The Spanish Civil War (23 page)

The basis of society would be the self-governing communes, though ‘the right of autonomy will not exclude the duty of fulfilling agreements of collective convenience’. A group of small villages might be united in a single commune. The associations of industrial and agricultural producers in each commune would federate nationally, and they would effect exchange of goods. As for the family, the revo
lution should not operate against it on principle. But separate treatment, social and professional, of women would vanish: ‘Libertarian communism proclaims free love, without more regulation than the will of the man and woman, guaranteeing to their children the safeguard of the community.’ At the same time, through a good sexual education, beginning at school, eugenic selection would be inculcated, so that human beings would henceforward breed conscientiously, in order to produce healthy and beautiful children. (This aspect of the anarchist programme has perhaps been ignored.) The anarchists also had a programme for love:

On the problems of moral idiosyncracy, which love may bring to the society of libertarian communism, the community and the principle of Liberty leave only two roads open … absence. For many illnesses, a change of air is recommended. For the illness of love … a change of commune is recommended. Religion, that purely subjective manifestation, will be recognized in as much as it is relegated to the sanctuary of the individual conscience, but in no case will it be permitted as a form of public show, nor a moral and intellectual coercion [all churches thus would be closed].

Illiteracy would be energetically fought. Culture would be restored to ‘those who have been dispossessed of it’ (by capitalism: the presumption behind the use of the word ‘dispossess’ clearly being that, in the golden age of the remote past, things were better than they were in 1936). A national federation of education would be installed—its mission being specifically to educate humanity to be free, scientific and egalitarian. In addition:

All questions of rewards and penalties will be excluded … The cinema, the radio, the teaching missions … will be excellent and effective aids for a rapid intellectual and moral transformation of the existing generations … Access to arts and sciences will be free.

There would be no distinction between intellectuals and manual workers, since each would be both.

As evolution is a continuous line, [the programme concluded] even though sometimes not always direct, the individual will always have as
pirations … to do better than his parents and his contemporaries; all those anxieties of … creation—artistic, scientific, literary—will not be at all out of place in the free society which would cultivate them … there will be days of general recreation, hours daily for visits to exhibitions, theatres and cinemas.
¹

Communists, socialists and left republicans greeted these aspirations with their usual neglect: the anarchists might be useful to have on the same side as oneself at the barricades, but not at the committee table. But shortly these ideas would be put into practice in thousands of villages and towns.

On 25 May, meantime, General Mola issued a detailed strategic plan.
²
José Antonio entered into correspondence with Mola, a letter being carried to Pamplona by his law clerk, Rafael Garcerán. He did not promise full support as yet, but discussed terms, pledging that 4,000 falangists could help the rising at the start.
³
On 30 May, Sanjurjo gave Mola his blessing to act as coordinator of the conspiracy, on the assumption that he, Sanjurjo, the symbol of victory, would be the head of the new government, and that the Carlists would play a part.
⁴
On 3 June, Mola had his first discussion with a leading Carlist, José Luis Oriol.
⁵
That same day, the director-general of security in Madrid, Alonso Mallol, who knew perfectly well what was afoot, drove up to Pamplona to try to catch Mola red-handed; Mola, warned by his friend, Santiago Martín Bagüeñas, the chief of police in the capital, was able to conceal all evidence of conspiracy.
⁶
On 5 June, when José Antonio was transferred from Madrid to Alicante gaol, Mola circulated a political document, describing how the success of the rising would be followed by a ‘Directory’, comprising a president and four others. All would be officers. They would have the power to issue laws. These would later be ratified by a constituent assembly, elected ‘by suffrage in the manner that shall be deemed most appropriate’. The Cortes and constitution of 1931 would be suspended. Laws not in ac
cord with the ‘new organic system’ would be abolished, and those people who received ‘inspiration from abroad’ would be outlawed. But the Carlists did not agree to the programme, despite a six-hour interview between Mola and Fal Conde in the Navarrese monastery of Irache on 16 June.
¹

Meantime, ideology even affected the bull-fighting season. At Aranjuez, for example, the two
alguacils
galloped into the ring with clenched fists raised. Uproar followed. Every moveable object—cushions, hats, and bottles—was thrown into the ring in protest. The first fight was delayed three-quarters of an hour while the ring was cleared up.
²
There were brawls, with some deaths, between CNT and UGT in Málaga. A British manager of a lace factory was mysteriously murdered in Barcelona. José Antonio by then apparently had accepted the inevitability of a military rising and of the Falange’s part in it. But he did do so less from conviction as from a belief that the Falange would be crushed if it did not side actively with Mola’s organization: in the last issue of the banned falangist journal,
No Importa,
he wrote, ‘Watch the Right. Warning to
madrugadores:
the Falange is not a conservative force.’ A little later, he warned against ‘thinking that the ills of Spain are due to simple rearrangements of internal order and will vanish when power is handed over to … charlatans lacking any historical understanding, any authentic education’.
³
Fewer reserves were felt by Calvo Sotelo. Despite the lack of any concession in Mola’s programme to the monarchy, he told the general that he only desired to know the hour and the day in order to be one more soldier at the army’s orders.
⁴
Gil Robles was not a part of the conspiracy, but he knew of its existence, and some of the CEDA’s funds were later transferred to the use of the plotters.
⁵
By this time, he had convinced himself that the con
tinuing disorder was part of a plan to bring economic collapse as a justification for revolution. His family were already in St Jean de Luz, in France, and he realized that his hour had passed. There is some evidence that he would have liked to have been more a party to the conspiracy than the generals permitted.
¹
Not only, however, were his followers leaving him for the Falange; some did so for Calvo Sotelo.

The years 1929–32 were the period of world depression; a bad time for a government to take power anywhere. True, had it not been for the depression, Primo de Rivera might not have fallen in Spain. But his successors did not act as if they realized the nature of the economic crisis, though they themselves had been borne to power partly by it. Azaña and his ministers behaved as if they thought they were dealing primarily with constitutional or cultural problems. Even the socialist ministers (between 1931 and 1933, Prieto and Largo Caballero were ministers of finance and of labour) did not seem to realize the needs, in a world financial crisis, of the economy. Partly because the ministers were inexperienced, partly because there was doubt about their policies, and partly because no one had money with which to take risks, the Spanish rich and the international financial community were hostile to the republic to begin with. Prieto’s arrival at the ministry of finance led, first, to the withdrawal of a loan from J. P. Morgan, negotiated by his immediate predecessor under the King, Juan Ventosa. The church burnings in May 1931 delayed the reopening of negotiations for it. There was a run on the peseta throughout 1931. Prieto later did his best to protect the currency, negotiating with Russia to buy oil at 18 per cent less than that offered by English and US companies, and insisting on licenses for foreign equipment.
¹

Nevertheless, throughout 1931, Prieto, for all the world as if he were an orthodox governor of the Bank of England, concentrated on trying to stabilize the peseta. His even more orthodox successor as minister of finance, Jaime Carner, did the same. They did prevent the international quotation for the peseta from dropping faster than it had before: the consequence was that, while the international value of the peseta declined by 25 per cent between 1929 and 1931, it only fell a little over 10 per cent in 1932, and remained thereafter stable until 1936. It is arguable that, had it not been for the continuing political uncertainty, the number of strikes, and the threats of revolution from Left and Right, the peseta would have increased its value by 1934. It would seem improbable, at all events, that right-wing or international financial conspiracies can be blamed for the fall of the republic, whatever Juan March might have been doing with his money.

Industry was in these years at a low level for reasons largely out of Spain’s control. The figures are dispiriting: taking 1929 as a base of 100, the index of industrial production was below that in 1935; after the elections of 1936, the index fell to 77. The index of share prices was still more gloomy. Again with 1929 as a base, prices had fallen to 63 in 1935.
¹
The most depressed side of the Spanish economy were the mines: less coal, than other minerals. Coal production certainly fell, though only moderately, from 7 million tons in 1931, to just under 6 in 1934, rallying to 7 in 1935. Spanish coal could not, however, compete with English prices and, if citrus fruit exports were not to suffer, some English coal had regularly to be imported to balance trade. On the other hand, the mining of manganese ore dropped to nearly nothing in 1935; production of pyrites, potash and pig iron fell by over a third between 1930 and 1935; lead, zinc, silver, tungsten and copper by over a half; and iron ore by a quarter. Steel production fell steadily from 1,000,000 tons in 1929 to 580,000 in 1935, not only because of world conditions but because the republic needed less steel than Primo had needed: there was no Moroccan war to service, while the republic, like all governments in the 1930s,
believed in roads, not railway expansion. Some sectors, however, did well during the republic—electric power, from increased development of hydro-electric plants, increased by nearly half between 1926 and 1936. So did building. In truth, most countries (the USA, Britain, France and Germany) had worse problems in the depression than Spain. Thus while Spain’s index of industrial production had dropped over 10 per cent, German and US production dropped nearly 50 per cent in 1932.

The most resilient of ministers in the face of these difficulties was Prieto who, when moved from the ministry of finance to that of public works, devoted much time and investment to dams, irrigation schemes and reforestation, assisting agriculture as well as hydroelectric power. He electrified some railways, began underground central terminals in Barcelona and Madrid, completed Primo’s scheme for a Guadarrama train tunnel, and built many roads. It is easy to imagine how large a part schemes of this nature would have played in any government of the centre which he would have directed.

Agricultural figures were more encouraging in the first years of the republic. Production of wheat, maize and rice either maintained past levels, or even showed an advance. Fish caught off Spanish coasts increased by a third.
¹
The area devoted to production of oranges between 1931 and 1935 was nearly half as much again as it was in 1926, while exports of oranges also rose to a record high figure in the years of the republic—reaching (principally to Britain) over 20 per cent of Spanish exports.
²
(The increase was chiefly due to the decline in other exports, such as wine and olive oil.) Nevertheless, as expected, overall export figures in the middle thirties were only about a quarter of the levels obtained in 1930.

Such figures need to be reckoned against the consistent rise in population—nearly 1 per cent a year—so that conditions were worse for a larger population.
³
100,000 emigrant workers also returned in the
1930s, chiefly from Cuba or South America, and further emigration was impossible.
¹

The economy of Spain was, therefore, marked by mildly declining industrial production, a severe decline in the mines, static or mildly increasing agricultural production and rising population. Prices remained fairly constant: food was cheap in relation to lodging, as were clothes. But political circumstances naturally dominated the consequences. Between 1931 and 1933, for example, wages rose as a result of Largo Caballero’s measures and of a wave of strikes with which the employers felt they had no alternative save to settle, for political reasons.
²
The eventual result after 1933 was layings-off, dismissals, closing of factories—and higher unemployment: indeed, unemployment rose steadily during the republic. Figures are not easy to decide upon; but if, as seems probable, the unemployed numbered 400,000 after the republic had been in existence for nine months in December 1931, they had probably risen to 600,000 by December 1933.
³

The situation changed during the
bienio negro,
the two years of radical, centrist, and CEDA government between late 1933 and early 1936. Employers now had no political anxiety about standing up to wage demands. They had the police, the civil guard and the army behind them, and the workers knew it. So, not only did wages not go up, but they were lowered in many places, without any commensurate drop in prices. The consequence, as has been seen, was the agricultural strike of early 1934, followed by the revolution and general strike of October 1934. Political feelings were thereafter worsened beyond cure, particularly since so many workers’ leaders were imprisoned. But the rate of increase at least in unemployment was lowered. After February 1936, the stock exchange declined, production fell and, this time, the crisis affected agriculture. Landlords and employers found themselves not only raising wages and cutting working hours but, par
ticularly in the country, as has been seen, yielding to demands for labour not only from those sacked between 1933 and 1936, and from those who had been in gaol, but from those who had never had jobs. Even so, unemployment still rose—in June 1936 reaching 800,000. It can easily be imagined how many of these must have sought to be embraced, if not fed, by one or other of the paramilitary organizations. Indeed, the ‘little civil war’, as the events between February and July 1936 has been not unfairly described, might be interpreted as having many characteristics of a raid by unemployed
pistoleros,
of both sides of the political spectrum, on the lives and possessions of the salaried.

The hatreds caused since 1934, the combination of falling production, high wages (obtained by intimidation), the collapse of business confidence, and rising unemployment left the country with only three alternatives: revolution, counter-revolution, or civil war. Gil Robles and Azaña now seemed irrelevant. In the first half of 1936, only Calvo Sotelo and Largo Caballero had any solution to offer: both had collaborated with democratic politics, both had served Primo de Rivera, both now offered authoritarian policies. The momentum in one direction or the other was difficult for men of the centre to withstand.

The twentieth century had admittedly seen an astonishing reawakening of the Spanish spirit: the political volatility of the years between 1898 and 1936, and most intensely between 1931 and 1936, was the expression of a vitality which extended through most spheres of national life. The first part of the twentieth century was richer in artistic achievement, for example, than any since the seventeenth century. The most famous names, Picasso, Dalí and Miró; García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado; Pío Baroja, Buñuel, de Falla, Casals, Unamuno and Ortega—these mark only the peaks of a brilliant period. Spain, in the early twentieth century, was certainly coming out from her long decline. This renaissance was to be seen on the Right as well as on the Left, in education as in art. The harmonious rationalism of the Free Institute of Education was complemented by an already reviving Catholicism. Catalan and Basque nationalism were political expressions of both economic and cultural renaissance. The anarchist movement, which continued to grow in numbers until the 1930s, proved that the working classes had also been awakened. The
intellectual revival was reflected in a vigorous press: not only every party but every shade of opinion had its own newspaper and often a journal or two as well. Alas, the clash of those, and other, regeneratory hopes could not be contained within the old structures. Thus the midsummer of 1936 saw not only the completion of Lorca’s masterpiece
The House of Bernarda Alba,
but the culmination of a hundred and fifty years of passionate quarrels in Spain.

In 1808, the old monarchy had collapsed and, from 1834, war was waged for five years over the question of a liberal constitution. In 1868, a corrupt monarchy was expelled by the army, and the country dissolved into a conflict which was at once religious and regional, while new working-class organizations were founded by the representatives of Bakunin. In 1898, the Spanish American War brought back the over-large army from the last colonies to unemployed frustration in Spain, surrounded by innumerable reminders of past glory, while a valiant group of middle-class young men sought to prepare the intellectual renaissance of the country by ‘placing a padlock on the Cid’s tomb’.
¹
In 1909, class hatred, exacerbated by both Catalan nationalism and anti-militarism, brought a week of bloody rioting in Barcelona, which vented itself in particular against the church. In 1917, a revolutionary general strike was crushed by an itself half-insurrectionary army, while the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, established in 1923 after five years of semi–civil war in Barcelona, was the government which gave the country its longest rest from political murders, strikes, and sterile intrigues. The ‘liberals’, whose protests brought the expulsion of both the dictator, in 1930, and the King, in 1931, proved unable to create a democratic habit powerful enough to satisfy the aspirations of either the working, or the old governing, classes, while the new rulers themselves mortally angered the latter, when not strong enough as well as not radical enough to please the former. In 1932, a section of the Right attempted to overcome their electoral defeat by a
pronunciamiento
in the old style, while, in 1934, a part of the Left, after their own reverse at the polling stations, impelled by their own impatience, as well as by continent-wide fears of fascism, also staged a re
volt, which, in Asturias, temporarily established a working-class dictatorship. In February 1936, the two sides which by then had taken shape, and which both referred to themselves by the ominously military word ‘front’, put their quarrels again to the voters. The narrow victory of the Popular Front over the National Front had brought in a weak if progressive ministry, regarded by its own socialist and communist supporters as the precursor of far-reaching social change. Most of the leading men of Spain in 1936 had lived through a generation of turbulence, and many of them, such as Largo Caballero, Calvo Sotelo, and Sanjurjo, had played important, if equivocal, roles throughout (Largo had served Primo de Rivera, Sanjurjo had deserted the King). Now the old masters of economic power, led by the army, and generally supported by the church, that embodiment of Spain’s past glory, believed that they were about to be overwhelmed. Opposed to them were the ‘professors’—the enlightened middle class—and most of the labour force of the country, maddened by years of insult, misery, and neglect, intoxicated by the knowledge of the better conditions enjoyed by their class comrades in France and Britain and by the mastery which they supposed that the working class had gained in Russia. The Left were frightened by fascism, the Right by communism. The Right supposed, too, that, unless they proceeded to a counter-revolution, they would be smashed by revolution. The anarchists meanwhile had been in a state of war with society for a generation; and the government’s response had been that of a desperate wartime administration, scarcely that of a government at peace. The situation was summed up sharply if haughtily by the French military attaché, Colonel Morell, some months later:

A parasitical aristocracy, a bourgeoisie little concerned with the public good, a people without leaders. The prestige of the clergy vanished, the system of
caciquismo
enfeebled, the populace has been the prey to agitators and politicians. The bourgeoisie menaced by revolution has, by conviction, or calculation, taken up the cause of rebellion.
¹