A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

Declaring that only the dictatorship of the proletariat could carry out the necessary economic disarmament of the bourgeoisie, he delighted his supporters, but antagonised the right and helped justify its already aggressive stance.

      The arguments of the moderate Indalecio Prieto that the PSOE must maintain its electoral alliance with the Left Republicans were dismissed by the more radical elements of the party led by Largo Caballero. Their imposition of the decision to go it alone was an irresponsible one. They were simultaneously blaming the Left Republicans for all the deficiencies of the Republic and confidently assuming that all the votes cast in 1931 for the victorious Republican-Socialist coalition would stay with the PSOE. In fact, that coalition had ranged from the middle classes to the anarchists. The Radicals were now on the right and, in the wake of Casas Viejas, the hostility of the anarchists to the Republic ensured that they would abstain. The Socialists were commiting a fatal tactical error. Given the existing electoral law which favoured coalitions, together with the CEDA’s readiness to make alliances, it took twice as many Socialist votes to elect a deputy as rightist ones. The election results brought bitter disappointment to the Socialists, who won only fifty-eight seats. After local deals between the CEDA and the Radicals designed to take advantage of the electoral law, the two parties finished with 115 and 104 deputies respectively. The right had regained control of the apparatus of the state. It was determined to use it to dismantle the reforms of the previous two years. However, expectations had been raised during that time which could only ensure burning popular fury when the right put back the clock to before 1931.

THREE

       Confrontation and Conspiracy: 1934–1936

      In the following two years, which came to be known as the bienio negro (or black two years), Spanish politics were to be bitterly polarized. The November 1933 elections had given power to a right-wing determined to avenge the injuries and indignities which it felt it had suffered during the period of the Constituent Cortes. This made conflict inevitable, since if the workers and peasants had been driven to desperation by the inadequacy of the reforms of 1931–32, then a government set on destroying these reforms could only force them into violence. At the end of 1933, 12 per cent of Spain’s workforce was unemployed and in the south the figures were nearer 20 per cent. Employers and landowners celebrated the victory by cutting wages, sacking workers, evicting tenants and raising rents. Even before a new government had taken office, labour legislation was being blatantly ignored.

      The outrage of the Socialists knew no bounds. Their own tactical error in not allying with the Republicans had made a crucial contribution to their electoral defeat. However, the PSOE was convinced that the elections had been fraudulent. In the south, they had good reason to believe that they had been swindled out of seats by the caciques’ power over the starving braceros. In rural areas of high unemployment, it had been easy to get votes by the promise of jobs or the threat of dismissal. Armed thugs employed by the caciques prevented Socialist campaigners speaking at some meetings and were a louring presence next to the glass voting urns on election day. In Spain as a whole, the PSOE’s one and a half million votes had won it fifty-eight seats in the Cortes, while the Radicals’ eight hundred thousand votes had been rewarded with one hundred and four seats. According to calculations made by the PSOE, the united parties of the right had together got 3,345,504 votes and two hundred and twelve seats at 15,780 votes per seat, while the disunited left had received 3,375,432 votes and only ninety-nine seats at 34,095 votes per seat. In some areas of the south – Badajoz, Cordoba and Malaga, for example – the margin of right-wing victory was small enough for electoral malpractice to have made all the difference. Rank-and-file bitterness at the cynical union of Radicals with the CEDA and at losing the elections unfairly quickly gave way to dismay at the untrammelled offensive of the employers. Popular outrage was all the greater because of the restraint and self-sacrifice that had characterized Socialist policy between 1931 and 1933. Now, in response to the consequent wave of militancy, the Socialist leadership began to adopt a tactic of revolutionary rhetoric. Their vain hope was that they could both scare the right into limiting its belligerancy and persuade the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, to call new elections.

      Although he was not prepared to go that far, Alcalá Zamora did not invite Gil Robles to form a government despite the fact that the CEDA was the biggest party in the Cortes albeit without an overall majority. The President suspected the Catholic leader of nurturing more or less fascist ambitions to establish an authoritarian, corporative state. Thus, Alejandro Lerroux, as leader of the second largest party, became Prime Minister. Dependent on CEDA votes, the Radicals were to be the CEDA’s puppets. In return for harsh social policies in the interests of the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals were to be allowed to enjoy the spoils of office. The Socialists were appalled. Largo Caballero was convinced that in the Radical Party, there were those who ‘if they have not been in jail, deserve to have been’. Once in government, they set up an office to organize the sale of state favours, monopolies, government procurement orders, licences and so on. The PSOE view was that the Radicals were hardly the appropriate defenders of the basic principles of the Republic against rightist assaults.

      The first violent working class protest, however, came from the anarchists. With irresponsible naïvety, an uprising was called for 8 December 1933. However, the government had been forewarned of the anarcho-syndicalists’ plans, and quickly declared a state of emergency. Leaders of the CNT and the FAI were arrested, press censorship was imposed, and syndicates were closed down. In traditionally anarchist areas, Aragon, the Rioja, Catalonia, the Levante, parts of Andalusia and Galicia, there were sporadic strikes, some trains were blown up and Civil Guard posts were assaulted. The movement was quickly over in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. In the Aragonese capital, Zaragoza, however, the rising did get off the ground. Workers raised barricades, attacked public buildings, and engaged in street fighting. The response of the government was to send in the Army, which took four days with the aid of tanks to crush the insurrection.

      With a pliant Radical government in power, the success of Accion Popular’s ‘accidentalist’ tactics could hardly have been more apparent. ‘Catastrophism’ was for the moment eclipsed. Nevertheless, the extreme right remained unconvinced by Gil Robles’ democratic tactic and so continued to prepare for violence. Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the North and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. In March, representatives of both the Carlists and the Alfonsine monarchist party, Renovación Española, led by Antonio Goicoechea, went to see Mussolini who promised money and arms for a rising. Both groups were convinced that even a strong rightist government did not constitute an adequate long-term guarantee for their interests, because it would be subject to the whims of the electorate in a still democratic Republic. In May 1934, the monarchists’ most dynamic and charismatic leader, José Calvo Sotelo, returned after three years exile to take over the leadership from Antonio Goicoechea. Henceforth, the monarchist press, in addition to abusing Gil Robles’s weakness, began increasingly to talk of the conquest of the state as the only certain road to the creation of a new authoritarian, corporative regime.

      Even Gil Robles was having trouble controlling his forces. His youth movement, the Juventud de Accion Popular (JAP), was seduced by the German and Italian examples. Great fascist-style rallies were held at which Gil Robles was hailed with the cry ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! jefe!’ (the Spanish equivalent of Duce) in the hope that he might start a ‘March on Madrid’ to seize power. Monarchist hopes, however, centred increasingly on the openly fascist group of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange Española, as a potential source of shock troops against the left. The Falange had been founded in October 1933 with monarchist subsidies. As a land-owner, an aristocrat and well-known socialite, José Antonio Primo de Rivera served as a guarantee to the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not get out of their control in the way of its German and Italian equivalents. Falange Española merged in 1934 with the pro-Nazi Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista of the pro-German Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, becoming FE de las JONS. Perpetually short of funds, the party remained during the Republican period essentially a small student group preaching