The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (11 page)

Azaña proceeded to assemble a cabinet with members of his own party and that of the Unión Republicana. He did not consider including a single socialist in his government. In any case, Largo Caballero vetoed the participation of the socialist party (PSOE) in the new administration to prevent Prieto forming a social-democratic alliance with the Left Republicans.

Despite the moderate basis of the new cabinet, the right reacted as if the bolsheviks had taken over the government. They were appalled by the rush of people into the streets to celebrate their victory and marching to the prisons to release prisoners before any amnesty decree had been announced. The Church warned that the enemies of Catholicism, ‘under the influence and direction of the Judaeo-Masonic world conspiracy, are declaring a war to the finish against us’.
²⁰
The right had decided that to safeguard its idea of Spain, the parliamentary road was no longer an option, if only because their opponents on the left had already demonstrated their own willingness to ignore the rule of law.

On 20 February the first council of ministers of Azaña’s government met after he had addressed the nation on the radio. Azaña spoke of justice, liberty and the validity of the constitution. He would undertake, with the approval of the Cortes, ‘a great work of national restoration in defence of work and production, encouraging public works, and paying attention to the problems of unemployment and all the other points which had motivated the coalition of the republican and proletarian parties which is now in power’.
²¹

Among the many problems which faced his government, perhaps the most urgent was the proclamation of an amnesty, following prison riots in Burgos, Cartagena and Valencia. The government could not wait until the Cortes was assembled. On 23 February it re-established the Generalitat of Catalonia and also the socialist councils suspended throughout Spain after the revolution of October 1934. At the same time Azaña embarked on a reorganization of the army command, appointing generals loyal to the Republic to key posts and sending those suspected of plotting to appointments far from Madrid.

The government then reanimated the work of the Instituto de Reforma Agraria, with the minister of agriculture himself, Mariano Ruiz Funes, overseeing the process in Andalucia and Extremadura. The president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, left the prison of Puerto de Santa Maria and was welcomed in Barcelona by an enormous demonstration as he reopened the Catalan parliament. On 16 March Azaña announced that the confiscation of land belonging to aristocrats involved in the Sanjurjo rising would be reactivated. And all those workers who lost their jobs as a result of participating in the October revolution would be reinstated.

The economic situation was not good. Since 1931 private investment had plummeted and in 1936 it dropped to the level of 1913. Not surprisingly, with the new government’s programme, capital left the country at an increasing rate. Juan March, the Mallorcan multimillionaire, who had amassed an enormous fortune through tobacco smuggling, fled Spain to avoid prison. Once out of the country, he concentrated on speculating against the peseta on the foreign exchange markets. From his own pocket he provided a tenth of the twenty million pesetas collected by the anti-republican group of whom the Count de los Andes was the president.
²²

Far more serious than March’s financial chicanery were the economic consequences of the left’s electoral victory. Workers put in huge wage demands, far beyond what the factory or farm could sustain. Strikes multiplied, unemployment rose and the value of the peseta fell sharply on the foreign exchanges. The real problem facing the centre-left government of Azaña was the result of its Faustian pact with the hard left of
caballeristas
, who saw it as the equivalent of the Kerensky regime in Russia, a view shared by the right. This liberal government found that it had no influence on its electoral allies, now set upon a revolutionary course, and could not persuade their followers to obey the law. Luis Araquistaín, the editor of
Claridad
and the voice of the bolshevizing tendency within the socialists and UGT, had argued during the election campaign that Spain, like Russia in 1917, was ready for revolution. He had rejected the earlier warnings of Julián Besteiro, the former leader of the UGT, that revolutionary activities such as factory occupations simply horrified the middle class and destroyed the economy. Each left-wing organization began to form its own militia–the communists’ was the most disciplined and effective. And an unprecedented number of people went around armed, ready to defend themselves from the attacks of opponents. The general impression of a breakdown of law and order played straight into the hands of the undemocratic right. The right-wing press blamed the disorders on the left, while the left blamed the right. The right insisted that democracy was not working and that the Cortes had become useless. Women from the middle and upper classes insulted officers in the streets, telling them that they were cowards for not overthrowing the government.

No group on the right did more to cause disorder, and thus to provoke a military coup, than the Falange. It was subsidized from a number of sources–10,000 pesetas monthly from Renovación Española, money from the Banco de Vizcaya, and later from Juan March, and 50,000 pesetas a month from Mussolini passed through the Italian embassy in Paris.
²³
The Nazis, however, had little confidence in them and refused them the million marks of support which they had requested. The Falange needed the money because it was growing at an astonishing rate, largely due to an influx from the youth movement of Acción Popular–some 15,000 of them in the spring of 1936, effectively doubling the size of the Falange to 30,000.
²⁴

The Falange Española, or Spanish Phalanx, had been born in the Comedy Theatre in Madrid on 29 October 1933. It was founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the elder son of the dictator, a young lawyer of dark good looks and supposedly great charm. He attracted a coterie of fascist intellectuals and appealed to students, especially those from wealthy families, the
señoritos
, as well as many from the lower middle class who felt threatened by social change. The Falange had also been joined by former members of his father’s Patriotic Union from a decade before, as well as frustrated monarchists and conservatives appalled by the electoral victory of the left.

Falangism differed from Nazism and fascism in its profoundly conservative nature. Mussolini used Roman symbols and imperial imagery in his speeches merely for their propaganda effect. The Falange, on the other hand, used modern and revolutionary phraseology while remaining fundamentally reactionary. The Church was the essence of
Hispanidad
(Spanishness). The new state would ‘draw its inspiration from the spirit of the Catholic religion which is traditional in Spain’. Their symbols were those of Ferdinand and Isabella: the yoke of the authoritarian state and the arrows of annihilation to wipe out heresy. They did not just borrow the symbols, but tried to revive the Castilian mentality. The ideal Falangist was supposed to be ‘half-monk, half-soldier’.

Yet the movement suffered from something of a split personality between the nationalist and the socialist elements. José Antonio attacked ‘the social bankruptcy of capitalism’ and denounced the living conditions of workers and peasants. Yet Marxism he found repugnant as an ideology, because it was not Spanish and because a class struggle weakened the nation. The country had to be united in a system in which the employer could not exploit the employee. At one moment José Antonio was making vain approaches, first to the socialist Prieto, then to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The next, he was reminding Franco of Oswald Spengler’s remark that in the last resort civilization had always been saved by a platoon of soldiers. But a civilization which has to be saved by soldiers is a conservative’s image of a perfect world, rather than that of a revolutionary national socialist.

The Falange constantly sought more firearms for their street fighting and José Antonio put in motion a Bulldog Drummond-style intrigue. Luis Bolín, the London correspondent of the monarchist
ABC
, met a prominent but anonymous Englishman by a secret recognition signal in Claridge’s Hotel. They arranged for large quantities of submachine-guns to be packed in champagne cases and shipped from Germany in a private yacht. In fact, they did not arrive in time, but it was not long before Bolínin London began to organize a far more important delivery.

The Falange, however, already had weapons from other sources. On 10 March a Falangist squad led by Alberto Ortega tried to assassinate Professor Luis Jiménez de Asúa, a socialist deputy, but instead killed his police escort. Four days later Falangists made an attempt on Largo Caballero’s life. That same day, 14 March, José Antonio met Franco in the house of the general’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, to discuss a joint plan of action. The following day the Falange was outlawed by the government because of the attack on Largo Caballero and José Antonio was arrested for the illegal possession of arms. It is difficult to reconcile José Antonio’s famous charm with the brutality of his followers and the outspoken racism of his coterie at their dinner-jacketed gatherings in the Hotel Paris. He cannot, in any case, escape responsibility, because his speeches were a clear incitement, even if violence remained an abstract quantity to the fastidious Andalucian.

The ideal of defending traditional Spain required active preparation, now that the authoritarian right had discarded any further attempt to make use of the parliamentary system. In the Pyrenees the Carlists had started to arm and train their
requeté
militia, famous since the Carlist wars in the nineteenth century for its uniform of a Basque beret in bright red.

The Carlist movement was purely arch-conservative. Its official title was the Traditionalist Communion and it has been described as a form of lay Jesuitry. It believed that a ‘judaeo-marxist-masonic’ conspiracy was going to turn Spain into a colony of the Soviet Union.
²⁵
Liberalism, in the view of Carlists as well as the Church hierarchy, was the source of all modern evils, and they dreamed of reviving a royal Catholic autocracy in a populist form. The main Carlist strength lay in the Pyrenees, though they did have supporters in a number of other areas, such as Andalucia. The Carlists no longer showed their former sympathy with regionalist aspirations. This had stemmed from their stronghold being in the former kingdom of Navarre and had also been a means of winning Basque and Catalan support for the Carlist wars in the nineteenth century. By 1936 they had come to detest Basque and Catalan nationalism.

A number of Carlist officers were trained in Italy with the help of Mussolini, while their leaders, Fal Conde and the Count of Rodezno, organized the purchase of weapons from Germany. The strength of the
requetés
is hard to calculate exactly, but there were probably more than 8,000 members in Navarre alone early in 1936. A figure of 30,000 for the whole country has been suggested. One of their backers, José Luis Oriol, organized a ship from Belgium which brought 6,000 rifles, 150 heavy machine-guns, 300 light machine-guns, five million rounds of ammunition and 10,000 hand grenades.
²⁶

In the spring of 1936 the Carlists’ Supreme Military Council was set up in Saint Jean de Luz, just over the French frontier, by Prince Javier de Borbón-Parma and Fal Conde. It was composed of former officers and began to plan a rising in conjunction with the right-wing Unión Militar Española, a secret association of right-wing officers within the army, with Alfonsine monarchists and the Falange. Their contact was Colonel José Varela (later one of Franco’s most important field commanders) who had earlier been training the Carlist
requetés
secretly in the Pyrenees mountains. So far only the vaguest rumours of these preparations had reached Azaña’s government in Madrid.

The Fatal Paradox

P
olitical turmoil in the spring of 1936 created an uncertainty which paralysed industry and finance. Although imports had fallen, Spain’s principal exports–oranges, almonds, wine and oil, had fallen much further.
¹
The fact that the country’s balance of payments depended upon agrarian produce at the very time when agrarian reform represented one of the most bitterly divisive issues, did not of course help. Landowners, faced with worldwide price deflation and four months of almost constant rain in western and southern Spain, were trying to maintain a profit margin just when desperately underprivileged labourers were demanding better living standards. The bill for decades, if not centuries, of social, technological and political immobilism was being presented at the worst possible moment.

The Instituto de Reforma Agraria took up again its task of resettlement as best it could, but this proceeded with great slowness because of the legal actions launched by landlords. This exasperated the peasants, especially since they also had a feeling after the Popular Front’s victory in the February elections that they should be able to dictate conditions. In addition they had a longing for revenge after the sackings and wage reductions over the previous two years and the triumphalism of many landowners when the centre-right was in power.

In the first fortnight of March, landless
braceros
began to occupy estates in the provinces of Madrid, Toledo and Salamanca. Then, at dawn on 25 March, 60,000 landless peasants in the province of Badajoz seized land and began to plough it. Over the next few weeks, similar actions were launched in the provinces of Cáceres, Jaén, Seville and Córdoba. The security forces, subdued by the memory of Casas Viejas, acted with indecision, but this did not help. In one of the confrontations with peasants in Yeste, a civil guard was killed. The Civil Guard, known with approval or bitter irony as the Benemérita, replied by killing seventeen day labourers and wounding many others.
²
In any case, during the government of the Popular Front fewer than 200,000 peasants were resettled in the whole of Spain on 756,000 hectares of land, yet it was still more than during all of the previous administrations under the Republic.
³
But none of those who colonized the land had money for seeds or tools. The Banco Nacional Agrario, which had been envisaged in the initial legislation to address the problem, was never set up.
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