The Spanish Civil War (15 page)

The affair was a fiasco. Azaña and the government knew—apparently through the treachery of a prostitute—what was afoot. Indeed, the matter had been talked about in the cafés for weeks. One of the conspirators, José Félix de Lequerica, a one-time ‘Maurista’, and newspaper proprietor, was asked by the judge who tried him how he knew the date fixed for the insurrection. ‘From my concierge,’ was the reply. ‘For weeks he has been saying that the date was being postponed. At last, yesterday, he declared solemnly: “It is tonight, Don José Félix.”’ General Sanjurjo was briefly triumphant at Seville, but in Madrid everything went wrong. Most of the would-be rebels were captured, after a scuffle in the Plaza de la Cibeles. Azaña ostentatiously watched the battle, a cigarette at his lips, from the balcony of the ministry of war, the old palace of Albas.
¹

In Seville, both communists and anarchists declared a general strike, and several upper-class clubs were burned.
²
Sanjurjo was persuaded to flee to Portugal. Apprehended near the border at Ayamonte, he was brought back to be tried with 150 others, mostly officers and including two scions of the House of Bourbon. The first rising against the republic thus ended in the discomfiture of its opponents. It also resulted in the seizure, without compensation, of the lands of the conspirators; and, illogically also, the immoderate confiscation of the lands of grandees of Spain, if those were above the limits laid down for expropriation under the Agrarian Reform Law. Those lands too would not be paid for. In the heat of the moment, the government, and then the Cortes, made a special exception in its agrarian policy which could scarcely be justified even by rough justice: who of the grandees had actually supported Sanjurjo? Only two, out of 262.
³

Azaña and his government weathered the rest of the year 1932 without much difficulty. For much of the time, the right-wing papers
ABC, El Debate,
and
Informaciones
were suspended. There were an ominously large number of preventive arrests of monarchist politicians and officers, not all of whom were brought to trial. A purge of the civil service was discussed to remove those ‘incompatible with the régime’. The autumn session of the Cortes was occupied with the passage of the Law of Congregations, which enacted the religious clauses of the constitution. Many Jesuits had already left Spain, but much work was still needed to discover which schools they owned and what other undertakings they had: the Society were masters of camouflaging ownership. Laws were prepared naming dates for the end of all clerical salaries, by November 1933,
¹
the end of religious teaching and the beginning of the other restrictions on the orders: ecclesiastical primary schools were to close on 31 December 1933, and their secondary schools and colleges or institutes of higher education three months before. That would mean that, in a country where there were already too few schools, another 350,000 children would have to be educated. Herculean efforts were, however,
already being made by Fernando de los Ríos, now minister of education, and Rudolfo Llopis, the director of primary education, to realize this part of the republic’s ideals. Seven thousand schools were quickly built and the annual income of teachers raised to 3,000 pesetas.
¹
Travelling schools were sent into remote provinces. By the end of 1932, 70,000 children were being educated in secondary schools in place of the 20,000 three years before. Thereafter, the pace of school building slowed, due to doubts raised about the capacity of some new teachers and the desire of later governments to balance the budget.
²

The nation was engaged by the trial of the Majorcan millionaire Juan March, probably the richest man in Spain from his monopoly for distributing tobacco in Morocco, granted by Primo de Rivera. March was convicted of fraud; but he later bribed his way to a sensational escape from Alcalá prison and, thereafter, apparently used his considerable wealth (valued at £20 million sterling) to try and sabotage the currency of the republic, which, nevertheless, maintained itself in these years at more or less the same rate: about 55 pesetas to the pound.
³

The uneasy peace of the winter was also broken by a new series of agrarian revolts—one of them in Castellar de Santiago (Cuidad Real), where right-wing farmers killed the local socialist trade unionist leader in appalling circumstances; and then, in January 1933, by an almost mortal thrust from the Left. Libertarian communism was proclaimed at Sardanola-Ripollet. There were sporadic risings throughout the Levante and Andalusia. The best-known anarchist rising, however, occurred at Casas Viejas in the province of Cádiz. Though the mayor gave in, the civil guard did not, and telephoned for help from nearby Medina Sidonia. The anarchists were briefly masters of the village. The black and red flag waved in the wind. Nobody, however, appears to have been killed, though there were many upper-class families in the town. The priest survived. Reinforcements shortly arrived in the shape of a detachment of the
guardia de asalto
(assault guards). This corps, more efficient than the older civil guard, had been founded after the May riots in 1931 as a new special constabulary for the defence of the republic. Led by Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes, an able commander known
for his evacuation in 1924 of Spanish troops from Gomara in Morocco, who created the new body out of nothing in three months, the assault guards were made up of officers and men supposed to be loyal to the new régime.
¹
They drove the anarchists out of Casas Viejas, and some of them established themselves on a small hill outside. Meantime, a joint unit of the civil guard and assault guards embarked on a house-to-house search for arms. One veteran old anarchist, nicknamed ‘Seisdedos’ (literally, six fingers), refused to open his door. A siege began. Seisdedos, with his daughter-in-law, Josefa, acting as gun-loader, and accompanied by five others, declined to surrender. Two assault guards were shot. Machine-guns were brought up. But the firing continued. Night fell. Seisdedos held his fire. One of Seisdedos’s daughters, Libertaria, and a boy escaped from the house. The next morning the forces of the government, furious at being for so long kept at bay, placed petrol round the house and set it ablaze, killing those within. Afterwards, some fourteen prisoners were shot, and the captain of the assault guards concerned, Captain Rojas, told the press that he had had orders to take no prisoners and to shoot these men ‘in the guts’.
²
Though Azaña and Casares Quiroga, minister of the interior, had plainly never given such an instruction, they never recovered from the consequences of this outrage. They were accused by the Right, with a certain hypocrisy, of ‘murdering the people’. The radical Martínez Barrio denounced the government for creating a régime of ‘blood, mud, and tears’. Ortega y Gasset openly proclaimed that the republic had disappointed him. ‘It was not for this’, he said, ‘that we worked in the days of the monarchy.’ Azaña’s majority sank in the Cortes to a low figure.

In April 1933, municipal elections were held in those areas which had returned monarchists in 1931, and which had been as a result deprived of representation. As in 1931, these elections were as important
as national ones. For one thing, they were fought much harder than any other had been in Spain before. In hundreds of
pueblos,
the great issue was religion, as much as the class war, even though the two matters were often combined. Acting sometimes in anticipation of the government, local councils had often abolished certain processions during fiestas. Municipal bands had sometimes been forbidden to enter the church. Where processions had been allowed, young socialists had proudly said that they would throw those accompanying the floats or carriages into the local river. One priest in Andalusia had also been fined by a socialist magistrate for saying mass in his church whose roof had been destroyed by lightning: he had been charged with making a public display of religion. Another priest was fined as a monarchist for alluding to the Kingship of God in the festival of Christ the King. In one parish, the tolling of bells was taxed, in another the wearing of crucifixes forbidden. Churches were also robbed, and sometimes burned, and nobody seemed to make any attempt to apprehend the malefactors. In a church in a village in Aragon, the ‘Leftists’ soaped the doorway, and watched the faithful in a procession slide about, with ribald laughter. In many places, the names of famous saints or churchmen were removed from streets and squares.

Then, slowly, a counter-revolution began. Old Spain began to protect the images of the Virgins in processions with armed men, who also stood on the street corners where she might pass. The faithful felt under an obligation to make all religious processions more solemn. Catholic Action began to be organized as a right-wing party designed to maintain the ‘slow traditional ways of doing things’ as opposed to ‘direct progressive and violent ideas and actions’.
¹

In the municipal elections of 1933, the government parties returned 5,000 councillors, the Right 4,900, and the Centre opposition, led by Lerroux and his radicals, 4,200. It dawned on both Left republicans and socialists that, even in a democracy, they might lose power. The Right also won victories in the Cortes, particularly over the Rural Leases Bill, because the Left republicans did not attend the debate. Because of Casas Viejas, liberal papers turned against Azaña. In September, elections among municipal officials to elect judges for the Supreme Court gave a
substantial majority to candidates opposed to the government. The opposition in the Cortes was vociferous and threatened passive disobedience if the bill forbidding the religious orders to teach were to become law. Exhausted and dispirited, Azaña sought first to reshuffle his cabinet and then, when the President made difficulties, resigned. He did so before the church schools were actually closed, and so they were given a further lease of life. After an unsuccessful attempt by Lerroux to form an administration, his lieutenant, Martínez Barrio, formed a caretaker government, and called for general elections on 19 November.

Azaña and his friends went to the polls in defence of their achievements: there had been important laws on leases, arbitration, education, religious orders, agriculture, the army, and Catalan home rule. There had been a new and advanced divorce law, as well as one legalizing civil marriage, laws on rights for women, and a more fair system of recruitment for the civil service. There had been a new penal code. In one of the most touching experiments, republican students had, under the inspiration of the aged art critic Manuel Cossío, and the leadership of Luis Santullano, carried out travelling cultural missions into the remotest parts of Spain, bringing to poor peasants free performances of Lope de Vega or readings of García Lorca’s poems. But even so, many were disappointed with the republic: the Agrarian Reform Institute had as yet only installed 4,600 families.
¹
An expropriation commission was still working its way slowly through the legal problems caused by the dissolution of the Jesuits; it was making poor progress. Like so many others before and since, Azaña had frightened the middle class, without satisfying the workers. His minister of agriculture, Marcelino Domingo, lost votes because of his mismanagement of wheat imports. Above all, political emotions had been everywhere aroused. But the extent of Azaña’s defeat was unexpected.

The Left lost in 1933 because, first, in a system favouring coalitions, they were disunited—the socialists gained 1,722,000 votes and won only 60 seats while the radicals with 700,000 votes won 104 seats. But the socialists were refusing to collaborate with a ‘bourgeois democracy’ anymore. Secondly, the lavish propaganda of the Right successfully misrepresented the positive work of the republic. There were clearly also some electoral frauds, efforts to intimidate and threats, on
both sides. Finally, the introduction of votes for women, for the first time in Spain, profited the Right. Altogether, the parties which had supported the late government gained only 99 seats, of which Azaña’s party, Republican Action, gained only 8.

As for the Centre, the radicals won 104 seats and the Lliga, the Catalan businessmen’s party, 24. The Right, on the other hand, won 207 seats. Of these 35 were won by an uneasy alliance between Carlists and orthodox monarchists, of whom the latter had been organized under the misleading name Renovación Española, and led by Antonio Goicoechea, an ageing dandy who had been the ‘young Maurista’ leader in 1913, a conservative minister of the interior in 1919, and first president of National Action in 1931. Excluded from that, he had been a conspirator, and imprisoned in consequence, in 1932. In late 1932, he had broken with Popular Action (Acción Popular) as National Action had by then become, and founded a movement of those Catholic, right-wing people who could not accept the ‘accidentalism’ of the Catholic party. There were also 29 ‘agrarians’, representing the interests of the Castilian growers of wheat and olives. But the largest group on the Right, and indeed in the entire Cortes, with 117 seats, was the new Catholic party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas).
¹
The core of the CEDA was Popular Action. The driving force was Angel Herrera, editor of
El Debate,
one of whose aims (like both Pope Pius XI and his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli) was to create a christian democratic party in Spain on the model of those successful after 1945 in Germany, Italy, and France. But the anti-clerical character of the constitution meant that the members of the CEDA could not accept the régime as it was then organized, and minor measures of anti-clericalism (such as the secularization of cemeteries, the insistence on civil funeral services unless the deceased had specifically requested Catholic burial in his will, and the cancellation of church parades in the army) caused as much anger as the more drastic laws.

The CEDA, founded formally in March 1933 as an amalgamation of the many small right-wing Catholic groups which had grown up since
1931, was an alliance, from many points of view. According to its most enlightened member, Manuel Giménez Fernández, some thirty of the CEDA’s deputies were social christians; another thirty monarchists, or conservatives; and the remaining sixty, opportunists.
¹
José María Gil Robles, the eloquent young barrister who became the leader of the CEDA, had been the parliamentary leader of National, and Popular, Action in 1931 and 1932, and had made his name, still in his early thirties, in the debates on the clerical clauses of the constitution. He had been one of Angel Herrera’s main leader writers on
El Debate
and was a lawyer for the Jesuits. He continued to explain his position under the name of ‘accidentalism’: it was ‘accidental’ whether Spain had a monarchy or a republic, but it was ‘essential’ that the law should not conflict with the church.
²
Hence, he had excluded from the CEDA such monarchists as Goicoechea. Nevertheless, Gil Robles would have liked a restoration and he met with, negotiated with and, when necessary, defended monarchist plotters. Yet he also permitted his followers—small-holders in Castile, the urban middle class (except in Catalonia and the Basque country), some landowners—to greet him at large meetings as
Jefe,
Leader, as if he were indeed a
Duce,
or even a
Führer.
He had visited Germany in 1933 to study Nazi propaganda, had been present at the Nuremberg rally and brought back to Spain some Nazi ideas for political campaigning—the use of radio, the dropping of pamphlets from aeroplanes, the well-organized psychological preparation of crowds at great meetings for wildly intoxicating speeches. Gil Robles was an accomplished parliamentarian who, nevertheless, disliked parliament and thought that it might soon be seen to have had its day. His representatives visited the King in Paris, but some of his speeches in 1933 showed sympathy with Dr Dollfuss’s Catholic state in Austria. His vagueness about his ultimate aims, and his reluctance to affirm loyalty to the republic, could only be provocative in the circumstances of the early 1930s, when tales of comparable behaviour elsewhere leading to fascism were frequent.