, and the ‘butchers of October’.
4. Madrid during the Second Republic
The Cortes were dissolved on 4 January. The elections were to be held on 16 February. Portela tried to delay the poll by unconstitutional procrastination; he failed. The electoral campaign which intervened between these dates was, to begin with, dominated by Gil Robles. His photograph as the Jefe, with a legend beneath demanding for him ‘an absolute majority so that he can give you a great Spain’, stared threateningly from the hoardings of the Puerta del Sol. Yet, as the campaign got under way, it became clear to the leaders of the CEDA that their path might not be so easy as they had assumed. They therefore began to arrange common lists with other right-wing parties. The Alfonsine monarchists and Carlists, together with the ‘agrarians’ and ‘independents’, stood in alliance in most places with the CEDA in ‘the National Front’.
The past year had been an active one for both monarchist parties, with military training for two hundred Carlists disguised as Peruvian officers at an airfield near Rome,1 and ideological discussion among the monarchists, still veering between ‘fascism’ and traditionalism. Calvo Sotelo, Primo’s minister of finance, had joined Renovación Española but was trying to create an alliance of all authoritarian monarchists: his views had evolved towards fascism during his exile in France, partly from contact with Maurras’s Action Française. From his writings, and those of Ramiro de Maeztu (editor still of Acción Española), Pradera (the Carlist ideologue of ‘the new state’), and Sainz Rodríguez, now the leading Alfonsist ‘theoretician’, it certainly seemed as if the ranks of the authoritarian Right were closing.
As for the Falange, José Antonio had been engaged in a long controversy with the old leader of the JONS, Ledesma Ramos. The latter had always regarded José Antonio as a mere señorito, and criticized him for his contacts with the church and the upper class.2 Ledesma started a workers’ organization, the CONS (Confederación de Obreros Sindicalistas), which, however, found few followers. José Antonio succeeded in making headway against the Falange extremists who wanted violence, but he had been unsuccessful in creating a policy which his more monarchist financial backers could support as well as Ledesma. In October 1934, José Antonio had been confirmed as leader of the party by only one vote, seventeen to sixteen.1 Ledesma tried to break the JONS away from the Falange to keep it as a national syndicalist party, even if a minute one: his personal relations with José Antonio had always been bad. When Ledesma wrote some articles denouncing José Antonio as the ‘tool of reaction’, he was expelled from the party. These events, and the financial difficulties of these young Spanish fascists, had prevented their membership from increasing (especially after the rich monarchist Marqués de Eliseda had broken with them) following the Asturias revolution, when one might have expected their appeal to have grown. But they continued to parade in blue shirts on Sundays. In the election campaign, the Falange remained outside the right-wing alliance, Gil Robles being unable to agree to the demands for apportionment of seats made by José Antonio. José Antonio’s old constituency at Cádiz would have nothing to do with him and the CEDA, like the Carlists, were critical of José Antonio’s economic ‘corporativism’, which they regarded as dangerously socialist. The Falange put up a few candidates, nevertheless, who lambasted the CEDA’s ‘sterile and stupid biennium in power’. Many of the most energetic falangists were, however, below voting age.2
To the Left of this right-wing alliance, there were the various parties of the centre. These included Lerroux and the radicals, the Lliga (the Catalan businessmen), the progressives—followers of Alcalá Zamora—and the specifically named ‘Centre party’, launched by the Prime Minister, Portela Valladares. Also classed among the centre parties were the Basque nationalists, which, although since 1934 they had been on bad terms with their natural allies of the CEDA, still hesitated before reaching an understanding with the Left.1 Portela tried to develop the centre artificially, by appointing his friends to civil governorships, but the stratagem failed.
The Left in the elections of February 1936 was grouped in a Popular Front pact. The name had been proposed by the communists. The previous July, the seventh congress of the Comintern had been held in Moscow. Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist, then general secretary of the Comintern (due to his defiant behaviour when accused of setting fire to the Reichstag), had defined the political aims of world communism in face of the rise of Hitler:
The formation of a joint People’s Front providing for joint action with social democratic parties is a necessity. Cannot we endeavour to unite the communist, social democratic, Catholic and other workers? Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy. The attacking army was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the Trojan Horse, it penetrated to the very heart of the enemy camp. We, revolutionary workers, should not be shy of using the same tactics.2
With these words, the international policy of the Popular Front was formally launched. Communist parties were blamed for having in the past treated every constitutional party as fascist. Now they were adjured to preserve ‘bourgeois, parliamentary democracy’ until it could be replaced by ‘proletarian democracy’. This policy of the Popular Front went further than that of the United Front in the 1920s. Then (as in Eastern Europe, after 1945), communist parties had been instructed to make common cause with other working-class parties only. With the Popular Front, they had to establish relations with middle-class parties also.
It was difficult for the communists to ensure the agreement of Largo Caballero to this alliance: the French communist leader, Duclos, went to Spain specially to persuade him.1 The persecution after 1934 and the attempt to prosecute Azaña made for friendship, however short-lived, between the leaders of the Left. Azaña and Prieto really arranged the alliance, the former’s prestige having grown during 1935, his ironic account of his imprisonment in 1934 (Mi rebelión en Barcelona) having sold 25,000 copies. (The republican parties had already formed in November a ‘Republican Front’.) Azaña and Largo were on bad terms, but the alliance suited them though the latter thought that ‘it is necessary for one class to disappear’.2 The socialist party continued to be divided, both Prieto and Besteiro trying to hold back the majority’s swing, under the pressure of the young, towards ‘bolshevization’. (Prieto returned to Spain from Paris in December 1935, a week after Largo Caballero had been released from gaol.)
The anarchists remained outside the system. Nevertheless, at the last minute, they encouraged their members to repeat before the ballot-box the unity expressed in Asturias. This was because one of the main proposals of the Popular Front programme was an amnesty for political prisoners.3
Other measures in the programme of the Popular Front harked back to Asturias. All who had lost their jobs for blatantly political reasons were to be reinstated: a warning to employers who had secured new labour to replace those in prison, or those whom they had dismissed after October 1934. An indemnity to the victims of 1934 would be paid by the state. The Catalan statute would be restored. Other regional statutes would be negotiated. The Agrarian Law and other reforms begun in 1933 would be given a fresh start.4
The election was fought tempestuously. The government lifted the ‘state of alarm’ which had existed in many areas since Asturias. The crowds were vast at meetings. Words, but for the moment only words, were violent. ‘Vatican fascism’, proclaimed one election leaflet, ‘offered you work, and brought hunger; it offered you peace, and brought five thousand tombs; it offered you order, and raised a gallows. The Popular Front offers no more, and no less, than it will bring: bread, peace, and liberty!’1 Bishops explicitly advised Catholics to vote against the Popular Front. Largo Caballero declared that, if the Right won, he would ‘proceed to declare civil war’, and Primo de Rivera that his men would disre
gard a result ‘dangerously contrary to the eternal destinies of Spain’.2 Lerroux and the radicals concentrated their efforts on destroying the Centre party launched by Portela. Calvo Sotelo appeared for the first time a national figure. His campaign was explicitly anti-republican and anti-democratic. He argued that the constitution was dead, murdered by its own founders. The next Cortes would be a new ‘constituent Cortes’.3 He also told patriotic Spaniards, in the most vigorous language, that, if they did not vote for the National Front, a red flag would soon fly over Spain: ‘that red flag which is the symbol of the destruction of Spain’s past and of her ideals’.
Spain went to the polls on 16 February, the Sunday of the carnival before Lent. 34,000 civil guards and 17,000 assault guards were on duty. There were some disturbances in Granada, where the polling-booth was held up by force, while others stuffed votes into the ballot-urn. But such instances were rare. The Times correspondent, Ernest de Caux, reported that voting had been ‘generally exemplary’.4 The results of the first round of the elections, available on 20 February, were, so far as national aggregates are concerned: