A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ and ‘catastrophist’. The ‘accidentalists’ took the view that forms of government, republican or monarchical, were ‘accidental’ as opposed to fundamental. What really mattered was the social content of a regime. Thus, inspired by Angel Herrera, the leader of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, the ‘accidentalists’ adopted a legalist tactic. Under a dynamic leader, the ACNP stalwart, José María Gil Robles, the old Catholic Agrarian Federations were forged into an organization called Acción Popular. Its few elected deputies used every possible device to block reform in the parliament or Cortes. Massive and extraordinarily skilful efforts of propaganda were made to persuade the small-holding farmers of northern and central Spain that the agrarian reforms of the Republic damaged their interests every bit as much as those of the big landowners. The Republic was presented to the conservative Catholic small-holders as a Godless, rabble-rousing instrument of Soviet Communism poised to steal their lands and dragoon their wives and daughters into an orgy of obligatory free love. With their votes thereby assured, by 1933 the legalist right was to wrest political power back from the left.

      At the same time, the various ‘catastrophist’ groups were fundamentally opposed to the Republic and believed that it should be overthrown by some great catastrophic explosion or uprising. It was their view which was to prevail in 1936, although it should not be forgotten that the contribution of the ‘accidentalists’ in stirring up anti-Republicanism among the small-holding peasantry was crucial for Franco’s war effort. There were three principal ‘catastrophist’ organizations. The oldest was the Traditionalist Communion of the Carlists, anti-modern advocates of a theocracy to be ruled on earth by warrior priests. Antiquated though its ideas were, it was well supplied with supporters among the farmers of Navarre and had a fanatical militia called the Requete which, between 1934 and 1936, was to receive training in Mussolini’s Italy. The best financed and ultimately the most influential of the ‘catastrophists’ were the one-time supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. These Alfonsine monarchists, with their journal Acción Española and their political party Renovación Española, were the general staff and the paymasters of the extreme right. Both the rising of 1936 and the structure and ideology of the Francoist state owed an enormous amount to the Alfonsines. Finally, there were a number of unashamed fascist groups, which finally coalesced between 1933 and 1934 under the leadership of the Dictator’s son, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as Falange Española. Also subsidized by Mussolini, the rank-and-file Falangists supplied the cannon-fodder of the ‘catastrophist’ option, attacking the left and provoking the street fights which permitted other groups to denounce the ‘disorder’ of the Republic.

      Among the Republic’s enemies two of the most powerful were the Church and the Army. Both were to be easily drawn into the anti-Republican right, in part because of errors made by the Republic’s politicians. On 7 May, the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura, declared war on the Republic in a pastoral letter calling on Catholics to take up arms against the destroyers of religion. This did nothing to soften the Republican view that the Church was the bulwark of black reaction. Thus, on May 11, when a rash of Church burning spread through Madrid, Malaga, Seville, Cadiz and Alicante, the cabinet refused to call out the Civil Guard. Manuel Azaña, the immensely talented left Republican Minister of War, proclaimed that ‘all the convents in Madrid are not worth the life of one Republican’, a phrase which was exploited by the rightist press to persuade its middle class readership that Azaña somehow approved of the actual burnings. On May 22, full religious liberty was declared. The monarchist daily ABC and the Catholic El Debate howled abuse and were briefly closed down by the government.

      Several issues were to cause friction between the Republic and the Armed Forces but none more than the new regime’s readiness to concede regional autonomy. On 14 April, Colonel Macià, the leader of the Catalan Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia), declared an independent Catalan republic. A deputation from Madrid persuaded him to await government action by promising a rapid statute of autonomy. Inevitably, this aroused the suspicions of the Army which had shed so much blood in the fight against Catalan separatism. To make matters worse, the Minister of War, Azaña, began in May to prepare reforms to cut down the inflated officer corps and to make the Army more efficient. It was thereby hoped to reduce the political ambitions of the Armed Forces. It was a necessary reform and, in many respects, a generous one, since the 8,000 surplus officers were retired on full pay. However, military sensibilities were inflamed by the insensitivity with which various aspects of the reforms were implemented. Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 for the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) reopened some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars. Many distinguished right-wing generals including Francisco Franco faced the prospect of being reduced to the rank of colonel. The commission carrying out the revision took more than eighteen months to report, causing unnecessary anxiety for the nearly one thousand officers affected, of whom only half had their cases examined. On 30 June 1931, Azaña closed the General Military Academy in Zaragoza for budgetary reasons and because he believed it to be a hot-bed of reactionary militarism. This guaranteed Azaña the eternal enmity of its Director, General Franco.

      Since Azaña’s reforms involved the abolition of the Army’s jurisdictions over civilians thought to have insulted it, many officers regarded them as a savage attack. Those that were retired, having refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic, were left with the leisure to plot against the regime. This was encouraged by the conservative newspapers read by most Army officers, ABC, La Época and La Correspondencia Militar, which presented the Republic as responsible for the economic depression, for the breakdown of law-and-order, disrespect for the Army and anticlericalism. In particular, a campaign was mounted alleging that Azaña’s intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the Army). Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. In fact, far from depriving the Army of funds and equipment, Azaña, who had made a life-time study of civil-military relations, merely ensured that the military budget would be used more efficaciously. If anything, Azaña tended to be punctilious in his treatment of a shambolic and inefficient force which compared poorly with the armies of countries like Portugal or Rumania. Ironically, the military readiness of the Spanish Army in 1936 owed as much to the efforts of Azaña as to those of his successor, the rightist José María Gil Robles. Azaña was converted by the rightist propaganda machine into the bogey of the military because he wanted to provide Spain with a non-political Army. For the right, the Army existed above all to defend their social and economic interests. Azaña therefore was presented as a corrupt monster, determined to destroy the Army, as he was allegedly determined to destroy the Church, because it was part of the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy to do so. Curiously, he had a much higher regard for military procedures than his predecessor General Primo de Rivera. A general who presumed to ‘interpret the widespread feeling of the nation’ to Azaña was told forthrightly that ‘Your job is merely to interpret regulations’. That was not how Spanish generals expected to be treated by civilians.

      The first major political contest of the Republic had taken place before the right was properly organized. The June 1931 elections were won by the Socialists in coalition with the left Republicans. Republicanism tended to be a movement of intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie, more an amorphous improvised grouping than a united left-wing force. The only centre grouping, the Radicals, had, on the other hand, started out as a genuine mass movement in Barcelona in the early years of the century. Led by the fiery orator, and corrupt machine politician Alejandro Lerroux, the Radicals were to become progressively more conservative and anti-Socialist as the Republic developed. They did immense damage to the Republic by their readiness to opt for the winning side at any given time. The polarization brought about by the pendulum effect of a big left-wing victory in the 1931 elections followed by an equally dramatic rightist triumph in 1933 was greatly intensified by the fact that the Radicals had changed sides.

      The centrifugal dynamic of Republican politics was in itself the inadvertent consequence of a set of electoral regulations which were drawn up in such a way as to avoid the political fragmentation of the Weimar Republic. To ensure strong government majorities, in any given province, 80 per cent of the seats were given to the party or list СКАЧАТЬ