The Spanish Civil War (7 page)

In 1925, the venerable, single-minded, patient and incorruptible father of the Spanish socialists, Pablo Iglesias, died. As a young printer, he had helped to achieve the break with Bakunin in 1872 and ever since had shrewdly and honourably led the party through innumerable vicissitudes. His successor, in the party and the UGT, was his chief lieutenant, Francisco Largo Caballero, a plasterer who had spent his life as a union official and as a conscientious member of the Madrid Municipal Council, successfully setting up insurance schemes and libraries, arranging courses of lectures and negotiating with employers.
¹
Aged sixty-two in 1931, Largo Caballero had taken part in Madrid’s first strike of building workers, in 1890, and was a man without liking, or talent, for parliaments. He was no speaker. He believed in committees, not theories. He had given no encouragement to any who had wanted to strike when Primo de Rivera ‘pronounced’. He had even agreed to collaborate (if briefly) with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera as ‘councillor of state’. The explanation for that was to be found in the socialists’ contempt for the monarchy and in Largo’s morbid fear of losing ground to his rivals in the working class, the anarchists, who, though disorganized, were still more numerous than the socialists. The UGT had, for a long time, been respected by the bourgeoisie for its discipline, its effective ‘machine’, with its myriad committees, its practical, even reasonable, behaviour in strikes (in contrast with the anarchists), and its centralist flavour. It was not surprising that Largo Caballero should become the first minister of labour under the republic. The arbitration committees of employers, unions, and a governmental casting vote, which he had set up under Primo to resolve wage disputes, were the predecessors of a similar system which he introduced in 1931. Largo Caballero owed his popularity to the fact that thousands of Spanish workers saw in him a reflection of their own struggles; he was the man
par excellence
of the
casas del pueblo,
who had risen through his own fortitude, persistence and honesty, as well as a resolve to avoid intemperate revolutionary action.

Indalecio Prieto, his colleague in the republican cabinet—he was minister of finance—was a different sort of socialist. Born in Oviedo,
he removed as a child with his widowed mother to Bilbao, where he worked as a newsboy. His quick brain attracted the attention of a Basque millionaire, Horacio Echevarrieta, who made him first his
homme de confiance
and, later, editor of his newspaper,
El Liberal de Bilbao.
In 1918, Prieto was elected as a socialist to the Cortes where his easy eloquence attracted attention—and the jealousy of Largo Caballero. Thereafter, the antagonism between the two marked the Spanish socialist party, being itself the reflection of a division of attitudes as to what sort of party it should be. Prieto had become prosperous. Bald, with a double chin and small eyes, his head set on a diabetic body of gigantic dimensions, he behaved more as an enlightened member of the upper classes than as a labour leader. ‘The first quality of Prieto is his great heart,’ wrote Miguel Maura of him. ‘I have known few, tremendously few, people more self-sacrificing, more compassionate, more disinterested than Prieto.’
¹
He was mercurial, but surprisingly dedicated to party discipline. As a successful parliamentarian, he had opposed collaboration in the government of Primo de Rivera, and it had been he who had persuaded the socialists to join the conspiracy against the monarchy of 1930. Aged forty-eight in 1931, Prieto was popular with the middle class. But, among workers, the sterner figure of Largo Caballero always commanded more affection.

The president of both the UGT and the party until 1931 was Julián Besteiro, the third most influential Spanish socialist, professor of philosophy and, though theoretically a Marxist, in party politics a moderate. But he was against the idea of the socialists serving in the government. As a result, he soon resigned from the presidency of both party and union. Besteiro was humane, friendly, wise, learned, but reserved; no one ‘
tutoyered
’ him.
²

The Spanish working class in the 1930s comprised about 8 million, out of a population of 24 million. About 4½ million worked on the land; and the socialists, as yet, had little following there, though they soon would. The socialists were also badly represented in Catalonia, where nearly three-quarters of Spanish industry was concentrated. But if they had in consequence few members in Spain’s largest industries—the 300,000 who worked in the clothes manufacturing and the textile industries—they had backing among the 270,000 builders, the
200,000 who worked in food industries, the 100,000 miners, and the 120,000 metallurgical workers. They also had strength among the 60,000 transport workers, and among the half million or so artisans.

The last member of the republican cabinet of 1931 was a Catalan classical historian, Nicolau d’Olwer, who became minister of ‘the national economy’. Though he had been active in Catalan politics in the 1920s, he was less of a professional politician than anyone in the cabinet; his inclusion in it was intended to please the Catalan nationalists. As an economist, it was said of him, he was ‘a great hellenist’.

Five of the members of this government had one attribute in common: they were freemasons and, therefore, suspected by their conservative enemies of anti-Spanish loyalties.
¹

In the nineteenth century, most Spanish liberals had been members of one or other of the masonic lodges which, though introduced into Spain in the eighteenth century, spread during the Napoleonic Wars. In the twentieth century, progressive persons seem, in Spain and elsewhere on the continent, to have felt obliged to join a lodge largely as a gesture. Although they subscribed to the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity on their induction, masons, however, formed a secret society without any real policy. Yet though without overt political purposes, Spanish masonry was anti-religious.
²
Since to disbelieve in God in Spain was an act with political consequences, churchmen and the Right believed masonry to be a devilish international plot, organized in the City of London, yet designed to establish atheistic communism. To the Jesuits, masonry seemed especially vile since its secret ways appeared a profane parody of their own order.
³
Such hostility, of course, would be likely to increase the secretiveness of the masons. But the latter did not, even so, have any political front. The French masons may have financed anti-clericalism in
other countries and the Spanish lodges were useful meeting-places for plotting against Primo de Rivera. But later, there were divisions within them. Some generals, such as Goded, Queipo de Llano, and Cabanellas, belonged to a military lodge, some of whose members were fervent republicans. The relation of masonry to Marxism was also hotly debated. Men of the Free Institute were rarely freemasons. The freemasons cannot, therefore, be regarded as of determining importance in the 1930s, though some politicians, such as Martínez Barrio, did owe some of their influence to their rank in the masonic order.
¹

The problem of Catalonia was the first with which the new republic had to deal. The four provinces of Catalonia had enjoyed a medieval past of commercial pre-eminence upon which it was easy for romantics to dwell. Industrialization and the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, as has been seen, created a desire for home rule which, when thwarted, turned into a nationalist movement. Richer than any other part of the Peninsula, with a modern class structure and a Mediterranean culture, Catalonia might have been prosperous within a Spanish federal state. It was certain to be rebellious within the centralized, unimaginative Bourbon structure. Hostility to free trade and a desire for protection played a part in the rise of Catalan nationalism. Catalans also believed themselves a ‘vital member’ attached to the ‘dying body’ of Castile.

Catalanism owed its strength to a combination of this economic interpretation with a literary renaissance expressed by the Floral Games which had begun in 1859, the poetic competitions in Catalan, as well as by the works of several poets, headed by the romantic priest Verdaguer. In the early years of the twentieth century, Catalonia’s importance was increased by the development of hydro-electric power in the eastern Pyrenees. Power was brought to Madrid from Catalonia, while the electricity supply itself was concentrated in the North American ‘La Canadiense’ (the Barcelona Traction Company). Meantime, the Bible was translated into Catalan by the monks of the Bene
dictine monastery of Montserrat, a flood of both original and translated literature poured from Catalan presses, a dictionary was compiled, and newspapers were founded. Catalan was more widely spoken than ever, and became the customary language of town councils. Excursions to rediscover inland Catalonia, the cult of the national dance (the ‘Sardana’), the creation of popular choirs, even the adoption of a national deity (Mare de Déu de Montserrat) were the cultural manifestations of a nationalism which, despite setbacks, still held the loyalty in 1931 of most of the Catalan middle class. The church gave some backing to the Catalan movement, since Catalanism was antiliberal in the sense that all regional movements had once been so. But the federalism into which Catalanism might easily fit was nevertheless more Left than Right.

There were a multitude of political parties in Catalonia, each dominated by people who, to a lesser or greater degree, rejected the authority of the Castilian unitary state. No party, admittedly, had had a history under Primo de Rivera, either in Catalonia or elsewhere. Even the centres of the once promising party of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Lliga Regionalista, had been closed. But the triumph of the anti-monarchists in the municipal elections of April 1931 was greater at Barcelona than elsewhere. To be precise, furthermore, the victory there had been gained by the Esquerra, a party whose name was the Catalan word for ‘left’. Its leader was an elderly, honourable, romantic colonel, Francisco Maciá, ‘el avi’ (the grandfather), who had spent the dictatorship plotting in France, Latin America and even Moscow. The leader apart, the Esquerra was a party of intellectuals, small businessmen and of the lower middle class of Barcelona.
¹

By 1930, the Catalan industrialists had been frightened by the actions of the anarchists in their factories between 1917 and 1923, and by
the failure of so many brave enterprises, into alliance with the Spanish orthodox Right. The Catalan upper class had once hoped to regenerate Spain through the revival of Catalonia. Their leader, Cambó, had opposed the old local
caciques
at the beginning of the century.
¹
But now he fought the Left and radicals. The Catalan movement had, on several occasions, united both Left and Right in the nationalist cause but the chance of a revival of that common front was now remote.

In 1913, the provincial councils of the four Catalan provinces had been merged, under Canalejas’s law, for some of their functions, into a precursor of autonomy, the
Mancomunidad,
which had not affected Spanish sovereignty. It had been abolished by Primo. Would it now be restored? Or would the Esquerra go further? Manuel Carrasco Formiguera called on Catalonia ‘to declare war on Spain’. When the elected councillors in 1931 came out onto a balcony in the Plaza San Jaime, there were heard not only the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘Els Segadors’, the Catalan national anthem, but also cries for an independent Catalan republic. Luis Companys, Maciá’s lieutenant, a young lawyer (who had gained a reputation in the early 1920s for defending anarchists for nugatory fees) proclaimed ‘the Catalan republic’; and Maciá spoke of ‘the Catalan state and republic’ from the same balcony an hour later. So some Catalan-born ministers in Madrid, Nicolau d’Olwer and Marcelino Domingo, with Fernando de los Ríos, made a hasty visit to Barcelona to persuade Maciá to await the passage of a Catalan statue of home rule by the new Cortes (which would shortly be elected). Maciá agreed, although Barcelona was in his hands. No doubt he was wise to be patient, since Barcelona was far from having only Catalan inhabitants: over a third of the city’s population had been born outside Catalonia. Their political views could not be guessed.
²

The honeymoon of the new republic lasted a month. During this time, the republic was caricatured in the press as
la niña bonita,
the pretty girl, in the style of the happy Marianne north of the Pyrenees; she had first appeared as representing the constitution of Cádiz in 1812. The government made plans for an election in June for a provi
sional Cortes. That would approve a constitution. Meanwhile, the royal flag of red and gold was changed for a tricolour in red, yellow and purple, the royal national anthem was altered from the ‘Royal March’ to the ‘Hymn of Riego’ (the constitutionalists’ song in 1820), and many streets were rechristened with republican names. Companys, who became the first republican civil governor of Barcelona, destroyed police records of anarchists and common criminals alike. The government published plans for thousands of new primary schools and, on 6 May, decreed that henceforth religious instruction was no longer obligatory in state schools: it would be ‘available’ to those whose parents requested it. The change was a startling one in Spain.

The enemies of the republic were, nevertheless, gathering. The anarchists took advantage of Maciá’s benevolent attitude and of the lurch of the country away from authoritarianism to settle some old scores in Barcelona, despite their national leadership’s declaration that they were against a return to terrorism. The republic carried out, meantime, no purge of either the national or the local administration, or of the police, the teachers and government agencies. The judiciary remained the same. So, of course, did the army. This combination of inexperienced, reformist politicians and a rather conservative governmental structure left many difficulties ahead.

Then, though the great depression had been less severe in Spain than in more advanced industrial countries, it did present difficulties all the same, particularly in the mining areas. During the course of 1931, the effect would begin to be felt in Catalonia. Meantime, the return of many workers from abroad, particularly from the Americas, would exacerbate unemployment in the poorer regions, such as Galicia and Andalusia. In the country, unemployment would always be twice as severe as, if less noticed than, in the towns. Yet at this time Spain had no unemployment relief, and her social services were rudimentary in comparison with what existed in northern Europe. Finally, the first shot in a contest between church and state which was to continue until the civil war was the grave but menacing pastoral letter of Cardinal Segura, archbishop of Toledo and primate of the Spanish Church, made public at the beginning of May. This determined prelate combined intelligence with obstinacy. A bishop at thirty-five, he had been translated from his wild Estremaduran diocese by the special intervention of the King. He was a scholar who boasted of three
doctorates and, when he undertook social work once a year, he worked as hard as a parish priest. In 1931, he was still under fifty, and at the height of his powers. His letter began with a eulogy of Alfonso XIII and ended with these threatening words: