A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

cult of violence facilitated the destabilization of the politics of the Second Republic. His blue-shirted militias, with their Roman salutes and their ritual chants of ¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA! and ¡ESPAÑA! ¡UNA! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡LIBRE! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡GRANDE!, aped Nazi and Fascist models. From 1933 to 1936, Falange Española de las JONS functioned as the cannon fodder of the haute bourgeoisie provoking street brawls and helping to generate the lawlessness which, exaggerated by the right-wing press, was used to justify the military rising. Its importance lay in the role played by its political vandalism in screwing up the tension which would eventually erupt into the Civil War.

      The left was very aware of such developments and was determined to avoid the fate of the German and Austrian left. As 1934 progressed there were growing numbers of street battles between left and right. Events within the orthodox political arena did little to cool tempers. Lerroux resigned in April after Alcalá Zamora had hesitated to sign an amnesty bill which reinstated the officers involved in the Sanjurjo rising of 1932. Socialists and Republicans alike felt that the government was signalling to the Army that it could make a coup whenever it disliked the political situation. The left was already suspicious of the government’s reliance on CEDA votes, since Gil Robles continued to refuse to swear his loyalty to the Republic. Moreover, since he made it quite clear that when he gained power he would change the constitution, the left was coming to believe that strong action was necessary to prevent him doing so. In fact, even if Gil Robles was not quite as extreme as the left believed him to be, he managed to convey the impression that the Radical government, backed with CEDA votes, was intent on dismantling the progressive, reforming Republic that had been created in 1931.

      In this context, it was difficult for the Socialist leadership to hold back its followers. Largo Caballero tended to give way to the revolutionary impatience of the masses, although his rhetoric, which they cheered to the echo, was unspecific and consisted largely of Marxist platitudes. No concrete relation to the contemporary political scene was ever made in Largo’s speeches of early 1934 and no timetable for the future revolution was ever given. However, rank-and-file pressure for the radicalisation of the Socialist movement, particularly from its youth movement, the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas (FJS), and its Madrid organization, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña, developed throughout 1934. This led to important divisions within the PSOE. The right-wing of the party, led by the law professor, Julián Besteiro, tried several tactics to slow down the process of bolshevisation which was taking place within the party. This merely earned Besteiro the vehement hostility of the radical youth. The centre, led by the ever-pragmatic Indalecio Prieto, reluctantly went along with the revolutionary tactic out of party loyalty. The young followers of Largo Caballero came to dominate the party and the UGT, with the organisations of the Socialist movement falling into their hands in quick succession.

      Thus, political tension grew throughout 1934. In March, the anarchists held a four week strike in Zaragoza to protest against the maltreatment of prisoners taken after the December rising. Then the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an unmistakably anti-republican gesture. In driving sleet, a crowd of 20,000 gathered in a close replica of the Nazi rallies. They swore loyalty to Gil Robles, ‘our supreme chief, and chanted ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’. The JAP’s nineteen-point programme was recited, with emphasis on point two, ‘our leaders never make mistakes’, a direct borrowing from the Italian Fascists. One CEDA deputy declared that ‘Spain has to be defended against Jews, heretics, freemasons, liberals and Marxists’. Another, the deputy for Zaragoza, Ramón Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law of General Franco and later architect of the post-Civil War National-Syndicalist state, denounced ‘degenerate democracy’. The high point of the rally was a speech by Gil Robles. His aggressive harangue was greeted by delirious applause and prolongued chanting of ‘¡Jefe!’. ‘We are an army of citizens ready to give our lives for God and for Spain,’ he cried. ‘Power will soon be ours . . . No one can stop us imposing our ideas on the government of Spain’.

      The young revolutionaries of the FJS were convinced that Gil Robles was aiming to take over the government in order to bring the Republic to an end. Various Radical ministries were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’s Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises by complaining that the cabinet was too liberal. As a result, the Radical government was taking on an ever more conservative veneer. On each occasion, Lerroux, who was desperate to stay in power, would force the more liberal elements of his party out of the cabinet. Accompanied by like-minded friends, they then left the party, leaving the rump ever more dependent on CEDA whims. After the first of the reshuffles, in March 1934, Gil Robles found a Radical minister who enjoyed his unalloyed trust. This was Rafael Salazar Alonso, the Minister of the Interior and a representative of the aggressive landowners of Badajoz. He provoked a number of strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. The Radical-CEDA determination to undermine the Republic’s most loyal support became clear when the government clashed successively with the Catalans and the Basques. The sympathy shown by the Constituent Cortes to autonomist aspirations was now dropped in favour of right-wing centralist bias. This was particularly the case with regard to Catalonia. Unlike the rest of Spain, Catalonia was governed by a truly Republican party, the Esquerra, under Lluis Companys. In April, Companys passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de contratos de cultivo, an enlightened measure to protect tenants from eviction by landowners and the right to buy land which they had worked for eighteen years. The law was opposed by the landowners and the Catalan conservative party, the Lliga, protested to the Madrid government with the backing of the CEDA. The right of the central government to intervene in Catalonia over this issue was not clear. Under pressure from the CEDA, the Radical cabinet handed the question to the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, whose membership was predominantly right-wing. On 8 June, by a small majority, the Tribunal found against the Generalitat. Nevertheless, Companys went ahead and ratified the law. Meanwhile, the government began to infringe the Basques’ tax privileges and, in an attempt to silence protest, forbade their municipal elections. Such high-handed centralism could only confirm the left’s fears of the Republic’s rapid drift to the right.

      Trouble increased during the summer. Rural labourers were suffering immense hardship through increased aggression from employers, which had been greatly facilitated by the repeal in May of the law of municipal boundaries. Coming just before the harvest, this permitted landlords to import cheap Portuguese and Galician migrant workers to undercut local wages. After much agonized debate, the FNTT called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law. While the strike action could hardly be considered revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was not prepared to lose this chance to strike a blow at the largest section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. Liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale, including four Socialist deputies. This was a flagrant violation of articles 55 and 56 of the Constitution. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint onto lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Although most of the labourers arrested were soon released, emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years of imprisonment. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. Salazar Alonso had effectively put the clock back in the Spanish countryside to the 1920s.

      The politics of reprisal were beginning to generate an atmosphere, if not of imminent civil war, certainly of great belligerance. The left saw fascism in every action of the right; the right smelt revolution in every left-wing move. Violent speeches were made in the Cortes and, at one point, guns flourished. In the streets, there were shots exchanged between Socialist and Falangist youths. Juan Antonio Ansaldo, a well-known monarchist playboy and aviator, had joined the Falange in the spring to organize terrorist squads. A plan to blow up the Madrid Casa del Pueblo was thwarted when the police discovered a large cache of arms and explosives. The actions of the Falangist hit-squads provoked reprisals by the would-be