Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  Rather, it was a newly formed mass Catholic organization, the CEDA (Confederación Españole de Derechas Autónomas), which for the next two years held the front line for the right within the existing contours of the parliamentary republic. Defence of religion, of the family, of property, of the social order at the service of Spain, were its guidelines.12 Under the leadership of Gil Robles, a dynamic young lawyer, the CEDA scored a major victory in the general elections of November 1933, becoming the single largest parliamentary party. Its initial refusal to declare itself unambiguously republican, and its anti-left policies made it highly suspect to the forces of the republic’s first ruling coalition. It did not immediately join the new centre government but supported it in parliament as it drove down wages and ignored, or put into reverse, reforms enacted during the republic’s first two years.

  The socialist party veered sharply leftwards. Mounting working-class militancy–1933 was the hardest year of the depression in Spain – and disillusionment at their experience of power were among the domestic causes. Internationally, the recent fate of their fellow party in Austria at the hands of a corporative Catholic party that looked suspiciously like the CEDA was an important factor in leading the socialists to stage an ill-prepared uprising. Its timing was motivated by the desire to prevent the CEDA from joining the government. The rising took root only in Asturias where, for a fortnight, the working class held power in the mining valleys. October 1934 was a watershed. The unstable social equilibrium, underlying the monarchy’s crisis and which the republic had given political expression to, broke. The right won a temporary victory over the left, which it misused, unable to produce coherent solutions to the country’s problems. The left suffered a temporary, if bloody, setback which, very soon, it was able to use. The crisis had not been resolved, only foreshadowed.

  The harsh repression unleashed, especially in Asturias, after October radicalized the working class and the liberal petty bourgeoisie. Following the recent French example (and the Comintern’s about-face), it led to the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance of working-class political parties and left republicans,13 and to its victory at the polls. (Under the existing electoral law, only coalitions had any chance of success at the polls.)

  The Popular Front pact was a republican-oriented minimal programme for continuing the reforms begun five years before at the start of the republic. It made no mention of socialism, and the left republicans explicitly rejected socialist calls for nationalization of the land and the banks, the establishment of unemployment benefits and workers’ control in industry. Instead, they counter-posed a republic directed not by ‘social or economic class motives, but rather a regime of democratic freedom impelled by motives of public and social progress’.

  The Popular Front electoral victory in February 1936, over the anti-revolutionary right-wing coalition led by the CEDA, was slender in terms of the popular vote;14 five years of republican regime had polarized the country. Fear and anguish at their defeat spread among the right. Before them appeared the spectre of revolution.

  —I can remember it still, though I was only six. My mother forced my father to vote. He was the manager of a dairy company in Madrid and he didn’t agree with either the right or the left. But she said everyone had to vote, and he voted for the right, recalled Jesús DE POLANCO. When they lost, it was as though the world had fallen in on top of us …

  For the other half of the electorate which supported the Popular Front, the victory gave hope that the problems which had confronted the republic since its inception would be seriously tackled at last.

  While none of the left-wing organizations was planning revolution, the masses – in the view of Luis PORTELA, another founder-member of the Spanish communist party who had joined the POUM in Madrid – were distinctly heading that way.

  —They wanted to go forward, they weren’t satisfied simply with the release of political prisoners and the return to their jobs of all those who had been sacked as a result of the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934. Instinctively, they were pressing forward, not necessarily to take power, not to create Soviets, but to push forward the revolution which had begun with the republic’s proclamation …

  And so it indeed appeared. Strikes broke out in almost every industry and trade. In the countryside the socialist-led Landworkers’ Federation organized the mass seizure of large tracts of land to settle tens of thousands of farm workers. In the two and a half months immediately preceding the outbreak of the civil war on 17–18 July, the number of agricultural strikes reached almost half of those recorded in the heaviest year of 1933.15 Street violence and political assassination in Madrid and the south became commonplace. The Falange, the Spanish variant of fascism, which had been founded in 1933, played a prominent role in these. The socialist and communist youth movements, which were in the process of fusing into the unified socialist youth, JSU (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas), were the Falange’s main antagonist in the streets.

  The socialist party, under pressure from its left wing led by Largo Caballero, refused to renew its experience of governmental participation. This left the government solely in the hands of the left republicans, as it had been since the elections. Azaña became president of the republic. ‘It seemed as though his presidency offered a double guarantee: against reaction, against revolution.’16

  With the exception of a narrow spectrum of the urban and nationalist middle classes, the bourgeoisie had no faith in any guarantee; it doubted the government’s ability to contain the working-class tide. It put its trust in the army, its constant defender for the past seventy-five years, and in the ‘reserve army’ of falangists, Carlists and monarchists. Large numbers of the CEDA’s youth movement, JAP (Juventudes de Acción Popular), went over now to the Falange.

  In the other camp, large sectors of the proletariat refused the strict limits of the Popular Front pact, pushing forward to achieve what five years of republican regime had denied them. The interests of neither camp were satisfied by the left republican government which tried vainly to contain both.

  At the time of the Popular Front electoral victory, General Franco, chief of staff, had unsuccessfully urged the government to declare a state of siege. The new regime relieved him of his post, at the same time removing another potential threat, General Mola, from his command in Morocco. Franco was posted to the Canary Islands, where he was closer to the Army of Africa in which he had made his name; while Mola, in whose hands a number of generals secretly confided the planning of a military uprising, was sent to Pamplona, capital of Carlist Navarre and centre of fervent opposition to the regime. These inept moves were compounded by the government’s refusal in the coming months to take any concrete measures against a military uprising, the imminence of which they were constantly being alerted to.

  No pronunciamiento of the nineteenth century (nor General Primo de Rivera’s in the twentieth) had resulted in civil war. The wars that were fought had other causes. But the situation had radically changed now. Given the balance of opposing forces a rising would almost inevitably lead to civil war. Momentarily, moreover, the initiative had passed to the reaction. Instead of an attempt to seize power, as in October 1934, the working class was defensively awaiting a pre-emptive counter-revolution which the Popular Front victory had virtually guaranteed. The working class was at a serious disadvantage; but things had gone too far to expect its passive acceptance of a coup. A socio-political crisis which could not be resolved politically would have to be settled by other means; class struggle by civil war.17

  1. See R. Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford, 1966), p. 155.

  2. P. Vilar, Historia de España (Paris, 1963), p. 86.

  3. P. Vilar, op. cit., p. 92.

  4. G. Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (Princeton, 1965), p. 8.

  5. This uneven development impressed its particular imprint on the civil war from the start, in part explaining the success or failure of the military uprising in different regions (see P. Vilar ‘
La guerra de 1936 en la historia contemporánea de España’, Historia internacional, Madrid, April 1976).

  6. Ma C. García-Nieto, ‘La segunda república (1)’ (Bases documentales 8, Madrid, 1974), p. 12. From 1900 to 1935 there was rapid demographic growth, the population increasing from 18.5 to 24 millions. But more than half the population (57 per cent) still lived in the countryside.

  7. Traditional explanations which ascribe this persistence to a Mediterranean ‘temperament’ in search of a ‘secular religion’ (millenarianism) or subject to an aimless (if justified) ‘irrational fury’ at oppressive social forces – the state, the church, etc. – fail to see anarchism as a response to concrete socio-economic conditions and needs. To single out but a few of these: the need, at the beginning of a revolutionary period (1868–74), to provide the working class with a revolutionary organization; the intransigence of rural and urban (Catalan) employers and an oppressive state; the links in a semi-developed capitalist society between an urban working class and its rural antecedents; the proximity (in small-scale production and unmechanized agriculture) of employers and employed; the poverty of large cities like Barcelona. Anarchism answered these conditions in a specific manner, often reinforcing existing tendencies: its anti-state, a-political ideology buttressed, in the regions where it took root, an existing hatred of the state and politics; its federal aims and structure, its stress on local self-organization, worked in the same direction, reinforcing existing ‘localisms’; its concept of producers’ self-management strengthened the notion (within small-scale production) of the ‘dispensability’ of the bourgeoisie, satisfying artisans threatened by capitalist growth as well as the proletariat; finally, its loose, unbureaucratic structure allowed it to submerge and re-emerge in response to political repression. (For an extended discussion of this question, see particularly T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903, Princeton, 1977.)

  8. See M. Tuñón de Lara, El movimiento obrero en la historia de España (Madrid, 1972), pp. 844–5.

  9. The 1930 San Sebastián meeting of republican leaders, attended by Macià and other Catalan nationalist politicians, agreed that a future republican government should find a constitutional solution to Catalan aspirations. The republican cause thus assured itself the backing of the petty bourgeois Catalan nationalists. It is worth noting that no similar identity of aims existed for the dominant Basque nationalist party, PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco), which did not attend the San Sebastián meeting. Nor did the Basques follow Macià’s move. Instead, they welcomed the republic and demanded an autonomous Basque regime within a federal republic which recognized ‘the freedom and independence of the Catholic church’. Macià was soon persuaded by representatives of the new republican government in Madrid to rescind his declaration and await passage of a home rule statute by a new Constituent Cortes. The audacity of his move none the less ensured that Catalan autonomy was put on the immediate political agenda and assured the Esquerra of political hegemony in Catalonia until the outbreak of the civil war. See I. Molas, El sistema de partidos políticos en Cataluña, 1931–1936 (Barcelona, 1974), p. 83, and A. Balcells, Cataluña contemporánea II (1900–1936) (Madrid, 1974), pp. 23–4.

  10. G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, 1950), p. 231.

  11. H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (third edition, London, 1977), p. 107.

  12. At the service of the ‘anti-Spain’ were: ‘the mass who deny God and the principles of Christian morality, who proclaim the velleities of free love as compared to the sanctity of the family, who replace private property – base and drive of each person’s well-being and the collective wealth – with a universal proletariat at the orders of the state which … enthrones the tyrannical empire of a class dictatorship’. From the 1931 founding manifesto of Acción Nacional, precursor of Acción Popular, the main party within the CEDA, led by Gil Robles (cited in A. Elorza, La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república española, Madrid, 1973, p. 228).

  13. Signatories to the pact were: the left republican party, the socialist party, the socialist-led trade union organization UGT, the communist party the national federation of socialist youth, the syndicalist party and the dissident communist POUM.

  14. The exact figures remain a matter of debate. They range (in the most recent estimate: J. Tusell, Las elecciones del Frente Popular, Madrid, 1971) from a Popular Front margin of 151,000 votes out of a total of 9,157,000 cast for both, to a margin of between 700,000 and 840,000 out of 8,800,000 votes polled by both. (To these totals must be added an additional 450,000 to 525,000 votes polled by the centre parties, including the Basque nationalist party, PNV.) M.Tuñón de Lara, in his La España del siglo XX (Barcelona, 1974), vol. 2, p. 483, resumes the different figures advanced. Because of he electoral system in force, however, the parliamentary representation did not reflect the closeness of the voting. When the new assembly met, the Popular Front seated 286 deputies (the major representations being: 99 socialists, 87 left republicans, 39 of Unión Republicana, 36 of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and 17 communists, including one of the POUM); the right, 132 seats (of which the CEDA held 88), and the centre 42 (M. Tuñón de Lara, ibid., p.488).

  15. See E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven, 1970), p.371.

  16. P. Broué and E. Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1961), p.64.

  17. The complexity of the five years immediately prior to the civil war, and the shifts of popular feeling during them, cannot be adequately described in so few pages. The five-month period from the Popular Front electoral victory in February to the military uprising of July 1936 is deascribed in more detail within the narrative of this book. A special section entitled ‘Points of Rupture’, pp. 513–74, attempts to deal with the earlier period in closer detail. It covers: A. The land. B. The petty bourgeoisie and the religious question. C. Two nationalisms. D. The libertarian movement and the republic. E. October 1934, Popular Front, orthodox and dissident communists. F. The army.

  List of political parties and organizations

  The following are the major political parties, movements and trade unions mentioned in this book. Those marked * signed the Popular Front pact of 1936; those indicated with ** joined the counter-revolutionary or National Front in the same year’s general elections.

  CENTRE AND RIGHT-WING

  **AP (Acción Popular) – the major party within the CEDA, founded in 1932

  **CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) – Catholic, founded in 1933

  *Lliga Catalana – Catalan nationalist party of the large bourgeoisie, founded as successor to Lliga Regionalista in 1933

  Partido Agrario – CEDA ally, representing mainly Castilian landowners

  Partido Republicano Radical – oldest republican party (1908), major government party in 1933–5

  PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) – major Basque nationalist party, founded in 1895

  EXTREME RIGHT-WING

  **Comunión Tradicionalista – the political party of the Carlist movement from 1931

  Falange Española – fascist, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 1933

  JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista) – fascist, founded in 1931, fused with Falange in 1934

  **Renovación Española – monarchist, founded in 1933

  UME (Unión Militar Española) – unofficial right-wing officers’ union

  LEFT-WING

  *ANV (Acción Nacionalista Vasco) – split from PNV, founded in 1930

  *Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya – Catalan left republican nationalist party, founded in 1931

  Estat Català – radical separatist Catalan party, one of the founders of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya; as a wing of the latter it became proto-fascist by 1934; elements from it broke away from the Esquerra to reform Estat Català before the war

  *Izquierda Republicana – left republican party, formed under Azaña in 1934 from Acción Republicana (1925), Partido Republicano Radical-
Socialista (1929) and ORGA (Organización Republicana Gallega Autónoma)

  MAOC (Milicias Anti-fascistas Obreras y Campesinas) – communist-organized workers’ and peasants’ anti-fascist militias

  *PCE (Partido Comunista de España) – official communist party, founded in 1921

  *PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) – the Spanish socialist party, founded in 1879

  PSUC (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya) – formed on outbreak of war from *Unió Socialista, *Catalan federation of the PSOE, *Partit Comunista de Catalunya and *Partit Català Proletari. Affiliated to Comintern, thus effectively the communist party in Catalonia

  UMRA (Unión Militar de Republicanos Anti-fascistas) – unofficial military union of anti-fascist republicans

  *Unión Republicana – a split, led by Martínez Barrio, from the Partido Republicana Radical, founded in 1934

  EXTREME LEFT-WING

  BOC (Bloc Obrer i Camperol) – Workers and Peasants Bloc, dissident communist party in Catalonia, formed in 1931 from a split in the PCE and a fusion with the Partit Comunista Català; led by Joaquim Maurín

  FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) – militant federation of anarchist groups, founded in 1927

  IC (Izquierda Comunista) – Trotskyist split from PCE, led by Andreu Nin

  *POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) – dissident communist party, fusion of BOC and IC in 1935, led by Maurín and Nin

  TRADE UNIONS

  AET (Agrupación Escolar Tradicionalista) – Carlist student union