Spain: A Unique History (32 page)

During the course of the Civil War, many different explanations of the causes and character of the conflict were presented at home and abroad. The Left always preferred to define it as a struggle between democracy and fascism. For the Right, it was a crusade by Christian civilization to overcome godless revolution and barbarism. For both sides, it was soon touted as a national liberation war. The Left was freeing Spain from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Right was liberating the patria from the clutches of Stalin, the Soviet Union, and international Communism. These in turn became claims concerning the causes of the Civil War, which were often held to be exogenous, and located in Moscow, Rome, or Berlin.

Altogether, a series of arguments and allegations have been presented concerning the causes and responsibilities for the war, which are worth examining: (1) the argument that civil war began in 1934; (2) the "breakdown thesis": the constitutional Republic had already ceased to exist; (3) efforts to avert civil war; (4) the "provocation" thesis; (5) the initial plan of the rebels; (6) the "exogenous" thesis (role of foreign powers); and (7) the contention that the final crisis alone was decisive.

Revolutionary insurrection was common in Spain between 1930 and 1934. The Republicans launched a military revolt against the monarchy in December 1930, and the CNT-FAI, or sectors thereof, launched three insurrections against the Republic during 1932-33, while a small band of military rebels did the same in August 1932. The Socialist insurrection of October 1934 was by far the most serious and extensive of these outbursts, affecting many different provinces and seizing control of much of Asturias. Revolution was proclaimed in Asturias, with the execution of political prisoners, priests, and seminary students, much destruction of property, and large-scale looting of money. Major military action was required to put down the insurrection, which in all Spain cost 1,500 lives and led to more than 15,000 arrests.
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To conservatives this was what they had always feared: revolution on the march. It produced intense polarization and an enormous propaganda campaign during 1935-36 in which the Left ignored their own atrocities while accusing the authorities of crimes and excesses during the repression, which in turn might be interpreted as a classic case of the perpetrators blaming the victims.
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The insurrection had many of the features of civil war, but was this really the beginning of the war of 1936-39? That seems quite doubtful, since for sixteen months after the insurrection the country was governed by moderate coalition governments that upheld law and order, followed by democratic elections in February 1936. What would be more accurate would be to say that this was the beginning of the rhetoric and propaganda of civil war by Left and Right. During the two years that followed, Spain was inundated with atrocity stories about Asturias and the repression by both sides, which began to create a psychological climate of civil war in the country. From October 1934 the Left stood for increasingly radical, even revolutionary, changes, and polarization was greatly intensified.

Yet there still remained nearly two years, and many good and reasonable opportunities, to avert the civil war that eventually erupted.

The military rebels who began the conflict at first declared almost unanimously that they were taking violent action not to overthrow the Republic but to save the Republic, since the constitution had become a dead letter, and law and order had broken down. Certainly the breakdown of law and constitutional order that had occurred in Spain was unprecedented in any modern European country in peacetime. Unpunished violation of the law took place in at least fourteen areas.

1. The electoral victory of the Left was later followed by the greatest strike wave in Spanish history, featuring many labor stoppages, in some cases without practical economic goals but rather seeking direct domination of labor relations and of private property, often accompanied by violence and destruction of property.

2. Illegal seizures of property, especially in the southern provinces, sometimes legalized ex post facto by the government under the pressure of the revolutionary movements. Manuel Tuñón de Lara has calculated that, between illegal seizures and the acceleration of the agrarian reform, approximately 5 percent of all agrarian property in the country changed hands within five months — not a revolution, but a precipitous change.
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3. A wave of arson and property destruction, particularly in the south.

4. In addition to the destruction, numerous seizures of churches and church properties in the south and east and in some other parts of the country.

5. Closure of Catholic schools, provoking a crisis in education, and in a number of localities forcible suppression of Catholic religious activities as well, accompanied by the expulsion of priests.

6. Broad extension of censorship, with severe limitation of freedom of expression and of assembly.

7. Major economic deterioration, which has never been studied in detail, with a severe stock market decline, the flight of capital, and in some southern provinces abandonment of cultivation, since the costs of the harvest would be greater than its market value. Hence several southern Socialist mayors proposed the "penalty of remaining" for proprietors, rather than the penalty of exile.

8. Many hundreds — indeed several thousand — arbitrary political arrests of members of rightist parties.

9. Impunity of criminal action for members of Popular Front organizations, who were rarely arrested. Occasionally anarchosyndicalists were detained, since they were not members of the Popular Front.

10. The politicization of justice through new legislation and policies, in order to facilitate arbitrary political arrests and prosecution, and to place the rightist parties outside the law. In spite of the four violent insurrections of leftist parties against the Republic — which had scant counterpart among the rightist parties — none of their members were charged with illegal action in this regard, since justice had become completely politicized, in keeping with the Popular Front program.

11. Forcible dissolution of rightist groups, beginning with the Falange in March and the Catholic trade unions in May, and moving toward the CEDA and Renovación Española in July. Illegalizing the rightist organizations was designed to create a virtual political monopoly for the leftist parties, first achieved in the trade union groups.

12. Falsification of electoral procedures and results, which, according to Alcalá-Zamora, passed through four phases. The first was produced by the series of disorders in various provinces on February 16-19, which destroyed a certain number of ballots, produced repeat voting of dubious legality in several locales, and distorted final registration of the votes. The second phase occurred during the run-off elections two weeks later, when, in the face of physical intimidation, the conservative parties withdrew. The third phase was the arbitrary and partisan actions of the Electoral Comission of the Cortes in the second half of March, almost universally condemned by historians, which arbitrarily reassigned a sizable number of seats from the Right to the Left. The fourth phase was the extreme coercion exerted in the new Cortes elections in Cuenca and Granada at the beginning of May, with the arbitrary detention of rightist candidates and activists and severe restriction of rightist activity, producing completely unilateral elections, taken by the opposition to the government as a signal of the end of democratic voting in Spain.
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13. Subversion of the security forces through reappointment of revolutionary officers and personnel earlier prosecuted for violent and subversive actions. One of these commanded the illegal police squad that kidnapped Calvo Sotelo. Equally notable was the addition of special "delegados de policía," normally activists of the Socialist and Communist parties named ad hoc as deputy police, though not regular members of the security forces. This followed the precedent of the Hitler government in appointing violent and subversive SA and SS activists as
Hilfspolizei
in Germany in 1933, and one of these fired the bullet that killed Calvo Sotelo. It should be noted, however, that this procedure was not followed on a massive and systematic scale, as in Germany.

14. The growth of political violence, although its extension was very unequal in different parts of the country. Some provinces experienced relative calm, while in others there was widespread violence, especially in some of the capital cities. Estimates by researchers of those killed by political violence within five and a half months range from a low of 300 to a high of 444.
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Even historians sympathetic to the Left have called this a "pre-revolutionary situation," and it was certainly one that would have elicited a sharp and probably violent reaction in any other country. But did this mean that the constitutional Republic had ceased to exist, as the rebels claimed? A simple yes-or-no answer would probably be ingenuous, since the situation was complicated in the extreme. The Republican government had not become a dictatorship (in which case there probably could not have been a major military revolt) but neither did it maintain constitutional order. Spain lived under a limited but capricious and decentralized tyranny of the leftist Republican government and the Popular Front parties, in which life continued with relative normalcy in much of the country but was severely disturbed in some key dimensions and especially in certain provinces. Spain had entered a kind of gray zone in which the extent to which the established law would apply was becoming increasingly uncertain.

Whereas the worker parties looked to a completely new revolutionary regime, the government of Manuel Azaña and Santiago Casares Quiroga planned to develop an exclusionary all-Left (but not socialist) Republic which would extend radical reform but preserve most private property. It gambled that if concessions were made to the revolutionaries, the latter would eventually be willing to support such a regime. It also gambled that the forces of the Right were weak and would be unable to contest the capricious tyranny through which the country would have to pass to achieve the new radical Republic. The gamble was lost.

From October 1934 commentators began to warn of the danger of civil war. Such a prospect was welcomed and preached only by the more extreme sectors of the revolutionary Left, on the grounds that a successful revolution always involved at least a brief civil war, though in 1935 the Communists changed their policy in this regard. The extreme Right attempted to formulate its own plans for armed insurrection, which were perhaps not so different from those of the revolutionaries, since all groups envisioned only a brief period of fighting.

As violence, disorder, and the various forms of pre-revolutionary activity mounted, warnings of civil war began to take on a new urgency by May 1936. It was clear to most rational observers that the danger of breakdown or serious civil conflict could only be averted by a stronger, probably more broadly based, government. There were at least three different proposals to achieve this.

The first began when Azaña was invested with the powers of the presidency of the Republic on May 10 (following the destitution of Alcalá-Zamora). For three months he had as prime minister presided over a weak, minority all-Left Republican government and now would have to authorize a replacement. The prime candidate was Indalecio Prieto, leader of the semimoderate sector of the Socialists. Prieto sought to form a strong majority government of Socialists and Left Republicans, hopefully with the participation of other leftist parties as well. He proposed to govern vigorously, pressing social and economic reforms, repressing disorder, and purging the military. Such a government could probably have averted civil war, but it was vetoed by Largo Caballero and the revolutionary Socialists, who rejected any further Socialist participation in a "bourgeois" government. Since a strong majoritarian leftist government was impossible, Azaña adopted the alternative of another weak minoritarian Left Republican government led by his crony Casares Quiroga, an uncertain administration that was capable of many arbitrary deeds but refused to adopt the measures that could have averted civil war.

Soon afterward, at a meeting of the leaders of his tiny Left-center National Republican Party on May 25, the eminent jurist Felipe Sánchez-Román presented his own proposal to "save the Republic." Azaña was a personal friend of Sánchez-Román, for whom he felt great admiration, but after helping to write much of the original Popular Front program, Sánchez-Román had withdrawn from the leftist alliance before the elections, concluding that it was wrong for republicans to ally themselves with violent revolutionaries. He now proposed a "national republican government" of all the republican parties, Left and center, with strong powers from the presidency to enforce the constitution fully and strictly, repressing disorder from any source, and disbanding all the party militias. The Socialists would be allowed to join the government if they endorsed this program. Despite his great respect for Sánchez-Román, Azaña rejected his proposal because it would have required allying with the moderate center and breaking altogether with Socialist radicalism, disrupting the Popular Front. Azaña continued to reject the moderates and insist on an all-leftist policy, despite the risk of civil war.

The third kind of proposal came from several centrist liberals and a few of the most moderate members of Azaña's own Izquierda Republicana. This called for a temporary "national Republican dictatorship," given plenary powers of martial law by the president, to repress disorder and enforce the constitution. Its most public presentation was made by the centrist liberal Miguel Maura, one of the founders of the Republic, in a series of articles in the Madrid daily
El Sol
late in June. This too was rejected by Azaña and most of the Left Republicans as excessive, unnecessary, and requiring a complete split with the worker Left, the voting support of the Socialists being fundamental to Azaña's program.