A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ at peace with the system, the Army was happy to defend it in August 1917 by crushing the striking Socialists with considerable bloodshed. Alarmed by the prospect of militant workers in the streets, the industrialists dropped their own demands for political reform and, lured by promises of economic modernisation, joined in a national coalition government in 1918 with both Liberals and Conservatives. Yet again the industrial bourgeoisie had abandoned its political aspirations and allied with the landed oligarchy out of a fear of the lower classes. Short-lived though it was to be, the coalition symbolised the slightly improved position of industrialists in a reactionary alliance still dominated by the landed interest.

      By 1917, Spain was divided more starkly even than before into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the small-holding peasantry. Significantly, in the years before and during the First World War, efforts were made to mobilize Catholic farmers in defence of big landholding interests. With anarchism and Socialism making headway among the urban workers, the more far-sighted landowners were anxious to stop the spread of the poison to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary syndicates were financed by landlords from 1906 but the process was systematized after 1912 by a group of dynamic social Catholics led by Angel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain before 1936. Through his organization of determined social Christian activists, the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, Herrera helped set up a series of provincial Catholic Agrarian Federations which tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery in return for their adoption of virulent anti-socialism. Many of those recruited were to play an important role when the landed oligarchy was forced to seek more modern forms of defence in the 1930s first by voting for the legalist parties of the right during the Second Republic and later by fighting for Franco.

      In the aftermath of the crisis of 1917, however, the existing order survived in part because of the organisational naïvety of the left and even more because of its own ready recourse to armed repression. The defeat of the urban Socialists in 1917 did not mark the end of the assault on the system. Between 1918 and 1921, three years known as the trienio bolcbevique, the anarchist day-labourers of the south took part in a series of risings. Eventually put down by a combination of the Civil Guard and the army, the strikes and land seizures of these years intensified the social resentments of the rural south. At the same time, urban anarchists were also coming into conflict with the system. Northern industrialists, having failed to invest their war profits in modern plant and rationalisation, were badly hit by the postwar resurgence of foreign competition. The Catalans in particular tried to ride the recession with wage cuts and lay-offs. They countered the consequent strikes with lock-outs and hired gunmen. The anarchists retaliated in kind and, from 1919 to 1921, the streets of Barcelona witnessed a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals. It was obvious that Restoration politics were no longer an adequate mechanism for defending the economic interests of the ruling classes.

      On 23 September 1923, a coup d’etat was carried out by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Ostensibly, Primo came to power to put an end to disorder and to prevent an embarrassing report by a parliamentary commission causing discomfort to the King. However, as Captain-General of Barcelona and intimate of the Catalan textile barons, Primo was fully aware of the anarchist threat to them. Moreover, coming from a large landowning family in the south, he also had experience of the peasant risings of 1918–21. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the coalition of industrialists and landowners which had been consolidated during the great crisis of 191 7. Initially, his dictatorship had two great advantages – a general revulsion against the chaos of the previous six years and an upturn in the European economy. He outlawed the anarchist movement and made a deal with the UGT whereby it was given a monopoly of trade union affairs. A massive public works programme, which involved a significant modernising of Spanish capitalism and the building of a communications infrastructure that would bear fruit only thirty years later, gave the impression that liberty was being traded in for prosperity.

      The Primo de Rivera dictatorship was to be regarded in later years as a golden age by the Spanish middle classes and became a central myth of the reactionary right. Paradoxically, however, its short-term effect was to discredit the very idea of authoritarianism in Spain. This fleeting phenomenon was born partly of Primo’s failure to use the economic breathing space to construct a lasting political replacement for the decrepit constitutional monarchy, but more immediately it sprang from his alienation of the powerful interests which had originally supported him. A genial eccentric with a Falstaffian approach to political life, he governed by a form of personal improvisation which ensured that he bore the blame for his regime’s failures. Although by 1930 there was hardly a section of Spanish society that he had not offended, his most crucial errors led to the estrangement of industrialists, landowners and the army. Attempts to standardise promotion machinery outraged army officers. The Catalan bourgeoisie was antagonised by an offensive against regionalist aspirations. Northern industrialists were even more enraged by the collapse of the peseta in 1928, which they attributed to his inflationary public spending. Perhaps most importantly, the support of Primo’s fellow landowners was lost when efforts were made to introduce arbitration committees for wages and working conditions into rural areas. At the end of January 1930, Primo resigned.

      There was no question of a return to the pre-1923 political system. Apart from the fact that it had fallen into disrepute by the time that Primo seized power, significant changes had taken place in the attitudes of its personnel. Among the senior politicians, death, old age and, above all, resentment of the King’s cavalier abandonment of the constitution in 1923 had each taken their toll. Of the younger men, some had opted for the republican movement, partly out of pique, partly out of a conviction that the political future lay in that direction. Others, especially those Conservatives who had followed the authoritarian implications of ‘Regenerationism’ to the logical extreme, had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the service of the dictator. For them, there could be no going back. Their experiences under Primo had left them entrenched in the view that the only feasible solution to the problems faced by the right was a military monarchy. They would form the general staff of the extreme right in the Second Republic and were to provide much of the ideological content of the Franco regime.

      In desperation, therefore, Alfonso XIII turned to another general, Dámaso Berenguer. His mild dictatorship floundered in search of a formula for a return to constitutional monarchy but was undermined by republican plots, working-class agitation and military sedition. When he held municipal elections on 12 April 1931, Socialists and liberal middle class republicans swept the board in the main towns while monarchists won only in the rural areas where the social domination of the local bosses, or caciques, remained intact. Faced by the questionable loyalty of both army and Civil Guard, the King took the advice of his counsellors to depart gracefully before he was thrown out by force. The attitude of the military reflected the hope of a significant section of the upper classes that by sacrificing the King it would be possible to contain the desires for change of both the progressive bourgeoisie and the left. That was to be an impossible ambition without some concessions in the area of land reform.

      The conflicts of the trienio bolchevique had been silenced by repression in 1919–20 and by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but they continued to smoulder. The violence of those years had ended the uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression had intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and their estate managers. By the same token, the landlords were outraged by insubordinate behaviour of the day-labourers whom they considered to be almost subhuman. Accordingly, the elements of paternalism which had previously mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros’ lives came to an abrupt end. The gathering of windfall crops, or the watering of beasts, even the collection of firewood were deemed to be ‘collective kleptomania’ and were prevented by the vigilance of armed guards. In consequence, the new Republic was to inherit a situation of sporadic social war in the south which was dramatically to diminish its possibilities of establishing a regime of co-existence. Nevertheless, with goodwill on both СКАЧАТЬ