The Spanish Holocaust (17 page)

Salazar Alonso opposed those in the cabinet who favoured a compromise solution. Both the Left Republicans and many Socialists regarded Catalonia as the last remaining outpost of the ‘authentic’ Republic. The anti-Catalan statements being uttered by the CEDA left little doubt that Catalan autonomy would be under threat if the CEDA joined the government. Gil Robles spoke provocatively at an assembly organized by the Catalan landowners’ federation in Madrid on 8 September. The assembly, like others held by the CEDA’s agrarian financiers, argued for a restriction of union rights, the strengthening of the forces of authority and, more specifically, the crushing of the Generalitat’s ‘rebellion’.
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On the following day, the Juventud de Acción Popular held a fascist-style rally at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of the battle in 722 considered to be the starting point for the long campaign to reconquer Spain from the Moors. The choice of venue symbolically associated the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and identified the working class with the Moorish invaders. Local Socialists declared a general strike and tried to block the roads to Covadonga, but the Civil Guard ensured that the rally went ahead as planned. The leader of the Asturian branch of Acción Popular, the retired army officer José María Fernández Ladreda, cited the reconquest of Spain as he introduced Gil Robles, who
spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque nationalists.
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The wily Gil Robles knew only too well that such language, threatening key achievements of the Republican–Socialist coalition of 1931–3, would confirm the left in its determination to prevent the CEDA coming to power.

Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation.

Later that evening, Salazar Alonso wrote once more to his lover Amparo recounting what had happened earlier in the day. He made it clear that he thought the CEDA should join the government and that his objective was to provoke a reaction by the left precisely in order to smash it.

I explained the revolutionaries’ plan. I examined the Catalan question, pointing out objectively and honestly all the circumstances, the possibilities and the consequences of our decisions … The situation is serious. I couldn’t permit any action that was thoughtless or not properly prepared. I had to consider what was necessary to justify declaring martial law … The Government, opposed by the revolutionary left, lacks the backing of the parliamentary group [the CEDA] on whose votes it relies … Was this the Government with the authority to provoke the definitive revolutionary movement?
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In his published account of his role, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was no less than that of starting the counter-revolutionary offensive to proceed with a work of decisive government to put an end to the evil.’ He aimed not just to smash the immediate revolutionary bid but to ensure that the left did not rise again.
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Not long afterwards, Gil Robles admitted that he was aware of and indeed shared Salazar Alonso’s provocative intentions. He knew that the Socialists were committed to reacting violently to what they believed would be an attempt to establish a Dollfuss-type regime. He too was fully aware that the chances of revolutionary success were remote.
Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.
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The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, eventually came around to the point of view of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. At the end of September, he organized large-scale army manoeuvres in León, in an area contiguous, and of similar terrain, to Asturias, where he suspected the revolutionary bid would take place.
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When the cabinet discussed cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo argued that they were necessary precisely because of the imminent revolutionary threat. Certainly, once the revolutionary strike did break out in Asturias in early October, the astonishing speed with which the Spanish Foreign Legion was transported from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem. As Hidalgo later admitted in the Cortes, three days before the manoeuvres started, he had ordered the Regiment No. 3 from Oviedo not to take part and to remain in the Asturian capital because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.
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In any case, Gil Robles had secured confidential assurances from senior military figures that the army could crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.
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On 26 September, Gil Robles made his move with a communiqué stating that, in view of the present cabinet’s ‘weakness’ regarding social problems, and irrespective of the consequences, a strong government with CEDA participation had to be formed. In a sinuous speech in the Cortes on 1 October, claiming to be motivated by a desire for national stability he introduced an unmistakable threat: ‘we are conscious of our strength both here and elsewhere’. After the inevitable resignation of the cabinet, President Alcalá Zamora entrusted Lerroux with the task of forming a government, acknowledging the inevitability of CEDA participation, but hoping that it would be limited to one ministry. Gil Robles insisted on three in the knowledge that this would incite Socialist outrage.
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Gil Robles’s provocation was carefully calibrated. His three choices for the cabinet announced on 4 October were José Oriol y Anguera de Sojo (Labour), Rafael Aizpún (Justice) and Manuel Giménez Fernández (Agriculture). Anguera de Sojo was an integrist Catholic (his mother was being considered by the Vatican for canonization), an expert on canon law and lawyer for the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat. He had been the public prosecutor responsible for a hundred confiscations and numerous fines suffered by
El Socialista
. Moreover, as a Catalan rightist, he was a bitter enemy of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the ruling party in the Generalitat. As a hard-line civil governor of Barcelona in 1931, his uncompromising strike-breaking policies had accelerated the CNT move to insurrectionism. The choice of Anguera could hardly have been more offensive. The Esquerra sent a deputation to see Alcalá Zamora and plead for his exclusion. Gil Robles refused point-blank the President’s suggestions.
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Aizpún, CEDA deputy for Pamplona, was close to the Carlists. Giménez Fernández, as deputy for Badajoz, was inevitably assumed to be as faithful a representative of the aggressive landlords of that province as Salazar Alonso had been and likely, as Minister of Agriculture, to intensify the awful repression that had followed the harvest strike. The suppositions about the Minister were wrong, since he was a moderate Christian Democrat, but those about the Badajoz landlords were right. Because of his relatively liberal policies, Giménez Fernández was rejected as a candidate for Badajoz in the 1936 elections and was forced to run in Segovia.
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The Socialists had every reason to fear that the new cabinet would implement Salazar Alonso’s determination to impose reactionary rule. After all, on 222 of the 315 days of Radical government until the end of July, the country had been declared to be in a state of emergency, which meant the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Sixty of the ninety-three days on which there was constitutional normality had been during the electoral period of late 1933. Press censorship, fines and seizures of newspapers, limitation of the freedom of association, declaration of the illegality of almost all strikes, protection for fascist and monarchist activities, reduction of wages and the removal of freely elected Socialist town councils were seen as the establishment of a ‘regime of white terror’. These were the policies that Gil Robles, in his speech of 1 October, had denounced as weak. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he intended to impose more repressive ones.
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In the last few days of September, still hoping to persuade the President to resolve the crisis by calling elections, the Socialist press had resorted
to desperate – and empty – threats.
El Socialista
implied that preparation for the revolutionary action was well advanced: ‘We have our army waiting to be mobilized, and our international plans and our plans for socialism.’
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At the end of the month, the paper’s editorial asked rhetorically: ‘Will it be necessary for us to say now, stating the obvious, that any backward step, any attempt to return to outmoded policies will inevitably face the resistance of the Socialists?’
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Clearly, Julián Zugazagoitia, the thoughtful director of
El Socialista
, knew full well that the Socialist movement was utterly unprepared for a revolutionary confrontation with the state. If his editorials were not senseless irresponsibility – and Zugazagoitia, a faithful supporter of Prieto, was no extremist – they have to be seen as a last-ditch threat to the President.

Largo Caballero’s revolutionary committee made no preparations for the seizure of power and the ‘revolutionary militias’ had neither national leadership nor local organization. He placed his hopes on revolutionary bluster ensuring that Alcalá Zamora would not invite the CEDA into the government. Just before midnight on 3 October, when news reached the committee that a government was being formed with CEDA participation, Largo Caballero refused to believe it and ordered that no action be taken to start the movement. Even once the truth of the news could no longer be ignored, only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that there was no choice and the threatened revolution had to be launched.
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Throughout 1934, the leaders of the PSOE and the CEDA had engaged in a war of manoeuvre. Gil Robles, with the support of Salazar Alonso, had enjoyed the stronger position and he had exploited it with skill and patience. The Socialists were forced by their relative weakness to resort to vacuous threats of revolution and were finally manoeuvred into a position in which they had to implement them. The results were catastrophic.

After defeat in strike after strike in the first nine months of 1934, Socialist intentions in the events that began on the morning of 4 October 1934 were necessarily limited. The objective was to defend the concept of the Republic developed between 1931 and 1933 against the authoritarian ambitions of the CEDA. The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet was followed by the existence for ten hours of an independent Catalan Republic; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its
half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.
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To allow the President time to change his mind, on 4 October the UGT leadership gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a peaceful general strike in Madrid. Anarchist and Trotskyist offers of participation in a revolutionary bid were brusquely rebuffed. Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or went into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests were the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.
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In Catalonia, where anarchists and other left-wing groups collaborated with the Socialists in the Workers’ Alliance, events were rather more dramatic. Many of the local committees took over their villages and then waited for instructions from Barcelona, which never came.
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In the Catalan capital, ill prepared and reluctant, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’ in protest against what was seen as the betrayal of the Republic. The motives behind his heroic gesture were complex and contradictory. He was certainly alarmed by developments in Madrid. He was also being pressured by extreme Catalan nationalists to meet popular demand for action against the central government. At the same time, he wanted to forestall revolution. Accordingly, he did not mobilize the Generalitat’s own forces against General Domingo Batet, the commander of military forces in Catalonia. The working class had also been denied arms. Accordingly, Batet, after trundling artillery through the narrow streets, was able to negotiate the surrender of the Generalitat after only ten
hours of independence, in the early hours of 7 October.
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The right in general, and Franco in particular, never forgave Batet for failing to make a bloody example of the Catalans.
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