The Spanish Civil War (11 page)

Despite all these views, however, there was no suggestion that children should be brought up in common, and free love was despised.

It was natural that the anarchists should be suspicious of Largo Caballero’s labour exchanges and arbitration committees which, under Primo de Rivera as under the republic, they believed threatened their
raison d’être.
That lack of interest in a promising programme of social legislation shows how the movement, though its members were often
imaginative, was too easily able to forget that there were others in Spain, including both socialists and capitalists, who had points of view worthy of being heard. Anarchists often had indeed only ‘the Idea’ of libertarian revolution to sustain them. They ignored that the men of ‘the Idea’ were never a majority of the working class.

Some unions did exist in Spain which were neither socialist nor anarchist, whose members were both Catholics and hostile to militant atheism and revolutionary talk. The National Catholic Agrarian Confederation even claimed a following of 600,000 peasant families in 1919. That body, however, confined its activities to Castile and Navarre and concentrated less on ideology than on such practical matters as marketing manure and the purchase of seed. Some attempts in the past had also been made at comprehensive social legislation. There was, for example, a Workers’ Compensation Act of 1909, an eight-hour day was introduced in 1918, and social insurance had been brought in during the 1920s. The difficulty was not only anarchist reluctance to cooperate but the state’s incapacity to ensure that laws were enforced. Similarly, the cooperatives which were introduced in some Catalan or Castilian fishing and agricultural communities were eccentric exceptions to the growing disharmony in social affairs.
¹

The events of May 1931 gave to the new republican government a warning of the threats which seemed likely to beset it from both Left and Right. But the ministers knew nothing of the details of the monarchists’ plans: rumours, of course, there were, and verbal menaces. Nor did they take the anarchists as seriously as they should have done. They attributed the church burnings to the provocation of the monarchists. On 28 June, an election was held which suggested that the majority of the people were behind the régime. This, for a constituent Cortes, was held on the understanding that one member would represent about 50,000 male votes. They were the fairest elections that had been held in Spain. As a result, there were elected 117 socialists (a true reflection of the growth in socialist numbers during the weeks since April); 59 radical socialists, and 27 members of Azaña’s Republican Action party; 89 radicals, following Lerroux; and 27 right republicans, following Alcalá Zamora. In addition, there were elected 33 members of the Catalan Esquerra and 16 Galician nationalists. All these could be expected to vote generally with the government.
¹
Against these, the non-republican Right could muster only 57 members, despite evidence that the old
caciques
were still often strong enough to exercise an improper influence. The monarchist party
seemed ‘nothing but an incitement to riots’.
¹
Many agricultural workers who might have been expected to have been indifferent to the republic had been won to it by the new land legislation.
²
The Catholics’ National Action won only six seats. The Right had been taken by surprise by the fall of the monarchy, the old leaders could not agree with each other as to what policy to follow, and such new right-wing leaders as were already in the wings of Spanish politics had as yet no following. Had it not been for the government’s minor anti-clerical decrees during the early summer, opposition might not have got under way for some years. But these included such things as a ban on showing images of saints in schoolrooms, on the ludicrous ground that the kissing of such objects was insanitary; and the minister of education was allowed to confiscate artistic objects from churches if there were danger of their deterioration. These pinpricks wounded, but did not injure. Meantime, the new constituent Assembly was in many ways a gathering of individuals, more than of parties. Only the socialists were an organized movement. The other republican groups were gatherings of friends. There were numerous independent members such as Ortega, Unamuno and Dr Marañón, the ‘founders’ of the republic.

The government’s confidence was reduced by a series of strikes organized by the anarchists in July and August. In Barcelona, strikers, besieged in a house in the Calle de Mercaders, said they would not give in except to regular soldiers. A unit arrived and the men surrendered; they were shortly machine-gunned by the forces of order.
³
Three deaths also occurred during a general strike in San Sebastián. The government even called on the artillery to crush a general strike in Seville, arising from a telephone strike. No less than thirty anarchists, including some gunmen, were killed and two hundred wounded. If they had reacted too slowly to the burning of the
conventos,
the government had now reacted too strongly.

Animosity between the anarchists and socialists was, however, stilled that summer by the former’s own dissensions. The opponents of the FAI’s aspirations to élite leadership published in August a mani
festo, signed by thirty leading anarchists (thereafter known as the
treintistas
). The FAI were guilty, they said,

of developing an over-simplified concept of revolution … which would hand us over to republican fascism … The revolution does not trust exclusively in the audacity of a more or less courageous minority, but instead it seeks to be a movement of the whole working class marching towards its final liberation, which alone will decide the character and precise moment for the revolution.
¹

The FAI were strong enough to resist this criticism and even succeeded in expelling the
treintistas
from the CNT. This victory was one of youth against middle-age: most
FAIistas
were in their twenties or thirties, most
treintistas
older. Some of the
treintistas
never rejoined the movement; Angel Pestaña, for example, formed a small splinter party which never gathered any momentum. Others, such as Roldán Cortada in Barcelona, became communists.

By the autumn of 1931, a committee of the Cortes had, meantime, prepared a draft constitution. Here the government (or, rather, the drafters) blundered. They identified the new régime with their own political views. Thus the draft constitution began by announcing, ‘Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all classes, organized in a régime of liberty and justice’. Government ‘emanated from the people’ and all citizens were equal. The country would renounce war as an instrument of policy. No titles of nobility would be recognized. Both sexes would vote at twenty-three. There would be only one chamber of parliament. Property would be ‘the object of expropriation for social utility’. Some of these clauses might be invoked to justify socialism; others could be regarded as giving safeguards against it. Then, since the men of the republic feared a meddlesome Head of State, such as King Alfonso had been, the powers of the President were limited by a six-year term, and ineligibility for immediate re-election. The President would, however, nominate the Prime Minister. The acts of the President would be valid if signed by a cabinet minister, but the President could veto laws which he did not like. He could be removed nevertheless if he were to dissolve the Cortes twice.

The religious clauses brought dismay. Article 26 separated church and state. The payments by the state to priests were to stop in two years, though these salaries had been compensation for the confiscation of church lands in 1837. All religious orders had to register with the ministry of justice. If they were judged a danger to the state, they would be dissolved.
¹
All would have to pay ordinary taxes. Orders which required a vow beyond the three normal canonical vows would anyway be dissolved. This was merely another way of dissolving the Jesuits, from whom a special oath of loyalty to the Pope is customarily exacted. No order was to be permitted to hold more property than it required for its own subsistence, nor was any to indulge in commerce. All orders were to submit annual accounts to the state. All education, meanwhile, was to be inspired ‘by ideals of human solidarity’. Religious education, that is, was to end. Every ‘public manifestation of religion’—including the Holy Week, Epiphany and even carnival processions—would have to be officially approved; while divorce was to be granted as a result of mutual disagreement between the parties, or on the petition of either party, if just cause could be shown. Civil marriages were to be the only legal ones.

The inclusion of such sweeping anti-clerical clauses in the constitution of the republic was ambitious, but foolish, whatever the merits of the case might be. It might have been that the application of such conditions would ultimately have made for a juster Spain. Nevertheless, it would have been wiser to have delayed before the presentation of total disestablishment. It would have been better too to have held back dissolution until the place of the Augustinian and Jesuit schools could have been taken by lay establishments of comparable quality. For, with all their shortcomings, these orders had created the best secondary schools in the country—for those who could pay. Even liberal newspapers denounced these measures. Yet Azaña thundered in the Cortes: ‘Do not tell me that this is contrary to freedom. It is a matter of public health.’ Unfortunately, Spanish liberalism had come to look on the church as a scapegoat for all Spain’s ills; but no such simple explanation was, in fact, honest. Furthermore, these ideas were far from innovations: the Jesuits had been expelled before, and compulsory religious education had been dropped in 1913, to be restored by Primo
de Rivera. The difficulty was that Spanish Catholics were forced into having to oppose the constitution if they wished to criticize its educational policy.
¹

The debates in the Cortes on these clerical clauses brought the first of many governmental crises in the Second Republic. Alcalá Zamora, the Prime Minister, and Miguel Maura, the minister of the interior, both Catholic ‘progressives’, resigned in October. The Speaker of the Cortes, the serene Besteiro, assumed the temporary rank of President of Spain and called on Azaña to form another government. Since Azaña had assumed the leadership of the government parties in the Cortes, he was the obvious choice: he was the one success of the new régime. But his promotion outraged the radical Lerroux, who regarded himself as representing the senior conscience of republicanism and who soon passed, with his ninety followers, into opposition.
²
Thereafter, the government was strictly anti-clerical, being a coalition of republicans of Azaña’s way of thinking, and of socialists. Alcalá Zamora admittedly became the first President of the republic. So it could not have been said that the Catholics were wholly excluded from the régime.

The constitution became law at the end of 1931. It remained for the government to introduce the legislation which would enact all its clauses. The ministers busied themselves first with a law ‘for the defence of the republic’. The constitution provided for the suspension of all guarantees of freedom for thirty days, in the case of an emergency. The scheme empowered the minister of the interior to suspend public meetings. A modest income tax was introduced for the first time in Spain. These things were vigorously fought by the few right-wing deputies. Then, on the last day of 1931, a terrible incident occurred which caught the attention of the whole country.

In the wild and empty region of Estremadura, near the monastery of Guadalupe, there stood a small
pueblo
of nine hundred inhabitants named Castilblanco. The conditions here were much as they were elsewhere in the region. There was no special shortage of food. Violence was previously unknown. The local socialists desired to demon
strate, along with others in other
pueblos,
against the unpopular civil governor of Badajoz. Permission to do so was refused. They determined to go ahead. The civil guard then came to the defence of the authorities.

The civil guard (‘
la Benemérita
’, the ‘well deserving’, as it was known by the middle class) numbered about 30,000. It had been established in 1844 to keep order in the countryside, then agitated by bandits using guerrilla methods successfully employed against the armies of Napoleon. The civil guard was led by a general and serving officers. Many of the rank and file were ex-regular soldiers. With their green uniforms, three-cornered hats, their Mauser rifles, and gaunt barracks, this police force was regarded as an army of occupation. Members of the civil guard never served in the part of Spain from whence they came. They were not encouraged to be friendly with anyone in the village where they were quartered. They had a reputation for ruthlessness. ‘When one joins the civil guard,’ wrote the novelist Ramón Sender, ‘one declares civil war.’
¹
The personnel during the republic, being the same as those of the monarchy, were as rough in the 1930s as they had been in the 1920s.

In Castilblanco in 1931, the civil guard were as unpopular as elsewhere in Spain. Their fate was terrible. When they tried to prevent the holding of the socialist meeting, the village fell upon them. Four were killed. Their eyes were gouged out. Their bodies were mutilated. On one of the bodies thirty-seven knife wounds were afterwards discovered; and, as in the town of Fuenteovejuna in Lope de Vega’s play of that name, there was no possibility of bringing the killers to trial. The village, no single person, was responsible.
²
This tragedy was followed by several comparable, but less dramatic, events in other
pueblos.
In Arnedo (Logroño) the civil guards wreaked vengeance and killed seven peaceful demonstrators. The civil guard were everywhere on the offensive after Castilblanco. But in Sallent, in the valley of the Llobregat near Barcelona, the CNT took over the town, raised a red flag on the town hall, abolished private property and money, and declared themselves an independent society. The government took five days to
recapture the town. Many anarchists from all over Spain were deported as a result. Among them were the
solidarios,
Durruti and Francisco Ascaso. The latter wrote from his prison ship: ‘Poor bourgeoisie which has to have recourse to such action to survive. But of course they are at war with us, and it is natural that they defend themselves by martyrizing, murdering, and exiling us.’
¹
This punishment did not prevent the FAI, worried at the growth of numbers in the socialist agricultural workers’ union, from virtually declaring war on the republic and the rural bourgeoisie for the rest of 1932. It was a terrifying time for the landlords’ agents and their friends.

The frequency of these explosions encouraged the government to broach a discussion of those fundamental social problems which lay at the heart of Spanish working-class unrest, particularly the problem of agriculture.

Spain was a dry land with bad soil. Its natural aridity had been increased by deforestation and the grazing of the famous flocks of sheep which, for centuries, had roamed central Spain. Forests had been destroyed by donkeys, goats, the demands of building (houses and ships) and peasant prejudice against trees. A lack of fodder prevented animals from being used as much as elsewhere in Europe; while agricultural machinery scarcely existed in 1930. Rainfall was low except in the north-west, and the unpredictability of such rain as there was made farming even more hazardous. The ‘golden fringe’ of the Mediterranean, and a few favoured valleys and irrigated plains, produced much of the available food. The social contrast between these prosperous regions and the poor, windy deserts of the centre was striking. Many farmers slaved all their lives on sterile soil. Water and fuel preoccupied farmers far more of the time than they did in northern Europe. Yield was lower too: for example, the acreage in vineyards was the same as in France but it produced only about two-thirds of what France did.
²
Long distances between villages and fields, bad transport, bad roads, shortage of manure and ignorance of modern possibilities all kept low the incomes of those who worked on the land. Though distribution of food had been improved because of the railway and
road programmes of Primo de Rivera, it still took too long to take perishable goods from the rich Valencian irrigated land or the Guadalquivir valley to mountain villages or to Madrid: hence the limited food available.