The Spanish Civil War

by Hugh Thomas

  2. The final figures were never published and were probably never counted. On the evening of 14 April, 29,953 monarchists had been elected, and 8,855 members of republican parties. Some 40,000 councillors remained to be elected. 29,804 councillors had already been elected on 5 April, in places where these candidates were unopposed. The overwhelming majority were monarchists—8 to 1, according to Ben-Ami, whose account is the best (see S. Ben-Ami, The Origins of the Second Republic, Oxford thesis, 1974).

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  1. ‘Don’ is somewhat like ‘Esquire’, though it is more democratic. It is rarely used in reference to anyone under forty, and it is employed in speech. It is a term of respect for any established person and may be used for a king (‘Don Alfonso’), or a baker.

  2. A son of Antonio Maura, and brother of the Duque de Maura, who had been a member of the King’s last cabinet until 14 April. Miguel was regarded as the black sheep of this remarkable Jewish-Catholic family until his niece, Constancia de la Mora y Maura, married the republican air chief Hidalgo de Cisneros, and became a communist. See his story of the change of régime, Así cayó Alfonso XIII … (Mexico, 1962). A favourable impression of Alcalá Zamora is on p. 212f.

  1. La Rebeldia of 1 September 1906, quoted Historia de la cruzada española (ed. Joaquín Arrarás) (Madrid, 1940–43), vol. I, p. 44. (Henceforth referred to as Cruzada; references are to the folios rather than the volumes.) ‘Young barbarians’ was the nickname of the radical youth movement.

  1. Speaker of the Cortes in 1936. See above, p. 8.

  2. Jesús Pabón, Palabras en la oposición (Seville, 1935), p. 196.

  3. See Vicente Cacho Viu, La Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Madrid, 1962).

  4. This was the celebrated ‘Generation of ’98’, associated loosely with the professor of Greek Miguel de Unamuno; the social analyst Ortega y Gasset; the social historian Joaquín Costa; the essayist Angel Ganivet; the poet of Castile Antonio Machado; the eccentric Galician poet Valle Inclán; the unpredictable publicist Ramiro de Maeztu; the novelist Pío Baroja; the essayist Azorín; the playwright Benavente; and, perhaps, the painter Zuloaga; who were the leading intellectuals in Spanish universities about the year 1898. See Aldo Garosci, Gli intellettuali e la guerra di Spagna (Turin, 1959), p. 7. Carr (p. 525f.) is sceptical.

  1. See above, p. 4.

  2. Remarkable, since no other Spanish politician since 1810 has kept a diary.

  3. A remark in La velada en Benicarló.

  1. See his diaries in vols. III and IV of his Obras completas (Mexico, 1966–8).

  2. Joaquín Maurín (Revolución y contrarevolución en España, Paris, 1966) argued that those who voted for Azaña in 1931 would, if they were young enough, form the support for the communist party in its ‘bourgeois’ incarnation between 1936 and 1939; if old enough they would have voted for the liberals in 1910.

  3. See above, p. 6.

  4. 277,011 in 1930. The real figure may have been larger since this gives members who paid membership fees.

  1. See below, p. 59.

  2. See above, p. 10.

  3. At first, the socialists were in favour of affiliation to the Comintern. Before committing themselves, they dispatched Fernando de los Ríos to Russia as a rapporteur. ‘But where is liberty?’ asked that bearded individualist from Andalusia. ‘Liberty,’ replied Lenin, ‘what for?’

  4. See below, p. 111.

  1. See Francisco Largo Caballero, Mis recuerdos, cartas a un amigo (Mexico, 1954). In 1905, Iglesias and Largo Caballero were elected to the Madrid Municipal Council for the first time by emulating the electoral frauds perfected by their opponents. Iglesias entered the Cortes in 1910, and Largo Caballero, and several other socialists, followed in 1917.

  1. See Maura, p. 216.

  2. Gil Robles, p. 448.

  1. Joaquín Arrarás, Historia de la segunda república española (Madrid, 1956–64), vol. I, p. 53. The five were de los Ríos, Martínez Barrio, Álvaro de Albornoz, Casares Quiroga, and Marcelino Domingo. Azaña became a mason early in 1932.

  2. It seems that there was a breach between English and continental masons in the 1880s, when the continental brothers decided that they could no longer stomach any reference to God, even under the name of the ‘Supreme Architect’, in the statutes of their order.

  3. Since many distinguished people became masons who could not be accused of being secret communists, the clerical publicists were obliged to distinguish between those who were blind instruments in the hands of ‘the terrible brother’, and those who knew his dark purposes.

  1. See Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931–1939 (Princeton, 1965), p. 510. The Catholic deputy Gil Robles (p. 94) gives an enumeration of Spanish masons which must reflect what he and the church thought were the right numbers: of the total of a little over 11,600, 3,660 were natives of Cádiz, suggesting the importance of that port in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, more than the twentieth.

  1. The Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, to give it its full name, was a combination of an old, mainly lower-middle-class radical party, the Partit Republica Catalanista (PRC); Estat Catalá, a group of separatists, headed by Maciá; and a group of Catalan socialists formed around the journal L’Opinió. Other Catalan parties active in 1931 included Acció Catalá (deriving from a Lliga youth split in 1922), which did badly in the elections. The Lliga and radicals came a bad second and third to the Esquerra, which had included, in its manifesto, the phrase ‘the socialisation of wealth for the benefit of the community’, thereby attracting some of the revolutionary Left. Maciá, the best-known man on the Catalan Left, had been dismissed from the army in 1906 for attacking the Law of Jurisdictions (see below, p. 88).

  1. Tomás Pamiés, in his Testamento de Praga (Barcelona, 1970) recalls (p. 53) that he first heard the word ‘revolution’ in the speeches of a group of strangers who had come to Balaguer (Lérida) in 1908: one speaker was Cambó.

  2. Alberto Balcells, Crisis económica y agitación social en Cataluña (1930–1936) (Barcelona, 1971), p. 18.

  1. El Sol, 7 May 1931. ‘Quiet and idle’, and ‘apathy and timidity’ were phrases used in an encyclical of Leo XIII. Segura hated fascism and would be a friend of England in the Second World War.

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  1. Anuario Estadistico de España, 1931, pp. 664–5. See José M. Sánchez, Reform and Reaction (Chapel Hill, 1964).

  2. Spanish women are much more religious than men, one more sign of the dominant feminine position in the church expressed by the part allotted in Spain to the Virgin Mary, so extreme as to verge on mariolatry.

  3. Quoted Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, 1943), p. 53.

  4. Speech of 13 October 1931 in Obras completas, vol. III, p. 51. Azaña’s diary for that day, though it notes the approval with which the speech was received, did not indicate that he was aware of having said anything likely to be used against him. See vol. IV, p. 177: ‘the speech went very well, like a dream, and I was measuring the effect of it, word by word … Lerroux … covered me with eulogies’.

  1. Antonio Ballesteros, Historia de España, vol. VI (Barcelona, 1919–36), p. 288, qu. Brenan, p. 117.

  2. By the Concordat of 1851, still in operation in 1931, the church accepted disentailment, agreed to the sale of church lands (provided the profits were invested in state bonds and distributed to the clergy) and accepted the state’s nomination of bishops. In return, the church’s right to acquire any kind of property was accepted, Catholicism was reaffirmed as ‘the only religion’ in Spain, the church was given the right to direct the conscience of state schools, the state paid to keep up church buildings and, above all, churchmen received stipends from the state, virtually as civil servants, ranging from 160,000 reales for archbishops, to 2,200 for rural priests.

  1. Nuevo Ripaldo enriquecido con varios apéndices (14th ed., Madrid, 1927), p. 117.

  1. This, of course, helped to maintain their low intellectual level.

  1. José Brissa, La revolución de julio
en Barcelona (Barcelona, 1910), p. 185, qu. Ullman, p. 324.

  2. Recollection of Father Alberto Onaindia.

  3. Azaña’s comment, in his Causas de la guerra de España (Obras, vol. III, p. 464).

  1. The Vatican soon quarrelled with the republic by refusing to accept the ambassador, Luis de Zulueta, whom the government had named for the Holy See. Cardinals Gomá and Segura met on 23 July 1934 in France and had a curious discussion, in which they agreed that Pope Pius XI was a man ‘without affection, cold and calculating’, who had too much sympathy for Catalonia and was being misled by Angel Herrera and Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, the archbishop of Tarragona. (Juan de Iturralde, El catolicismo y la cruzada de Franco, Bayonne, France, 1955, vol. I, p. 265.) For speculation that Angel Herrera and Monsignor Tedeschini, the papal nuncio, encouraged the expulsion of Segura, see Iturralde, vol. I, p. 344f. Tedeschini was liberal-minded, though a dramatic personality, and, when he first came to Spain in 1921, had helped to create a still-born Spanish version of the Italian Partito Popolare. See Javier Tusell, Historia de la democracia cristiana en España (Madrid, 1974), vol. I, p. 104f.

  2. At a local level, National Action represented a drawing together of local landowning or industrial interests. National Action soon had to change its name to Popular Action, when the government pettily insisted that the word ‘National’ was not to be used for other than government enterprises.

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  1. Maura’s account is the best (p. 241f.). Cf. also Azaña, vol. IV, p. 303. He places some blame on the liberal monarchist general, Carlos Blanco, who surprisingly was the government’s new director-general of security. For the monarchist side of the story, see Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, Mis amigos muertos (Barcelona, 1971), p. 97f. The monarchists were besieged in the club from 12.30 till 5 P.M.

  1. Lawrence Fernsworth, Spain’s Struggle for Freedom (Boston, 1957), p. 131.

  2. All religious houses in Spain, whether lived in by monks or nuns, are known as ‘conventos’. Among the fires was one in the archives of the Colegio de Santo Tomás de Villanueva in Valencia, a seminary in which Earl Hamilton, the historian of price rises in the sixteenth century, was then at work. The burnings in Málaga seem partly to have been due to the incompetence of the civil governor, Antonio Jaén, a friend of Alcalá Zamora’s, and to the negligence of the military governor, General Gómez Caminero.

  3. Juan Antonio Ansaldo, ¿Para qué …? (Buenos Aires, 1951), p. 15.

  4. ABC, 5 May 1931.

  1. See below, p. 89. On 25 April, Azaña had issued a decree allowing all officers who wished to do so to retire on full pay. This over-zealously fair act merely created a number of unemployed officers with means and time to plot against the new régime.

  2. None of these early plotters against the republic seems to have taken the required oath to serve and defend it.

  3. Some were, like Goicoechea, ‘young Mauristas’ in 1913.

  1. But see Maura, p. 246 and p. 254 for a report that some of Azaña’s younger admirers in the Ateneo had been planning to burn the conventos as a protest against the government’s slowness in dealing with the church. The leader of these hooligans was Pablo Rada, a radical mechanic, who had flown with Ramón Franco across the south Atlantic on his first flight.

  2. There had been a few isolated anarchists in Spain before 1868, none with a following. The account of Fanelli’s talk to twenty-one young Madrid printers by Anselmo Lorenzo, El proletariado militante (Barcelona, 1901–23), vol. I, p. 123, is deservedly famous.

  1. The theory of anarchism as compensation for desertion by the church gets its best expression in the illuminating work of Brenan, p. 131f.

  1. Edward Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven, 1970), p. 137; José Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas: Córdoba (Madrid, 1929), p. 226.

  1. José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española (Toulouse, 1951–3), vol. I, p. 72.

  2. Ullman, p. 94f.; see also Sol Ferrer, Francisco Ferrer (Paris, 1962).

  3. The role of Ferrer in 1909 was never cleared up; did he give money to hire incendiarists, did he try and finance continued fighting while he bought state bonds which were bound to go up if the revolution failed? See Ullman, p. 306f. Some alleged that the whole rebellion was a ‘stock market manoeuvre’. Ferrer was arrested since, already in hiding and believed to be in France, he signed a note renewing an overdraft.

  1. National Confederation of Labour. This was the successor to Solidaridad Obrera, founded in 1907, which had been a coalition of Catalan workers’ movements, led by, but not exclusively composed of, anarchists. The socialists withdrew when this movement became a national one.

  2. Díaz del Moral, pp. 575–7. The FNAE (Federación Nacional de Agricultores de España), an agricultural counterpart to the CNT, was founded in 1913 and merged with the CNT in 1918.

  1. Peirats, vol. I, p. 9, gives an ‘incomplete’ list of anarchist leaders killed in this period; the list numbers 106. A description of the government’s backing of the anti-anarchist pistoleros and the amount they received per killing was published in Tiempos nuevos (Paris) in 1925. It is reprinted in Peirats, vol. I, pp. 10–13. Far the best account of this period is given by Meaker, in the book previously cited.

  1. The character of these years has been touched on on p. 21 above.

  2. Nin is further discussed on p. 114 below.

  3. ‘The Russian Revolution’, said a famous old anarchist, Eleuterio Quintanilla, ‘does not express our ideals. It is a revolution of socialist character. Its direction and orientation do not respond to the needs of the workers, but of political parties.’

  1. Ilya Ehrenburg, Ils ne passeront pas (Paris, 1937), p. 13.

  2. See Ricardo Sanz, El sindicalismo y la politica: los ‘solidarios’ y ‘nosotros’ (Toulouse, 1966); J. Romero Maura, ‘The Spanish Case’ in David Apter and James Joll, Anarchism Today (London, 1971); Juan Llarch, La muerte de Durruti (Barcelona, 1973).

  3. Peirats, vol. II, p. 347, says the FAI was 30,000 strong in 1936.

  4. See below, p. 70.

  1. Peirats, vol. I, pp. 42, 43.

  2. Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground (London, 1945), p. 195. See his remarkable speech as minister of justice in January 1937, p. 538.

  3. Brenan, p. 140. The anarchists claimed 600,000 members in June 1931, 250,000 in Catalonia (Solidaridad Obrera, 12 June 1931). Balcells says the CNT had 58 per cent of the workers in Barcelona, and between 30 and 35 per cent of the workers in Catalonia.

  1. Peirats, vol. II, p. 122.

  1. Carr, p. 463.

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  1. Women could be candidates but were not to be voters till 1933. The second round of the elections were on 12 July.

  1. El Imparcial, qu. Ben-Ami, p. 286. Republicans assumed predominance in many rural town halls by substituting their own also questionable brand of electoral management in place of monarchist caciquismo.

  2. Discussed on p. 81 below.

  3. Peirats, vol. I, p. 49.

  1. Peirats, vol. I, pp. 55–7; César Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnoles et le pouvoir (Paris, 1969), p. 69. See too Abel Paz, Durruti: le peuple en armes (Paris, 1972).

  1. An earlier draft of the constitution had provided for the dissolution of all orders.

  1. See Marcelino Domingo, La experiencia del poder (Madrid, 1934). For a summary of attitudes by the Right, see Robinson, p. 59f.

  2. For an intimate picture of this crisis, see Azaña, vol. IV, p. 172f.

  1. Ramón Sender, Seven Red Sundays (London, 1936), p. 171.

  2. Six people were afterwards condemned to life imprisonment. See Luis Jiménez Asúa, Castilblanco (Madrid, 1933).

  1. Peirats, vol. I, p. 51.

  2. René Dumont, Types of Rural Economy (London, 1957), p. 218; see, too, Carr, p. 417f.

  1. Pre-republican agrarian reform is usefully summarized in Appendix E to Malefakis, pp. 427–38.

  1. Balcells estimates the average agricultural wage at 2.80 pesetas
a day, and the harvest wage at 5.50 pesetas.

  1. Carr, p. 419.

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  1. The population of the three Basque provinces was 891,710 in 1930; with Navarre, the total reached 1,237,593. By no means all those who lived in the provinces were Basque.

  2. Navarre is chiefly inhabited by Basques. But, for reasons which will become clear (see below, p. 94), their political history has taken a different course.

  3. The figure sank to 15 per cent among non-Basques living in Basque cities.

  4. Le Clergé Basque (Paris, 1938), p. 15. Men and women sat separately, as in Ireland and in synagogues.

  1. Except for those who lived in Navarre, who were ruled by the monarchs of that little kingdom until the sixteenth century.

  2. But the heyday of Basque iron ore was over: production in 1929 was half what it had been in 1913. Carr, p. 435.

  1. The PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) was founded by Arana in 1894. For Orgaz’s approach, see José Antonio Aguirre, De Guernica a Nueva York pasando por Berlin (Buenos Aires, 1943), pp. 342–3. Orgaz later denied this version of the interview, saying that the request for an alliance was made by Aguirre, who desired officers to train his youth movement (Mendigoixales) for a rising. It is possible that monarchist politicians arranged the interview in such a way as to leave both under the impression that the other had taken the initiative. (See Iturralde, vol. I, pp. 36–7.)

  2. Out of a total electorate of 489,887 in the three provinces, 411,756 voted in favour of the statute, 14,196 voted against, and 63,935 abstained.

  3. The working classes in Bilbao were neither so Catholic nor so separatist as the bourgeoisie. Their adoption of the centralizing ideas of the socialist UGT, one of whose chief centres was Bilbao, was also to be a cause of fights.

  1. The Basque nationalist movement can be followed in M. García Venero, Historia del nacionalismo vasco (Madrid, 1945); Aguirre’s memoirs; Salvador de Madariaga, Spain (London, 1946), pp. 227–35 (hostile); Brenan, pp. 278–80; and Stanley Payne’s Basque Nationalism (Reno, 1975).