Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Paul Preston 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780007558391

eBook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780007558384

Version: 2021-01-12

Dedication

For María Jesús González

and

Linda Palfreeman

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Preface

7  1 Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption

8  2 Violence, Corruption and the Slide to Disaster

9  3 Revolution and War: From the Disaster of 1898 to the Tragic Week of 1909

10  4 Revolution and War: From the Tragic Week of 1909 to the Crisis of 1917–1918

11  5 A System in Disarray: Disorder and Repression, 1918–1921

12  6 From Colonial Disaster to Dictatorship, 1921–1923

13  7 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Success, 1923–1926

14  8 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Failure, 1926–1931

15  9 The Second Republic: Reform and Frustration, 1931–1933

16  10 The Black Years and the Coming of War, 1933–1936

17  11 Civil War: Hatred, Incompetence and Profit, 1936–1939

18  12 World War: Survival, Hypocrisy and Profit, 1939–1945

19  13 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Terror, 1945–1953

20  14 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Complacency, 1953–1969

21  15 The Twilight Years of a Corrupt Regime, 1969–1975

22  16 The Painful Creation of a Democracy, 1975–1982

23  17 The Grandeur and Misery of a Newborn Democracy, 1982–2004

24  18 The Triumph of Corruption and Incompetence, 2004–2018

25  Acknowledgements

26  Notes

27  Index

28  By the Same Author

29  About the Author

30  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1921: ‘Starting with the monarchy and moving on to the Church, no national authority has thought of anything but itself. When has the heart, after all foreign, of a Spanish monarch or of the Spanish Church ever beat for ends that were deeply Spanish? As far as is known, never. They have done the exact opposite. They have ensured that their ends have been adopted as if they were in the national interest.’1 In similar vein, the poet Antonio Machado, during the Spanish Civil War, wrote to a Russian friend, the novelist, David Vigodsky: ‘The best thing in Spain is the people. That is why the selfless and heroic defence of Madrid, which has astounded the world, moves me but it does not surprise me. It has always been like that. In difficult times, the señoritos – our Boyars – invoke the fatherland and then they sell it; the people do not even mention it but they buy it back with their blood and they save it. In Spain, it is impossible to be a decent person and not love the people. For us, love of the people is a basic duty of gratitude.’2

Similar views were expressed in the nineteenth century by the English romantic travellers. The most celebrated, Richard Ford, author in 1845 of A Handbook for Travellers in Spain and one year later of Gatherings in Spain, portrayed ordinary Spaniards as generous and noble while referring constantly to bad government and misgovernment: ‘The real permanent and standing cause of Spain’s thinly peopled state, want of cultivation, and abomination of desolation, is BAD GOVERNMENT, civil and religious.’ He claimed that, at all levels of government, there were despots always open to bribes.3 Gerald Brenan agreed to a certain extent: ‘Spain has been seen as the land of paradox where a people of great independence of character allowed themselves to be governed by corrupt and arbitrary rulers.’ However, commenting on the extent to which such criticisms derived from an idealized image of Britain at the time when Ford was writing, Brenan remarked: ‘He has much to say of Spanish mismanagement and poverty, yet who would not have preferred to be a Spanish workman in those days to an English miner or mill-hand or agricultural labourer?’4

The present volume is another work written by a British historian who loves Spain and one who has spent the last fifty years studying the country’s history. As might be deduced from its title, this book echoes the spirit of Richard Ford and of many Spanish commentators such as Lucas Mallada, Ricardo Macías Picavea, Joaquín Costa, Manuel Azaña and José Ortega y Gasset. While drawing on the perceptions of Ford, it does not adopt his simplistic comparisons of a benighted Spain with an idealized Britain. Equally, while deriving great insight from the critical analysis of the regenerationists, it does not share the view of Costa that the problem called for an authoritarian solution – the ‘iron surgeon’. This book makes no attempt to suggest that Spain is unique in terms of corruption or governmental incompetence. There are other European nations for which, at various historical moments, similar interpretations might be valid. For instance, while writing the book, I have lived, on a daily basis for the last three years, under the shadow of the Brexit process in Britain. It has been a painful experience to have to witness the combination of lies, governmental ineptitude and corruption that have bitterly divided the nation and threatened to provoke the break-up of the United Kingdom.

There are many possible approaches to the rich and tragic history of Spain. This book spans the period from the restoration of the Borbón monarchy in 1874 with Alfonso XII, to the early days of the reign of his great-great-grandson Felipe VI in 2014. It aims to provide a comprehensive and reliable history of Spain with a dramatic emphasis on the way the country’s progress has been impeded by corruption and political incompetence. It demonstrates how these two features have resulted in a breakdown of social cohesion that has frequently been met with, and exacerbated by, the use of violence by the authorities. All three themes consistently emerge in the tensions between Madrid and Catalonia. Throughout the Restoration period, and most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, institutional corruption and startling political incompetence were the norm. Popular disgust with this opened the way to the country’s first democracy, the Second Republic.

From the inception of the Republic in 1931 until its demise in 1939, corruption was less toxic, not least because the newly installed political elite was inspired by many of the propositions of the regenerationists. That is not to say corruption did not exist. A recurring character in the book, the multi-millionaire Juan March, who was behind some of the most spectacular corruption during the Primo de Rivera period, was equally active during the Republic, as indeed he would be in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. This was also true of Alejandro Lerroux, an important politician who was on March’s payroll. A lifetime of shameless corruption reached its peak when, as Prime Minister in 1935, Lerroux brazenly sponsored a system of fixed roulette wheels, an outrageous operation that gave rise to the word estraperlo which has become a synonym for economic malfeasance.

The victory of General Franco saw the establishment of a regime of terror and pillage which allowed him and his elite supporters to plunder with impunity, enriching themselves while giving free rein to the political ineptitude that prolonged Spain’s economic backwardness well into the 1950s. Ironically, throughout his life, Franco would express a fierce contempt for the political class that he held responsible for the loss of empire in 1898. In 1941, on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, he declared in a speech to the top brass of the Falange: ‘when we started out in life … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’.5 In fact, some of his own fatuous errors would far outdo those of the predecessors he mocked. That he would not scruple to put his determination to stay in power above national interests can be seen in his relationships with the Third Reich and later with the United States. His scatterbrained get-rich-quick schemes, ranging from alchemy and synthetic water-based gasoline to the disaster of his autarkic policies, contributed to Spain’s backwardness until he was persuaded in 1959 to let others supervise the economy.

In denouncing politicians in 1941, Franco was far from alone. With brief intervals when optimism flowered, between 1931 and 1936 and the first decade of the rule of King Juan Carlos, the attitude of Spaniards towards their country’s political class has often been one of disdain bordering on despair. Belief in the incompetence and venality of politicians has been an underlying constant of Spanish life since the Napoleonic invasion if not before. Franco used rhetoric about corrupt politicians to justify a dictatorship under which corruption flourished unchecked and was indeed exploited ruthlessly by the Caudillo himself, both for his own enrichment and to manipulate his followers.

The humiliation of 1898 was just the final confirmation of a truth that had been coming for nearly a century. Spain’s internal economic problems could no longer be alleviated by imperial plunder. A backward agrarian economy, an uneven and feeble industrial sector, the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, parasitical armed forces and growing regional divisions were endemic burdens. They were perpetuated, as was perceived by the far-sighted polymath Joaquín Costa, by a corrupt and incompetent political system which blocked social and economic progress and kept the Spanish people in the servitude, ignorance and misery which lay behind the contemporary slur that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’. However, the solution proposed by Costa, the iron surgeon, showed little confidence in the people and in democracy.

Other equally damaging, and inextricably linked, features of Spanish politics and society have endured since the late nineteenth century. The unspoken assumption that political and social problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for hundreds of years civil strife was no rarity. In modern times, certain forms of social violence have been a consequence of corruption and government incompetence. Electoral corruption excluded the masses from organized politics and challenged them with a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution. The war of 1936–9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s.

Between 1814 and 1981, Spain witnessed more than twenty-five relatively serious pronunciamientos, or military coups.6 That crude statistic provides a graphic indication of the divorce between soldiers and civilians. In the first third of the nineteenth century, those pronunciamientos were liberal in their political intent, but thereafter a tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. Accordingly, a factor generating hatred within Spanish society was the repression by the army of deep-rooted social conflicts that had arisen in the wake of imperial decline and military defeat. Military resentment of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular was the other side of the same coin.

The role of violence in Spain was consolidated by the way in which the armed forces dealt with post-imperial trauma. A resentful officer corps, which blamed the humiliation of 1898 on the politicians who had provided inadequate support, came to consider itself the ultimate arbiter in politics. Determined to lose no more battles, it became obsessed not with the defence of Spain from external enemies but with the defence of national unity and the existing social order against the internal enemies of the regions and of the left. At one level, this was not surprising. After the Cuban disaster, the army was inefficient, overburdened by bureaucracy and ill equipped. An absurdly high proportion of the total military budget was absorbed by salaries, administration and running costs which left very little for training or equipment.

Spain’s rulers had tried to shake off the immediate post-war shame with a disastrous new imperial endeavour in Morocco. Woefully unprepared, this African adventure stimulated massive popular opposition to conscription, thereby intensifying the mutual hatred of the military and the left. While working-class conscripts became militant pacifists in response to the appalling conditions in North Africa, there emerged within the military an elite corps of tough professional officers, the Africanistas, of whom Franco became the iconic example. They came to believe that they were a beleaguered band of heroic warriors alone concerned with the fate of the patria. This inevitably exacerbated their sense of apartness from a society which they felt had betrayed them. The Africanistas came to dominate the officer corps, particularly in the late 1920s when Franco was Director of the Military Academy. They would be at the heart of the coup of 1936 and then used against Spanish civilians the same terror tactics that they had perfected in Morocco.

They would be a favoured element of Franco’s kleptocratic elite. The survival of their ‘values’ through and beyond the dictatorship would guarantee the determination of sectors of the armed forces to derail the new democracy established in the late 1970s. Fortunately, popular distrust of the armed forces came to an end with the democratization of the army after the military reforms carried out during the first Socialist government. Generational change within the officer corps and the entry of Spain into NATO have seen a dramatic reversal of popular perception of the armed forces and the Civil Guard, which are now among the most highly rated institutions in Spain. Popular perception of Spain’s problems puts the political class second only behind unemployment.7

Equally damaging to Spain’s attempts to attain modernity was the dead hand of the Catholic Church. In the civil wars of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church took sides against the threat of liberalism and modernization. Besieged by violent popular anti-clericalism and impoverished by the disentailment of its lands in the 1830s and 1850s, the Church allied itself with the powerful. Already by the 1880s the Church, in its educational provision for the middle and upper classes, had become the legitimizing agent of the socio-economic and political system. The history of the Catholic Church in Spain in the twentieth century parallels that of the country itself. Almost every major political upheaval of a turbulent period – with the possible exception of the revolutionary crisis of 1917–23 – had its religious backcloth and a crucial, and often reactionary, role for the Church hierarchy.

What follows interleaves these themes of military and ecclesiastical influence, popular contempt for the political class, bitter social conflict, economic backwardness and conflict between centralist nationalism and regional independence movements. It also places these processes in an international context. The breakdown of the Second Republic and the coming of the civil war are incomprehensible without consideration of the influence of international developments, particularly fascism and communism, on domestic developments. The course of the Spanish Civil War will be analysed with particular attention to the interplay between domestic and international factors in determining its outcome. In many respects, the Spanish conflict can be seen as either a rehearsal for the Second World War or as the location of its first battles. Spanish neutrality in the Second World War played a key role in the outcome of the conflict in Europe. The process whereby the Franco dictatorship shook off international ostracism to become the valued ally of the Western powers will be fully considered.

The book shows how Spain went from utter despair in 1898 on a roller coaster that culminated in the present state of almost comparable pessimism. The civil war was the most dramatic of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had punctuated Spanish history from 1808 to the present day. There is a curious pattern in Spain’s modern and contemporary history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have used political and military power to hold back social progress were followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, in the 1870s, between 1910 and 1912, between 1917 and 1923 and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the country’s social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to redistribute wealth, especially on the land, which in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional order of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General O’Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874, by General Primo de Rivera in 1923 and by General Franco between 1936 and 1939. It took the horrors of the civil war and the nearly four decades of dictatorship that followed to break the pattern. The moderation shared by the progressive right and a chastened left underlay a bloodless transition to democracy.

The pattern of conflict between the political establishment and sociological development – progressive forces pushing for change until driven back by violence and the imposition of dictatorship – changed in 1977. Nevertheless, the new democratic establishment was tainted by the old ways. As asserted by Baltasar Garzón, one of the judges who has worked to eliminate corruption: ‘In Spain, no one has ever been afraid to be corrupt. Given that its existence was taken for granted, corruption is not something that has bothered the average citizen. This indifference has ensured that its roots have grown deep and solid and sustain a structure of interests that is very difficult to bring down.’ In the view of Garzón, the justice system has contributed to this situation: ‘Judgments that are laid down after long years of delay, laughable sentences, incomprehensible dismissals or shelving of cases, unacceptable collusions and connivance …’8

Throughout the entire period covered by this book, corruption and political incompetence have had a corrosive effect on political coexistence and social cohesion. Spain’s transition to democracy has been widely admired. Nevertheless, the scale of uninterrupted corruption and periodic ineptitude demonstrated by the political class at various levels of society since 1982 has been remarkable. Politicians of both right and left have been unable or unwilling to deal with corruption and the pernicious clash between Spanish centralist nationalism and regional desires for independence. Only during brief periods in the early 1930s and in the first years of the transition to democracy was there a degree of public respect for politicians. However, widespread contempt and resentment have intensified anew during the economic crisis of recent years. The boom of the 1990s fostered corruption and witnessed political incompetence on an unprecedented scale. From the late 1980s to the present day, endemic corruption and renewed nationalist ferment has brought disillusionment with the political class almost full circle. While not at the unrepeatable low point of 1898, politicians are nevertheless rated by the Spanish population far lower than could have been imagined when the transition to democracy was being hailed as a model for other countries.

A satirical cartoon published in the magazine La Araña in August 1885. ‘Poor Spain. How beautiful she is. The more they strip her, the more beautiful she is.’ Among the watching European leaders are Otto von Bismarck and King Umberto of Italy. Among those ripping the flag from her body are the architects of electoral corruption, Francisco Romero Robledo, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.

1
Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption

Spain has often been seen through the myths of national character. One of the most persistent has been that of corruption and dishonesty, which owed much to the numerous translations into other European languages of the first and hugely popular picaresque novels, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (o Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos; ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños) (written 1604, published 1626). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spain was a frequent, and conveniently exotic, setting for operas by foreigners. Among the most extreme examples of operas based on myths of national character, especially Spanish, are almost certainly Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Il trovatore and La forza del destino and Bizet’s Carmen. Artists wishing to portray violent passions drew upon a view of Spain, its history and its people as the embodiment of fanaticism, cruelty and uncontrolled emotion. This image went back to the Reformation, when a series of religiously inspired pamphlets had denounced the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Tribunal of the Holy Office and the terrors of the auto-da-fé. Religious hatreds aside, the European perception of Spain was confirmed by the experience of an empire in the Americas, Italy and Flanders built on greed and maintained by blood. The Peninsular Wars, or the wars of national independence, and the subsequent nineteenth-century series of civil wars did nothing to undermine stereotypes which survived into the twentieth century in the literature spawned by the Spanish Civil War.

Collectively, this view of Spain constituted what the Spaniards themselves came to call ‘the black legend’, the most extreme examples of which were collected in the celebrated work by the historian Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra. Combating the notion of universal laziness and violence, Juderías railed against ‘the legend of the inquisitorial, ignorant, fanatical Spain, under the yoke of the clergy, lazy, incapable of figuring among civilized nations today as well as in the past, always ready for violent repressions; enemy of progress and innovations’.1 What Juderías had in mind were definitions of Spain such as that by Sir John Perrot, Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputy of Ireland (1584–6), who observed: ‘This semi-Morisco nation … is sprung from the filth and slime of Africa, the base Ottomans and the rejected Jews.’2 The stereotypes which caused greatest outrage to Spaniards, however, were fundamentally the product of the romantic era. From 1820 to 1850, British and French travellers were drawn to Spain by what they saw as the picturesque savagery of both its landscapes and its inhabitants. Rugged mountains infested by brigands, their paths travelled by convoys of well-armed smugglers, the bloody rituals of the bullfight, the ruins of Moorish palaces and castles, and erotic encounters (probably imagined) with languid olive-skinned beauties became the clichés of romantic literature about Spain. The stereotypes would be maintained even in the 1920s when bar owners in the sleazy Raval district of Barcelona exploited the reputation of the ‘Barrio Chino’ for the benefit of foreign tourists. They would stage ‘spontaneous’ incidents in which ‘gypsies’, apparently inflamed with jealousy by the sight of their women (the waitresses) flirting with the tourists, waved knives, the incidents being settled with rounds of expensive drinks.3

Bizet’s Carmen remains perhaps the most famous ‘Spanish’ opera, largely because of its deployment of most of these Spanish stereotypes. Carmen presents the archetypes of the passionate Andalusian woman, the knife-wielding murderer and the bullfighter set in a context of smugglers, bandits, sex and violence. The notion that the Spaniards were sex-crazed underlay the fact that syphilis was known in France as le mal espagnol. The German writer August Fischer also wrote of the frantic, indeed fanatical, sexuality of Andalusian women – a view shared by Lord Byron, who visited Andalusia in 1809. The French diplomat Jean-François Bourgoing, in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne (1788; expanded in 1803 into the three-volume Tableau de l’Espagne moderne), complained about the open sensuality of flamenco dancing and excoriated the vice-ridden daily life of gypsies.4 Rather more wistfully, Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian sexual athlete, praised the fandango thus: ‘Everything is represented, from the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of love. I could not conceive a woman refusing her partner anything after this dance, for it seemed made to stir up the senses.’5

It was Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832) that really put Spain on the map for romantics. A decade later, he was outdone by Théophile Gautier whose Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) described the dusky, flashing-eyed Andalusian beauties who warmed his blood with their flamenco dancing and the blood-chilling gypsy knife fighters and their fancy cutlery.6 English writers like George Borrow (The Bible in Spain, 1843) and Richard Ford (Handbook for Spain, 1845, and Gatherings in Spain, 1846) portrayed Spaniards’ alleged obsession with honour, their religious fanaticism, their extremes of love and hate, and the proliferation of lawless cut-throats. This was intensified even more by Alexandre Dumas. Massively famous as a result of the success of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas had been invited by the Duc de Montpensier to attend his wedding on 10 October 1846 to the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, daughter of King Fernando VII. Dumas spent two months in Spain on the basis of which he wrote his massive four-volume De Paris à Cadix. Here he described his disgust at Spanish food and at what he saw as the licentiousness and depravity of gypsy dancers in Granada. Yet, in Seville, he was delighted by the voluptuousness of professional flamenco dancers and rejoiced in the flirtations between young army officers and the pretty girls who worked in the great Fábrica de Tabaco.7 Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845) concentrated all the romantic clichés about Seville in one personage. A cigarette factory worker, Carmen was also a flamenco dancer, lover of a bullfighter, accomplice of smugglers and bandits, voluptuous, independent, untamed – just the thing to titillate the Parisian bourgeois who seemed to view Spain as a kind of human zoo.8 Mérimée’s patronizingly anthropological attitude to his characters was popularized even further by Bizet’s opera.

A context of readily familiar assumptions about Spain had long since been established by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy. Her Mémoire de la cour d’Espagne (1690), published in English as Memories of the Court of Spain written by an ingenious French lady, was a prurient account of the allegedly syphilis-ridden royal court in Madrid. Uninhibited by the fact that she had almost certainly never visited Spain at all, this armchair fantasist then quickly produced her immensely influential Rélation du voyage d’Espagne, which was first published in 1691 and was regularly reprinted in several languages well into the nineteenth century. Despite claiming to relate ‘nothing but what I have seen’, Madame d’Aulnoy described a country full of exotic animals including monkeys and parrots. Her cast of invented characters was based on other travel books, diplomatic memoirs and the plays of Calderón and other Spanish dramatists. Her wild exaggerations presented corrupt officials, aristocratic men ever ready to kill or die for questions of honour and promiscuous women invariably in the throes of passion.9 Nevertheless, the caricatures created by Madame d’Aulnoy, including the notion that virtually the entire population was afflicted with venereal disease, allowed Bizet to present the insolent and primeval sexuality of Carmen as somehow typically Spanish.10

In Britain, the image of an exotic, semi-oriental Spain of crumbling cathedrals and mosques, castles and bridges, inhabited by colourful, passionate and sensual people, drew on the exquisite paintings and drawings of David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis in the 1830s and of Charles Clifford in the 1850s. Many of their most characteristic works became immensely popular through collections of best-selling lithographs. Their views of Spain were confirmed by many Spanish painters of the romantic era, particularly Genaro Pérez de Villaamil, whose work was exhibited and published in Paris.11 Nothing symbolized the Spain of the romantic era more than Andalusian beauties and bandit-infested sierras. Foreign travellers returned home to dine out on stories of the risks they claimed that they had undergone.12 Virtually all travellers to Spain, whatever their nationality and whatever they thought of the sex, the bandits, the bulls and the Inquisition, complained about the rutted tracks which passed for roads. They often declared confidently that Spain would never be penetrated by railways.13 In fact, it was the introduction of railways from the late 1850s onwards that dramatically changed the stereotypes. As Spain enjoyed an extremely uneven industrial revolution, foreign investment increased. Thereafter, observers and travellers were concerned less with romantic stereotypes than with political instability, corruption and social violence.

In fact, the fundamentals of Spanish society had little to do with the steamy erotic stereotypes beloved of foreign travellers. The reality was altogether more mundane, its central characteristics the linked factors of social inequality and violence and political incompetence and corruption. In 1883, the Tribunal Supremo entitled part of its annual report on criminality ‘On the Violent Customs of the Spanish People’. It was symptomatic of Spain’s dysfunctional society that, between 1814 and 1981, there were more than fifty attempted pronunciamientos, or military coups of which only a handful succeeded.14 That crude statistic provides a graphic indication not just of the divorce between soldiers and civilians but of the extent to which the Spanish state did not adequately serve its citizens. A tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. The year 1833 saw the outbreak of the first of four civil wars with the battlefield hostilities of the last coming to a close in 1939. In fact, to some extent, the civil war of 1936–9 is the war that never ended. Indeed, in some respects, Spain still suffers today from some of the divisions of 1936.

The early 1830s experienced both the loss of the bulk of the once great Spanish empire and the beginning of dynastic conflict. The death in 1833 of Fernando VII, succeeded as queen by his infant daughter, Isabel, and the attempt by his brother Carlos to seize power provided the spark that ignited what came to be called the first Carlist War, which raged until 1840. Carlos sought support among deeply reactionary landowners and extreme ultramontane Catholics and was opposed by modernizing liberals led symbolically at least by Isabel’s mother, the Queen-Regent María Cristina. Carlist forces were commanded, even more symbolically, by the Vírgen de los Dolores, a commitment to theocracy that guaranteed the support of the Church hierarchy. A second, rather more sporadic, Carlist war was fought from 1846 to 1849 and a third from 1872 to 1876. The active role of the Catholic Church in these Carlist Wars, with some lower clergy even taking up arms, contributed to the subsequent popular perception of priests as deeply reactionary.15 In the 1860s, there had been fewer than 50,000 secular priests, monks and nuns in Spain. In the period between the monarchical Restoration of 1874 and the end of the century, the numbers would increase to more than 88,000. When the Primo de Rivera dictatorship fell in 1930, the clergy had swelled to over 135,000.16 In the view of the anarchists, the Catholic Church commercialized religion but did not practise morality. They saw it as a corrupt and rapacious institution which exploited the people and also blocked social progress.

Thus, even though black, reactionary Spain was startled by the French revolution and was shaken out of its lethargy by the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, many of the European stereotypes of Spain lamented by Juderías, certainly those based on the violence of its political life, were confirmed rather than shattered by the cycle of nineteenth-century civil wars. The notion that deep social and political problems could be resolved by violence was to afflict Spain well into the twentieth century. The Franco regime which followed the civil war was a regime built on terror, plunder and corruption. None of these elements was the invention of Franco. Indeed, it is the central thesis of this book that the violence, corruption and incompetence of the political class have betrayed the population at least since 1833 and almost certainly before. There are many possible historical reasons to do with religion and empire but perhaps the most potent and enduring has been the lack of a state apparatus popularly accepted as legitimate. After a state of near civil war between the death of Franco in 1975 and the military coup of 1981, it looked as if Spain was witnessing the creation of a legitimate state. The prosperity of the late twentieth century masked the extent to which the new polity was as mired in corruption and incompetence as its predecessors. An especially vibrant economic boom fuelled by the cheap credit facilitated by Spain joining the euro drew a veil over rampant corruption that reached as far as the royal family. The recession that followed saw the veil torn away, the political establishment lose legitimacy and problems such as regional nationalism divide the country in, rhetorically at least, violent terms.

In the nineteenth century, the Spanish state was weak in the face of geographic obstacles, poor communications and historical and linguistic traditions utterly opposed to a centralized state. Unlike, say, France or Italy after 1871, Spanish governments failed to create an all-embracing patriotism and sense of nationhood. In other countries, this task was largely assumed by the armed forces. However, in Spain, the army was an engine of division, above all because of the appalling conditions faced by conscripts in overseas wars. By the early twentieth century, army officers were ripe for persuasion by extreme conservatives that it was their right and duty to interfere in politics in order to ‘save Spain’. Unfortunately, that ostensibly noble objective actually meant the defence of the interests and privileges of relatively small segments of society. The armed forces were thus not the servants of the nation defending it from external enemies but the defenders of narrow social interests against their internal enemies, the working class and the regional nationalists. In the hundred years before 1930, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocs. Accordingly, popular hostility to the armed forces grew as deep-rooted social conflicts, at a time of imperial decline and military defeat, were repressed by the army. A further layer of the dialectic between violence and popular discontent was the way in which regional nationalism was crushed in the name of a patriotic centralism. Military resentments of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular were the other side of the same coin.

Ironically, it was in 1833 that the biggest step towards creating a state had been taken. This was the adoption of a highly centralized French territorial model with fifty broadly uniform provinces under the control of a civil governor appointed by Madrid. This systematized the distribution of patronage and therefore fostered corruption. Although the idea of Spain had long existed, the country seemed to be a flimsy collection of virtually independent provinces and regions whose languages and dialects were often mutually unintelligible. The 1833 definition of regions and provinces has subsequently been modified but, broadly speaking, it still holds good and can be recognized in the current system of so-called autonomies into which Spain is now divided. Similarly, further measures taken in the 1840s saw the beginnings of something resembling a central state with a crude and divisive taxation system and the creation of local and national police forces. However, with the exception of the Civil Guard, it was an inadequately implemented process. Taxation did not finance the state because wealth was not taxed, whereas consumption was. Ancient forms of politics, social influence and patronage, caciquismo or clientelism, took precedence over any kind of modern political machinery, poisoning what falteringly developed as electoral politics and leaving the state underfinanced and weak, other than in its coercive capacity.

After the process known as the disentailment or desamortización, Spain ceased to be a feudal society in legal and economic terms. However, it remained so in social and political terms. Traditional rural elites retained their power long after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1874 and the attempt to create a modern state by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in his Constitution of 1876. That state worked only in so far as it was in the interests of the local bosses or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’) to allow it to do so. It was only with the growth of industry in the Basque Country, Asturias, Catalonia and Madrid that a different and more modern politics became even a remote possibility. Then, the vested interests of the landed caciques ensured that their superior power was exerted over the reforming bourgeoisie which, itself under pressure from the first signs of working-class discontent, scurried to make an alliance in which it was the junior partner. Loss of empire would lead to a weakening of the alliance but it would always be consolidated when the industrial bourgeoisie needed the protection of the repressive machinery that was the state’s principal asset. Pressure for political change and social development was simply dismissed as subversion.17

Richard Ford wrote in the 1840s: ‘I once beheld a cloaked Spaniard pacing mournfully in the burial ground of Seville. When the public trench was opened, he drew from beneath the folds the dead body of his child, cast it in and disappeared. Thus, half the world lives without knowing how the other half dies.’18 In a land in which oppressive poverty coexisted with an equally parasitical government and Church, the law was not respected and smugglers and bandits were the objects of hero worship. When Ford enquired of Spaniards where brigands hid, he was frequently told that ‘it was not on the road that they were most likely to be found, but in the confessional boxes, the lawyers’ offices, and still more in the bureaux of government’. Of the Civil Guard, Ford wrote that they were nothing but rogues ‘used to keep down the expression of indignant public opinion, and, instead of catching thieves, upholding those first-rate criminals, foreign and domestic, who are now robbing poor Spain of her gold and liberties’.19

Founded by two royal decrees of 28 March and 13 May 1844, the Civil Guard was intended to be a disciplined nationwide police force, staffed by men seconded from the army. The corps was organized by the Inspector General of the Army, the Duke of Ahumada.20 Between 1844 and the 1860s, the Civil Guard established itself as a dour and brutal army of occupation protecting the great estates and mines against the resentment of their workers. It became part of the army in 1878. Banditry was gradually eliminated, but the Civil Guard’s ominous ubiquity forced the peasants to direct their rebelliousness against it and therefore against the state. ‘Every Civil Guard became a recruiting officer for anarchism, and, as the anarchists increased their membership, the Civil Guard also grew.’21 In fact, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the death of General Franco, many Civil Guards were actually recruited from the sons of men who had served in the corps.

The sense that the Civil Guard was a hostile institution imposed from outside was intensified by the fact that social interaction was forbidden between the rank and file and the inhabitants of the area where they served. Needless to say, this prohibition did not extend to the officers, who usually maintained cordial relations with the local clergy and those who owned the land, the mines and the factories. In small towns and villages, Civil Guards and their families lived in fortified barracks known as the casa-cuartel. In Asturias, the casa-cuartel was often paid for by the mining companies. In many places, it was common for the local fuerzas vivas (notables) and employers’ organizations to subsidize the casa-cuartel with gifts of food, wine and, sometimes, furniture. Such gifts were publicized in the local press as well as in the official publications of the Civil Guard, which intensified the sense that the corps was a force at the service of the wealthy.22 This perception was reinforced by the fact that a Civil Guard could not serve in the area where he or his wife had been born. In a country of fierce localism (patriotismo chico), where any stranger could be seen not just as an outsider but virtually as a foreigner, this increased the hostility towards the Civil Guard. In Asturian mining villages, for instance, the hatred of the Civil Guard was intense both for political reasons and also because they were often from Galicia. Guards were not permitted to move about unarmed or alone and so were usually in pairs (la pareja). Thus ‘their relations with the working classes were of open hostility and suspicion. Living as they did among their enemies, they became unusually ready to shoot.’23

The Civil Guard responded to any social upheaval with aggression. In particular, signs of anarchist ideology were perceived as an especially pernicious and barbaric foreign doctrine. Anarchists were seen as ‘harmful beasts’, worse than common criminals because of their utopian ambitions for society. So the destructive influence of ‘those who have ideas’ had to be eliminated. Anarchists were the enemies of society and especially of the Civil Guards.24

Ford believed that bad government and poor communications were the principal cause of poverty and economic backwardness.

It has, indeed, required the utmost ingenuity and bad government of man to neutralise the prodigality of advantages which Providence has lavished on this highly favoured land, and which, while under the dominion of the Romans and Moors, resembled an Eden, a garden of plenty and delight, when in the words of an old author, there was nothing idle, nothing barren in Spain – ‘nihil otiosum, nihil sterile in Hispania’. A sad change has come over this fair vision, and now the bulk of the Peninsula offers a picture of neglect and desolation, moral and physical, which it is painful to contemplate.

He added, ‘Spain is a land which never yet has been able to construct or support even a sufficient number of common roads or canals for her poor and passive commerce and circulation.’25

For Ford, the essence of bad government in Spain was corruption. ‘Public poverty’, he wrote,

is the curse of the land, and all empleados or persons in office excuse themselves on dire necessity … Some allowance, therefore, may be made for the rapacity which, with very few exceptions, prevails; the regular salaries, always inadequate, are generally in arrear, and the public servants, poor devils, swear that they are forced to pay themselves by conniving at defrauding the government; this few scruple to do, as all know it to be an unjust one, and that it can afford it; indeed, as all are offenders alike, the guilt of the offence is scarcely admitted. Where robbing and jobbing are the universal order of the day, one rascal keeps another in countenance … A man who does not feather his nest when in place, is not thought honest, but a fool; es preciso, que cada uno coma de su oficio. It is necessary, nay, a duty, as in the East, that all should live by their office; and as office is short and insecure, no time or means is neglected in making up a purse …

He offers an example:

We remember calling on a Spaniard who held the highest office in a chief city of Andalucia. As we came into his cabinet a cloaked personage was going out; the great man’s table was covered with gold ounces, which he was shovelling complacently into a drawer, gloating on the glorious haul … This gentleman, during the Sistema, or Riego constitution, had, with other 1oyalists, been turned out of office; and, having been put to the greatest hardships, was losing no time in taking prudent and laudable precautions to avert all similar calamity for the future. His practices were perfectly well known in the town, where people simply observed, ‘Está atesorando, he is laying up treasures,’ – as every one of them would most certainly have done, had they been in his fortunate position … Donde no hay abundancia, no hay observancia. The empty sack cannot stand upright, nor was ever a sack made in Spain into which gain and honour could be stowed away together; honra y provecho, no caben en un saco o techo; here virtue itself succumbs to poverty, induced by more than half a century of misgovernment, let alone the ruin caused by Buonaparte’s invasion, to which domestic troubles and civil wars have been added.26

For all that Spanish intellectuals resented the belittling of their country by foreign writers, there were those who did it themselves, albeit in a different way. There was a substantial literature that lamented Spain’s loss of empire, uninterrupted military failures, deep-rooted political instability and economic backwardness.27 In November 1930, the intellectual Manuel Azaña, a future prime minister and president of the Second Republic, echoed Richard Ford’s judgement. He described the political system as functioning with two mechanisms, despotic authoritarianism and corruption. The great practitioner of the first was the reactionary General Ramón María Narváez, who was seven times Prime Minister between 1844 and 1868. He was notorious for remarking on his deathbed: ‘I have no enemies. I have shot them all.’ The wizard of electoral falsification was Luis José Sartorius, who, in the 1840s and 1850s, according to Azaña, ‘elevated political corruption into a system and became a master in the art of fabricating parliamentary majorities’. During their collaboration, in Azaña’s view, ‘the most illustrious elements of Spanish society applied themselves to squeezing profit out of politics’.28

The civil war of 1936–9 represented the most determined effort by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reforming project which might threaten their privileged position. The enduring dominance of reactionary forces reflected the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. The painfully slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain accounted for the existence of a numerically small and politically feeble commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were broken. The power of the monarchy, the landed nobility and the Church remained more or less intact well into the twentieth century. Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth-century Spain did not see the establishment of an incipiently democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. The legal basis for capitalism was established albeit without there being a political revolution and with the survival of elements of feudalism. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that its industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the political pattern established by Prussia.

Within this authoritarian model, until the 1950s capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian except for Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country in the north. Spanish agriculture is immensely variegated in terms of climate, crops and land-holding systems. There have long existed areas of commercially successful small and medium-sized farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the most politically influential sectors were, broadly speaking, the large landowners. In the main, the latifundios, the great estates, are concentrated in the arid central and southern regions of New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, although there are also substantial latifundios to be found scattered throughout parts of Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy saw occasional tentative challenges by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes. However, reliant on the repressive power of the oligarchy, their efforts met with little success. Until well into the 1950s, the urban haute bourgeoisie was obliged to play the role of junior partner in a working coalition with the great latifundistas. Despite sporadic industrialization and a steady growth in the national importance of the political representatives of the northern industrialists, power remained squarely in the hands of the landowners.

In Spain, industrialization and political modernization did not go hand in hand. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were diverted. The desamortización (disentailment) saw the expropriation of great swathes of Church and municipal lands and the lifting of mortmain, feudal restrictions on land transactions. The process had begun piecemeal in the late eighteenth century but was speeded up in 1836 by the Liberal Prime Minister Juan de Dios Álvarez Mendizábal. He had changed his name from Álvarez Méndez to hide the fact that he came from a Jewish family that sold second-hand clothes in Cadiz. He was a self-made businessman who had acquired a reputation as a financial genius as a result of having made a fortune in London. He saw the expropriation, and sale, of the lands of religious orders as a way of resolving royal financial problems created by the Carlist Wars of the 1830s. Mendizábal believed that he was thereby laying the basis for the future prosperity of Spain by creating a self-sustaining smallholding peasantry, ‘a copious family of property owners’.29 However, in the interests of the crown, the confiscated properties were sold at auction in large blocks, which meant that they were far beyond the means of even existing smallholders. Moreover, the fact that the lots were sold well below their market price, and often on credit which could be obtained only by the wealthy, ensured that one of the consequences was the consolidation of great estates. The other was that the privatization of property brought into cultivation land that had previously been idle or poorly cultivated. However, this was not enough to meet the needs of a steadily growing population, especially in the south.30

In 1841, General Baldomero Espartero extended the expropriations to all Church properties. Huge tracts of entailed ecclesiastical and common lands were liberated to pay for the Liberal war effort. This process was intensified after 1855 by the Ley Pascual Madoz which opened the way to the acquisition of common lands by private individuals, often simply by a combination of legal subterfuge and strong-arm tactics. The landed aristocracy benefited because their lands were taken out of mortmain but not expropriated. Thus they could buy and sell land and rationalize their holdings. By 1875, three-quarters of land that forty years previously had belonged to the Church or municipalities was in private hands. This not only diminished any impetus towards industrialization but, by helping to expand the great estates, also created intense social hatreds in the south. The newly released land was bought up by the more efficient among existing landlords, and also by lawyers and members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie who were attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and, unlike their inefficient predecessors, the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment and saw land as a productive asset to be exploited for maximum profit. Having said that, neither the old nor the new landowners were prepared to invest in new techniques. The judgement on the ‘general dilapidation’ made by Richard Ford in the 1840s would still be valid ninety years later: ‘The landed proprietor of the Peninsula is little better than a weed of the soil; he has never observed, nor scarcely permitted others to observe, the vast capabilities which might and ought to be called into action.’31 One obvious consequence was an increase in thefts of domestic animals and assaults on bakeries and other shops. That is not to say that all crimes of violence were responses to social deprivation. Many others were sexual and honour crimes.32

The capital of the merchants of the great seaports and of Madrid bankers was diverted away from industry and into land purchases both for speculative purposes and also because of the social prestige that came with it.33 Investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy weakened their commitment to reform. The weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was exposed during the period from 1868 to 1873, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. Population growth in the middle of the century had increased pressure on the land. Unskilled labourers from country districts flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who survived on the edges of society. This was especially the case in Barcelona, in large part because of the collapse of the wine industry as a result of the phylloxera crisis after 1880. Its population more than doubled between 1860, when it constituted an eighth of the Catalan total, and 1900, by which time it had swelled to more than a quarter. The living standards of the urban lower-middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers were almost as wretched as those of the unskilled labourers. One of the most explosive areas was the Catalan textile industry where the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding in insanitary living conditions and starvation wages – produced acute social tensions and, soon, anarchist terrorism. When cotton supplies were choked off by the American Civil War in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment was exacerbated by a depression in railway construction that saw the urban working class pushed to desperation. Until well into the twentieth century, Madrid governments, representing as they did agrarian interests, had little or no understanding of the problems of a growing and militant industrial proletariat in Catalonia. Consequently, the social problem was dealt with entirely as a public order issue. Of the eighty-six years between 1814 and 1900, for sixty of them Catalonia was under a state of exception, which effectively meant military rule. Moreover, a quarter of the nation’s military strength was stationed in Catalonia, a region containing approximately 10 per cent of the Spanish population. This was directed as much at rural Carlism as at urban anarchism.34

In 1868, growing working-class discontent linked with middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy as well as financial and sexual scandals involving Queen Isabel II. In September 1868, a number of pronunciamientos culminating in one by General Juan Prim coincided with urban riots. This led to the overthrow and exile of the Queen. The two forces driving the so-called glorious revolution were ultimately inimical. The liberal middle classes and army officers had aimed to amend the constitutional structure of the country. Now, they were alarmed to find that they had awakened a mass revolutionary movement for social change and opened the way to the six years of instability known as the sexenio revolucionario. To add to the instability, between 1868 and 1878 Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba, was riven by a rebellion against the metropolis. In November 1870, Prim finally offered the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Amadeo had neither the political nor even the linguistic skills to cope with the problems that he faced. On 30 December, the very day of the new King’s arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated. From the beginning, Amadeo faced opposition from republicans, from supporters of Isabel II’s thirteen-year-old son Alfonso and from the Carlists. In 1872, there began the third Carlist War. A successful rebellion across the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the establishment of a kind of Carlist state, disorganized and based on religiously inspired banditry.

In the Catalan countryside, the majority of small landowners and farmers were Carlist, not just because of the movement’s clericalism but also because of its commitment to local freedoms and ultimately devolution. Thus in Catalonia, and also in the Basque Country, the Church’s links to the Carlists fed into support for independence movements in both regions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a revival of Catalanist sentiment, of Catalan literature and of the language whose official use had been banned since the eighteenth century. This was intensified by the federalist movement from 1868 to the collapse of the First Republic. Nowhere was federalism as strong as in Catalonia. Another factor was almost certainly resentment of the lack of Catalan influence on the central government. Between 1833 and 1901, there were 902 men in ministerial office. Only twenty-four of them, 2.6 per cent of the total, were Catalan. In consequence, Catalanism was to be found not just in the rural areas but also in Barcelona, where it found enthusiastic adherents among the wealthy upper-middle classes. A loose federation of middle- and upper-class Catalanist groups formed the Unió Catalanista in 1892. Its programme, known as the Bases de Manresa, called for the restoration of an autonomous government, a separate tax system, the protection of Catalan industry and the institution of Catalan as an official language. With the exception of a brief period from 1906 to 1909, from 1868 until the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s Catalan nationalism would be a largely conservative movement.35

Faced with civil war, a colonial revolt and a deeply divided political establishment, Amadeo abdicated in despair on 11 February 1873. With the establishment divided, elections in May saw a republican victory and the proclamation of the First Republic on 1 June. Under the presidency of the Catalan Federalist Francesc Pi y Margall, a decentralized structure was adopted and Spain was divided into eleven autonomous cantons. A series of bold reforms were proposed, including the abolition of conscription, the separation of Church and state, the provision of free compulsory education for all, the eight-hour day, the regulation of female and child labour, the expropriation of uncultivated estates and the establishment of peasant collectives. The combination of rapidly established cantons, land seizures, a violent revolutionary general strike in Alcoy, the Carlist rebellion, the Cuban unrest, an outburst of anti-clericalism and the alarm provoked by the planned reforms ensured that Pi y Margall’s federal regime was perceived as an intolerable threat to the established order. The republican government was overthrown by the artillery General Manuel Pavia y Rodríguez de Alburquerque, who crushed the Cantonalist movement and established a more conservative government under General Francisco Serrano. Although the Carlists were on the verge of defeat, Serrano was unable to consolidate a conservative republic. On 29 December 1874, in Sagunto, the dynamic young Brigadier General Arsenio Martínez Campos proclaimed as King of Spain the now seventeen-year-old Prince Alfonso. One of the least scurrilous rumours concerning the sex life of his mother Queen Isabel II was that Alfonso’s father had been Enrique Puigmoltó, a Valencian captain of the Engineers. Subsequent to his mother going into exile, Alfonso was educated, successively, in Paris, in Vienna and at Sandhurst.36

On 26 June 1878, Alfonso XII’s wife María de las Mercedes de Orleans died of typhus two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was devastated and his consequent plunge into drink and sexual adventures did little for his own precarious health. Indeed, his wife’s death was merely one of a series of misfortunes. Efforts to quell rebellion in Cuba would eventually lead to the loss of 200,000 lives and an unsustainable drain on state resources. In August 1878, there was a minor republican uprising in Navalmoral de la Mata in Cáceres. It was easily suppressed, but the fact that it had happened at all hinted at underlying problems. On 15 October that same year, Alfonso XII was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by Joan Oliva i Moncasí, an anarchist cooper from Labra in the province of Tarragona. Oliva fired twice with a double-barrelled pistol but missed. He was executed by garrote vil on 4 January 1879. Fourteen months later, on 30 December, there was a second assassination attempt. The King had remarried only a month before, on 29 November. He was returning from a walk in the Retiro with his new wife, Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena, when a twenty-year-old pastry chef from Galicia, Francisco Otero González, shot at them. Although he also missed, on 14 April 1880 Otero was similarly executed by garrote vil.37

For now, Arsenio Martínez Campos was achieving some success against the Cuban insurgents. By dint of a combination of energetic counter-guerrilla tactics, bribery and conciliatory negotiations, he had achieved the Peace of Zanjón. As Governor General, he urged thoroughgoing reform of education and the economy and especially of the Cuban tax burden and of Spanish tariffs on sugar, tobacco and coffee imports from the island. Cánovas was seriously alarmed because the proposed measures constituted a major threat to the Spanish economy. His solution was to invite Martínez Campos in June 1879 to form a government which he intended to control from the shadows. Cánovas’s electoral fixer, Francisco Romero Robledo, had friends among the Cuban plantation owners who were bitterly opposed to Martínez Campos’s proposed reforms and did everything possible to undermine the new Prime Minister. Deeply frustrated, Martínez Campos resigned a mere six months later on 7 December and was replaced by Cánovas. In the course of 1880 and 1881, only a few of Martínez Campos’s reforms were implemented, which guaranteed that the Cuban War would be reignited. On 7 February 1881, Alfonso XII exercised his royal prerogative by withdrawing confidence from Cánovas and effectively making Práxedes Mateo Sagasta Prime Minister by giving him a decree to dissolve the Cortes and call new elections.38 Little changed with the fall of Cánovas. Spain’s domestic economic problems ensured that Martínez Campos, who had become Sagasta’s Minister of War, remained unable to implement his proposed reforms. In addition to the plantation owners, wheat growers feared the loss of Cuban markets to North American producers. Catalan industrialists and the footwear manufacturers of Valencia and Alicante also relied on protected Cuban markets.

In many respects, the chaotic period 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order and establish a short-lived Republic, the liberal bourgeoisie was frightened out of its reforming ambitions by the spectre of proletarian disorder. When the army restored the monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, the middle classes abandoned their reformist ideals in return for social peace. The subsequent relation of forces between the landed oligarchy, the urban bourgeoisie and the remainder of the population was perfectly represented by the so-called Restoration political system created in 1876. Indeed, it would differ little in composition from what had gone before except that parties would alternate in power peacefully rather than by a combination of insurrections and military coups. A provisional government was established under the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who quickly set about drafting a new Constitution. After sixty years of civil wars, disastrous rule by generals and political corruption, he was convinced that what was necessary was a period of tranquillity in which industries might develop.

Cultured and widely read, Cánovas believed that the prosperity enjoyed by the dominant power of the day, Great Britain, was the result of the stability provided by its two-party system. His admiration of the British parliamentary system allegedly extended to learning by heart some of the speeches of Gladstone and Disraeli. In a bid to emulate British success, he had set out to copy, outwardly at least, what he believed to be its secret. He was determined both to exclude the army from political power and to run no risks of a radical electorate undermining his plan to consolidate the recently restored monarchy. Thus an apparent working model of the British system was elaborated whereby the Conservative Party under Cánovas and the Liberal Party under Sagasta would take turns in power. The tool necessary for this to function without interference by the electorate was electoral falsification.39 The system came to be known as the turno pacífico, that is to say the peaceful alternation in power of the two monarchist or ‘dynastic’ parties. Thus the turno, in the words of the liberal reformer Gumersindo de Azcárate, far from replicating the British system was merely ‘a ridiculous parody in which everything is a farce and a lie’.40 Salvador de Madariaga wrote that Cánovas ‘relied on force and fiction’ and described him as ‘personally honest and honourable’ but ‘the greatest corrupter of political life which modern Spain has known’.41

The micro-managing of elections ensured that, for the next half-century, power would remain in the hands of the same families that had held it before 1876. Entire dynasties, fathers, sons and sons-in-law, brothers and brothers-in-law would monopolize parliamentary seats. Such would be the case of the family of Álvaro de Figueroa, the Conde de Romanones, in Guadalajara with tentacles in Baeza and Úbeda in Jaén, Castuera in Badajoz and Cartagena in Murcia. An equally striking example was the family of Eugenio Montero Ríos, the main cacique of the four provinces of Galicia, who was Minister of Development from 1885 to 1886, Minister of Justice between December 1892 and July 1893 and eventually Prime Minister in 1905. From his base in Lourizán in Pontevedra, he used his influence to promote the political careers of his sons and sons-in-law. Sagasta was equally watchful of the parliamentary welfare of his sons-in-law. Francisco Silvela y de Le Vielleuze, Cánovas’s eventual successor at the head of the Conservative Party, was the all-powerful cacique of Ávila. Although he criticized the electoral falsification of the turno pacífico, he placed members of his family in some of the most important government positions. Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, the omnipotent cacique of Murcia, similarly promoted his family. Indeed, it was not uncommon for parliamentary seats, senior government administrative posts and sometimes even government ministries to be virtually bequeathed from father to son.42

The two political parties did not have strongly defined ideologies or policies but were rather groups of notables representing the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy. The Conservatives looked mainly to the concerns of the wine and olive growers of the south while the Liberals protected the interests of the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were known as the ‘dynastic’ parties because they were both committed to the monarchy and were not divided on issues regarding the social order or the sanctity of property. As their name suggested, the Liberals were less authoritarian and, unlike the firmly Catholic Conservatives, inclined to be rather more critical of the Church. The main differences were to do with trade. The Conservatives favoured the free trade required by their constituency of export fruit growers and wine producers while the Liberals represented the needs of the inefficient wheat growers who wanted protection from the great international producers of Canada, Argentina and Australia. To give an example of the problem – in Barcelona in 1884, some 60 per cent of all wheat consumed came from Castile, yet two years later it was a mere 10 per cent. The various components of the northern industrial bourgeoisie were barely represented within the system but, for the moment, were content, as Cánovas had hoped, to devote their activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the early twentieth century, they began to organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers tended to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, in their case to protect the Spanish market against cheaper British and Indian competition. In contrast, the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders. Nevertheless, because of its lack of representation, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was forced to act as little more than a pressure group. Thus, despite having interests in common with the agrarian protectionists, they could be attacked by Liberals and Conservatives alike as the mouthpieces of Catalan nationalism.43

It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression unless they were in the interests of the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. Rafael Shaw, an English journalist who lived in Barcelona, wrote in 1910:

Ministerial changes in Spain are the outcome of a tacit arrangement made some thirty years ago between Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the then leaders of the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and continued by their successors, that each side should have its fair share of the loaves and fishes. After one party had been in office three or four years it was agreed by common consent that the time had come for the other side to have a turn. Thus, as Major Martín Hume says: ‘Dishonest Governments are faced in sham battle by dishonest Oppositions, and parliamentary institutions, instead of being a public check upon abuses, are simply a mask behind which a large number of politicians may carry on their nefarious trade with impunity.’

Shaw explained the impotence of the electorate to change this system as the consequence of ‘the tentacles of the octopus of corruption which holds the whole country in its grip. The simple fact is that the great mass of the people have no voice at all in the election of their representatives. Nominally voting is free: actually it is not.’44

In theory, governments were in power for five years but in practice would resign because of defeat on a particular vote, hostile public opinion, the loss of party support for the Prime Minister or some intractable social or economic problem on the horizon. The King, in theory, as the mouthpiece of public opinion or, in reality, on the basis of his prejudices or caprice, had the power to change governments because he could force an administration to resign. He could then decide to whom to grant a royal decree of dissolution of the Cortes. The rather frivolous Alfonso XIII would abuse this power.45 The newly chosen Prime Minister, often but not always the leader of the other party, would form a government. Then, he and his Minister of the Interior would spend the next few months arranging an electoral victory that both justified his party’s presence in power and gave the outgoing party a decent presence in the Cortes. When the petitions of both parties had been examined, lists of candidates would be drawn up that would ensure a substantial majority for the new Prime Minister. This process was known as the encasillado, each candidate who was selected to win a seat placed in the pigeonhole (casilla). The agreement of both parties was forthcoming. Sometimes results were faked in the Ministry of the Interior but more often they were fixed at the local level. The task of ensuring the election of the selected candidates fell to the provincial governor of each province. He would then negotiate with the local town bosses or caciques. They would deliver the vote for the government’s candidates in return for government patronage. The candidates chosen in Madrid, who were then ‘parachuted’ into the constituency, were known as cuneros. On average about half of successful candidates were cuneros, that is to say with no links to the area that they would represent. Nevertheless, sometimes the local oligarchs would accept a cunero willingly because his political influence boded well for the area.46

The two parties thus lived within a non-aggression pact which made a mockery of the apparently democratic system because the formation of governments had nothing to do with the will of the electorate. Only after governments had been appointed by the King were elections held. The results were then carefully arranged by the party in power and produced, on average, 65 per cent majorities. Such apparently humiliating defeats for one side were rendered acceptable by the certainty of an equally spectacular victory next time. Between them the two dynastic parties held 98 per cent of parliamentary seats in 1884 and 83 per cent in 1901. The republicans and the Carlists had relatively little representation. The relatively even alternation was illustrated by the fact that, between 1879 and 1901, of all the deputies ‘elected’ 1,748 were Conservatives and 1,761 were Liberals.47 Electoral falsification ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened. The system rested on the social power of local town bosses or caciques. In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique could be a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. The threat of foreclosure could secure votes. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was usually the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore whose family did not starve. The cacique thus could acquire the votes of individuals by many means, ranging from the intimidation that came from ruthless control of the local labour market to the granting of favours and bribes.

Control of the local administrative and judicial apparatus enabled the cacique to provide favourable judgements in land disputes, jobs, reduction of tax bills or exemptions from military service for someone within the clientelist network. Each change of government would see a massive changeover of jobs from the most humble doormen and roadsweepers to civil governors, judges and senior civil servants, all of whom were expected to vote as instructed.48 After the elections of 1875 had been arranged by Cánovas’s Minister of the Interior, Francisco Romero Robledo, Sir Austen Henry Layard, the British Ambassador to Spain from 1869 to 1877, reported to the Foreign Office that virtually every salaried placeholder had been replaced by a supporter of Alfonso XII.49 There was no permanent civil service or judiciary owing its service to the nation. The system itself fostered corruption by ensuring that public service was for private benefit. Thus the tradition which endures to this day was established whereby few of those who become mayors (alcaldes) leave the town hall poorer than when they entered.

General Eduardo López de Ochoa wrote in 1930 that the majority of judges and magistrates owed their places to political intrigues and passed sentences in the interests of their patrons. The same applied right down to secretaries and court clerks. It was said of the great cacique Juan de la Cierva that no leaf fell in the province of Murcia without his permission. López de Ochoa claimed that La Cierva had several judges of the Supreme Court in his pocket and could always count on judgments favourable to himself or his friends. López Ochoa quoted a law professor who had stated that ‘larceny and robbery existed in Spain only in regard to amounts lower than one hundred thousand pesetas. Above that figure, they were called financial affairs.’ In any issue, civil or criminal, that went through the courts, a sum had to be put aside to grease the wheels of ‘justice’.50

Similar accusations to those made about Juan de la Cierva were made regarding numerous other powerful caciques who also controlled entire provinces: Álvaro de Figueroa y Torres, the Conde de Romanones in Guadalajara; the wheat baron Germán Gamazo in Valladolid; Juan Poveda and Antonio Torres Orduña in Alicante; Carlos O’Donnell, Duque de Tetuán, in Castellón; Pedro Rodríguez de la Borbolla in Seville; Manuel Burgos y Mazo in Huelva; Gabino Bugallal in Orense or Augusto González Besada in Lugo.51 With the tax collector, the alcalde and the judge at his command, the cacique was able to take over parcels of common lands, let his cattle graze on his neighbours’ lands, divert water away from the land of his enemies and towards his own or that of his friends and have works done on his property at the expense of the municipality. A landowning lawyer from Almería commented: ‘Four pickpockets in top hats and four thugs usually make up the top brass of a party.’ In a similar vein, the one-time Minister of Justice Pedro José Moreno Rodríguez claimed that ‘those that the Civil Guard used to pursue now work as bodyguards for the authorities’. It was a symptom of how openly the system worked that despite the press publishing the most corrosive accounts of caciquismo, the outrage of public opinion changed nothing. The general view was that the lower orders of the caciquismo system, the alcaldes and secretaries, had often spent time in prison and, if they had not, their liberty had been maintained through the influence of the caciques that controlled the local judiciary.52

At a provincial level, the cacique was a highly privileged middleman between the government and the local vote. The incoming Minister of the Interior chose the provincial civil governors and he squared the caciques.53 The influence that permitted the cacique to supply the required votes to the government depended in part on the distribution of patronage that was provided by the public purse. This might take the form of the rerouting of a road or railway or the building of a bridge that would extend his influence over a town or even an entire province. The loyalty of the cacique’s clientele also depended on the protection of family and friends from the law, from taxation or from conscription. It has been calculated that the more than a third of the correspondence written by the principal politicians of the Restoration period consisted of requests for votes or letters of recommendation for those whose votes were required. Moreover, the bulk of such correspondence was written just before or just after elections. It is said that the homes of Sagasta and Cánovas in Madrid were besieged on a daily basis by aspirants for government jobs or favours such as public works in their district. So frequently were roads built for the convenience of local caciques that they came to be known as parliamentary highways.54

On occasion, over-zealous local officials would produce majorities comprising more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, after the introduction of universal male suffrage, casual falsification became ever more difficult and, if the requisite number of votes could not be mustered, the caciques sometimes registered the dead in the local cemetery as voters. In Madrid in 1896, fictitious voters, known as Lázaros, used the names of deceased electors. More frequently, they sent gangs of paid voters from village to village to vote for the government party. In 1879, Romero Robledo used the technique of ‘flying squads’ – 200 Aragonese raced around Madrid from polling station to polling station using their votes. It was said that one man had voted forty-two times. The alteration of the electoral list or the addition or subtraction of votes was known as pucherazo or tupinada, the packing of the pot. Sometimes, announcements were placed in the local press announcing, falsely, that a rival had withdrawn his candidacy. More common was to change the timing of elections so that hostile voters would not arrive in time or having thugs present to intimidate rival voters. At other times, the voting urns were placed where voters would not want to go, in a fever hospital, a pigsty or on a high roof. In 1891, in one voting station in Murcia, the supervisor obliged voters to pass their voting slips through a window so that he could change them at his convenience. Advantage could also be taken of some who simply did not bother to vote. If the vote was not going as planned, there were thugs on hand to raid the polling station and seize the voting urns. Sometimes, those likely to vote for the unofficial candidate would be thrown in jail or else threatened with investigation of their tax status. Most common of all was simply the falsification of the count.55

The USS Maine, blown up in Havana harbour, the excuse for the Spanish-American war of 1898. (The History Collection/Alamy)

2
Violence, Corruption and the Slide to Disaster

The consequence of the turno system was that politics became an exclusive minuet danced by a small privileged minority. As well as the caciques who were committed to one or other of the parties, the Conservative La Cierva or the Liberal Gamazo, there were amenable caciques who would work for both parties. This is illustrated by the oft-related story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local rich men’s club or Casino. Leafing through them, he declared to the expectant hangers-on: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. Their apathy allowed the local authorities to fabricate the results without too much opposition. Violent resistance guaranteed arrest, torture and perhaps execution. From 1876, the electorate consisted of men over the age of twenty-five who could afford to register to vote, by paying a 25 peseta tax on property or a 50 peseta tax on their economic activities. For the elections of 1879, 1881, 1884 and 1886, the electorate numbered approximately 850,000. The introduction of universal male suffrage in 1890 extended the electorate to just under four million for the elections of 1891, 1893, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1901 and 1903. By increasing the threat of the electorate using its votes in its own interests, the reform also intensified the use of electoral corruption in the interests of property.1

However, the electoral list had little to do with those whose votes were actually registered. Control of the local judiciary facilitated the removal of enemies and the addition of friends. In 1879, around 40 per cent of those who voted in Barcelona were government functionaries whose jobs depended on how they voted. In 1881, in Valencia, 75 per cent of those that voted had no right to do so. In 1884, Romero Robledo managed to reduce the potential electorate in Madrid from 33,205 to 12,250. That alcaldes were government nominees ensured that they would be willing electoral agents. Those who refused could simply be removed or forced to resign by threatening them with exorbitant fines for invented or trivial offences such as failure to respond to letters or to introduce the metric system.2

This all worked best in poor rural areas, particularly in Galicia and Andalusia, because the votes of a poverty-stricken and largely illiterate electorate could be falsified easily. Accordingly, the official turnout in rural areas was recorded as an utterly implausible 80 per cent. The cities, where it was so much more difficult for the techniques of caciquismo to be applied, recorded much lower electoral participation. As the century wore on, votes in the cities were increasingly the only ones that could be accepted as genuine. Thus, to neutralize them, the ministers of the interior of the dynastic parties had no compunction about resorting to gerrymandering, flagrantly changing electoral boundaries to swamp towns with the falsified votes of surrounding rural areas. This was possible while the Cortes was small and constituencies large. Even then, backward Galicia was over-represented in the Cortes while industrial Catalonia was dramatically under-represented. Between 1876 and 1887, there were only 210 deputies in the Cortes. After 1891, there were 348. By the turn of the century, urbanization saw an increasing influx of deputies from non-dynastic parties and even republicans.3

The quest for government jobs went on unabated. The queues of place-seekers outside his house obliged Sagasta on occasion to sleep in an hotel. Within two weeks of coming to power, he had replaced all the under-secretaries of all the ministries, virtually all the directors general in the ministries of the Navy, of Overseas Territories, of Finance and of Development, seven in the Ministry of the Interior and four in the Ministry of War, forty-seven civil governors, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and three of the eight captains general of the military regions. Sagasta’s election fixer, Venancio González, emulated Romero Robledo and arranged a substantial Liberal majority in the late-summer elections of 1881. The immediate consequence was that, at provincial and municipal level, the number of sacked bureaucrats was legion.4

Under Cánovas, gambling casinos were illegal but were allowed to function when the appropriate bribes were paid. In Madrid, for instance, each casino paid 35,000 pesetas to the Civil Governor of Madrid, the Marqués de Heredia Spínola. Theoretically, the money was for charitable purposes, but there was no auditing. Heredia’s successor, the Conde de Xiquena, tried to close the casinos, only for the owners to mount a bombing campaign in June 1881 which severely injured a number of children. It was later alleged by Xiquena that Romero Robledo had been one of the beneficiaries of the bribes paid by the gambling bosses. The accusation had to be abandoned when Cánovas threatened to bring the Cortes to its knees by leading a walkout of the Conservative Party.5

While the Liberals failed to introduce significant reform, working-class opposition to the system was growing. The Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (FTRE), the Spanish section of the International Workingmen’s Association or ‘First International’, began to organize openly. It soon had 57,000 members, concentrated mainly in Andalusia and Catalonia, but was split over the relative efficacy of strikes and terrorism. The nucleus of the Socialist movement, the Asociación del Arte de Imprimir, was gaining ground through a successful strike by typesetters in 1882.6 In January 1884, Alfonso XII had brought back Cánovas. His Minister of the Interior, Romero Robledo, presided over notoriously corrupt elections on 27 April that year and secured a Conservative majority of 295 seats against 90. Cánovas’s government faced numerous problems – military subversion, the ongoing concerns about the alleged anarchist secret society called the Mano Negra, a cholera epidemic, unrest in Cuba and the fact that the King was facing a progressively more debilitating battle with virulent tuberculosis. In fact, Alfonso did not look after himself, failing even to wear warm clothing on hunting trips in bad weather.

Armed with such a big majority, the new cabinet’s instinctive response to most problems was reactionary. Cánovas himself was seen as intolerably arrogant. The Cuban situation was worsened by the new Minister of Overseas Territories, Manuel Aguirre de Tejada, refusing to contemplate the abolition of slavery. This was not unconnected with the interests of Romero Robledo, who was the son-in-law of the fabulously rich sugar magnate Julián de Zulueta y Amondo. Known as ‘the prince of the slavers’, the Basque Zulueta had huge plantations and three sugar mills in Cuba and others in Álava.7 That connection explains why Romero Robledo would later, in November 1891, seek to be named Minister for Overseas Territories. Shortly after the 1884 elections, a minor republican uprising at Santa Coloma de Farners near Girona was easily suppressed. However, when courts martial failed to hand out death sentences for the two leaders, a major and a captain, the government went ahead and had them shot despite widespread protests, including from the King. On 20 November 1884, a minor student demonstration in favour of a professor who had been excommunicated for making a speech in favour of the theories of Charles Darwin was repressed with some violence by the Civil Guard. On Christmas Eve, a series of earthquakes in Andalusia left thousands homeless, many of whom died from cold and others from the cholera epidemic. A visit to the affected areas left the King disgusted with what he had seen of government neglect. He also ignored the Prime Minister’s advice and visited areas affected by cholera.

Alfonso XII complained to the German envoy that Cánovas ‘knows everything, decides everything and interferes in everything, even in military matters of which he knows nothing and that he gives no consideration to the King’s views and wishes’. He believed that Cánovas was using funds that were needed to modernize the army’s weaponry in order to fortify harbours because there were more opportunities for graft in construction. On 25 November 1885, Alfonso died, aged just twenty-seven. Apparently, Cánovas had been made aware of the seriousness of the King’s condition by his doctor, who had told him that a warmer climate would probably prolong Alfonso’s life. However, he had sworn the doctor to secrecy lest news of the King’s weakness inflame the republican movement.8 His wife María Cristina became Queen Regent and some months later gave birth to a child, the future Alfonso XIII. To ensure that the system established by Cánovas would endure, the two party leaders met at the Palace of the Pardo and signed a pact that consolidated the so-called turno.

In the south, land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as Andalusian labourers came under the influence of anarchism. This was partly the consequence of the fact that, in November 1868, Giuseppe Fanelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, had been sent to Spain by the First International. His oratory found fertile ground and soon inspired his own evangelists to take anarchism to village after village. Part of the message was that alcoholism, the frequenting of prostitutes and gambling were degrading. Alongside the advocacy of austerity, Fanelli also argued that justice and equality should be seized by direct action. This struck a chord among the starving day labourers or braceros and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fanelli’s eager converts took part in outbreaks of violence, crop burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, these revolutionary outbursts were easily crushed and alternated with periods of apathy.9

Commenting in 1910 on why revolution was slow in developing, Rafael Shaw wrote:

The patient submission of the labourer to conditions which he believes to be unalterable is partly the result of three hundred years of corrupt government, during which he has been steadily squeezed to provide money for the wars, luxuries, and amusements of the governing classes; partly of the terror of the Inquisition and the tradition of silence that it has left behind it; partly of Oriental fatalism; but is certainly not due to the animal indifference and stupidity to which his ‘betters’ attribute it. The peasant refrains from open complaint, not because he is contented and has nothing to complain of, but because long experience has taught him the uselessness and the danger of protest. He may offend his employer and lose his place, or, still worse, he may offend the Church and the Jesuits, in which case he will be a marked man, and can never hope to get permanent employment again.

Another reason for the lack of protest against the ease with which corruption dominated the political system was that, at the turn of the century, around 75 per cent of the population was illiterate. Thousands of villages had no school at all. Even in Madrid and Barcelona, there were fewer than half of the schools required by law. Where there were schools, attendance was not imposed and schoolteachers were poorly paid and often not paid at all. Rudimentary literacy skills were taught in the army.10 At first, hunger and injustice had found their champions in the banditry for which the south was notorious, but the day labourers had not been long in finding a more sophisticated form of rebellion.11 When they came, the inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were repressed violently by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.

The owners of the great estates, unwilling to engage in artificial fertilization or expensive irrigation projects, preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros.12 The latifundios were usually administered by bailiffs, who took every advantage of a mass of surplus labour. When seasonal work was available, the braceros and jornaleros were obliged to work long hours, often from sun-up to sun-down. Work was often available only far from home which meant having to sleep in insanitary huts provided by the landowners. The labourers endured harsh working conditions on starvation wages and lengthy periods of unemployment. When the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age sold up and the common lands were enclosed, most of the social palliatives which had alleviated rural misery were curtailed. The encroachment on the lands of religious orders or the sleepier aristocrats saw the collection of windfall crops or firewood, the occasional hunting of rabbits or birds, the watering of domestic animals, which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval, come to an end. Paternalism was replaced by repression. Thus was intensified the process of the proletarianization of a great army of landless labourers. The powder keg of resentment was kept in check by the institutionalized violence of the Civil Guard and armed thugs hired by the bailiffs.

Other devices were used, such as conspiracies fabricated or wildly exaggerated in order to justify the repression of the principal working-class organization, the FTRE. Its weekly journal, the Revista Social, was subject to censorship and occasional confiscation. In the last week of September 1882, the FTRE’s second congress was celebrated in Seville. A total of 209 sections and nearly 50,000 members were represented, mainly from Andalusia (30,000) and from Catalonia (13,000). The FTRE was portrayed by the authorities as a band of bloodthirsty revolutionaries. In fact, the organization’s immediate objective was the eight-hour day and its long-term ambition the collectivization of agriculture and industry. However, this relative moderation was undermined by the fact that members of the FTRE were being discriminated against by landowners and industrialists. In numerous towns, the alcaldes banned public meetings and the Civil Guard treated private ones as subversive. Accordingly, a breakaway group, Los Desheredados, advocated secret revolutionary action and the use of terrorism.13

A drought in the summer of 1881 led to crop failures across Andalusia but especially in the provinces of Cadiz and Seville. The consequent hunger the following winter saw landless labourers and their families begging in the streets of the towns. There were dramatic increases in the number of deaths from malnutrition and related illnesses such as measles, particularly among children. There were violent attacks on property, crop burning and sheep rustling, thefts from bakeries and other food shops and cases of banditry.14 There were some towns where the authorities vainly tried to raise funds to ameliorate the predicament of the starving labourers and isolated incidents of charitable donations for the poor. In some cases, municipal resources were used to finance road mending or irrigation projects to give work to the unemployed. More often, however, labourers were simply advised to seek work in other provinces. By the autumn of 1882, social tension had intensified notably. A wave of strikes was met by heavy-handed repression at the hands of a substantially reinforced Civil Guard. In Jerez, there were demonstrations by labourers demanding work which soon degenerated into food riots. In December 1892, four murders were registered in the area.15 The panic-stricken authorities seized the opportunity to claim that the killers in Jerez and the perpetrators of numerous other unconnected crimes, brawls and robberies belonged to the Mano Negra (Black Hand), a name referring to the dirty hands of manual labourers. The Mano Negra was said to be conspiring to avenge the crimes committed against the working class by the landowners. Allegedly, it aimed to wage war on the southern rich by means of murder, kidnappings and robbery. Furthermore, it was claimed that this secret organization had over 70,000 members. In this context, many workers were imprisoned on the basis of denunciations by a landlord, a magistrate or a Civil Guard, without any need for proof.

In the words of James Joll, the Mano Negra ‘may never have existed outside the imagination of the police, who were always ready to attribute isolated, unconnected acts of violence to a single master organization’. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that in 1880 some member organizations of the FTRE had agreed to carry out reprisals against the owners. By the spring of 1883, as a result of indiscriminate arrests of members of workers’ societies and readers of (legal) anarchist newspapers, 5,000 prisoners were being held in Cadiz and Jerez. Little or no distinction was made between union activity and crime as confessions of membership of the Mano Negra were extracted by torture. The FTRE denied the existence of the Mano Negra and accused the government of concocting a supposed revolutionary organization out of unconnected criminal elements. In fact, it seems that, while there may possibly have existed since the late 1870s a small criminal mafia called the Mano Negra, the link between it and the transparent and moderate FTRE was an invention to justify the repression of the rural labourers’ movement. Indeed, documents produced at the trial of its supposed members in the summer of 1883 revealed that the decisive ‘proof’ of the existence of Mano Negra just happened to have been provided by the commander of the Jerez garrison of the Civil Guard who had conveniently stumbled across a copy of this secret society’s written constitution under a rock in the countryside. Many were sentenced to life imprisonment, which meant confinement in filthy dungeons, and seven were publicly executed by garrotte in June 1884.16 The repression decimated the membership of the FTRE to the extent that, at a congress held in Valencia in September and October 1888, it was dissolved.17

The Spanish Socialist Party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), was founded in 1879 but constituted little challenge to the anarchist movement. Its trade union strength was largely in the printers’ union in Madrid, the Asociación General del Arte de Imprimir, and the textile union in Barcelona known as the Tres Clases de Vapor. The party’s founder, Pablo Iglesias, admitted that, in the 1880s, the PSOE had only around 200 members. Rigidly Marxist, the PSOE leadership both refused alliances with bourgeois republicans and rejected the violent revolutionism of the anarchists. It thus remained isolated. It was not until 1886 that its newspaper El Socialista was published and only in 1888 that its trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), was established in Barcelona. So poor was its development that, in 1899, its headquarters were moved to Madrid. The key to the strategy adopted by Pablo Iglesias was to achieve political power by electoral means which rendered questionable the refusal to make alliances with the liberal republicans. For Pablo Iglesias, the purpose of strikes was not revolutionary but reformist, the improvement of working conditions, and thus insufficiently combative to attract workers in the miserable conditions of late nineteenth-century industrial Spain. By the end of the decade, the UGT was acquiring substantial support in the mining districts of the Basque Country and Asturias.18

Throughout the 1880s, and indeed beyond, the much larger anarchist movement was divided on tactics and strategy. Broadly speaking, on the one hand, there were the so-called collectivists who favoured the building of economic power through legal trade union activity that could eventually implement the social revolution. On the other, there were the so-called communists, who rejected this reformism as consolidating the capitalist system. In its stead, they advocated revolutionary violence. To replace its collectivist ideology, relative moderation and reliance on legal methods, there was emerging a more individualistic anarchism committed to ‘propaganda by the deed’ carried out by fragmented clandestine cells or ‘affinity groups’ such as those advocated by Los Desheredados.19

Strikes and demonstrations started to give way to acts of terrorism. As anarchism took ever deeper root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage and indiscriminate reprisals from the forces of order. Between June 1884 and May 1890, there were twenty-five bomb incidents in Barcelona. The most frequent incidents came as a result of labour disputes and targeted factories, the homes of the managers or the owners, the offices of the industrialists’ association, the Foment del Treball Nacional, and police stations. There were three fatalities and many injured. From 1890 to 1900, there would be another fifty-nine incidents which caused a further thirty-five deaths. The worst years in terms of violence would be those between 1893 and 1896. The intensification of social violence was not simply a result of the ideology of anarchist revolutionaries. Their ideas spread in the fertile soil of a Catalonia experiencing a profound process of social and economic transformation. Rural workers were being attracted to Barcelona and other cities by the growth of industries, especially in textiles. The recent arrivals, relying on insecure work, were forced to live in appalling shanty towns of unhygienic hovels without basic sanitation or adequate nutrition, resulting in high levels of infant, and indeed adult, mortality. Moreover, there was no schooling available for their children. Radicalization, similar to that taking place in France and Russia, was facilitated by the recent invention of dynamite which was available for purchase without restriction in Barcelona. It was not uncommon in the taverns of the poorer parts of Barcelona to encounter men passing the hat for ‘a few pence for dynamite’.20

The social conflicts deriving from the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization matched those arising in the southern countryside from the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The rural proletariat existed on the most meagre subsistence diet. There was rarely more than one meal per day, and it was usually poor-quality bread and gazpacho, a soup made from tomatoes, onions, cucumber, peppers and garlic. Such a diet never contained more than secondary sources of protein, since meat, fish and eggs were beyond the means of the day labourer. A common cold could be disastrous.21 The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, both in the urban slums and in rural areas.

The misery of the southern peasantry was the motive force behind direct action. The indiscriminate repression unleashed in the midst of the Mano Negra panic fostered the belief that any direct action up to and including individual terrorism was licit against the tyranny of the state. In a context of poor harvests with the consequent price inflation and mass unemployment, there were increasing levels of social violence in the form of sporadic estate occupations, thefts of livestock and grain and attacks on owners and estate managers. In late 1891, a building worker from Madrid, Félix Grávalo ‘El Madrileño’, preached anarchist ideas in the villages surrounding Jerez. Among his disciples grew the naive idea of seizing Jerez in order to create an anarchist stronghold as the first step to taking control of the entire province of Cadiz. On the night of 8 January 1892, more than 500 braceros from Arcos de la Frontera, Ubrique, Trebujena, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, El Puerto de Santa María and other towns in Cadiz and Lebrija in Seville, gathered on the outskirts of the city. Armed only with sickles, scythes, pitchforks and sticks but driven by hunger, they invaded the city centre. In part, they were intending to free dozens of workers recently imprisoned after the Mano Negra trials. Their battle cry was ‘Brothers, we are coming for you!’ However, parallel uprisings in several other towns of the province of Cadiz suggested Grávalo’s wider revolutionary purpose. The braceros briefly held Jerez, although their belief that the local military garrison would join them was entirely misplaced. Their triumph was short-lived and the police swiftly regained control. Two innocent passers-by, a commercial traveller and an office worker, had been killed by elements of the mob in an outburst of class hatred. Because they were well dressed and wore gloves, they had been assumed to be ‘oppressors’.22 Fear of the spectre of revolution provoked by the Jerez events ensured that the consequent repression would be severe and extend right across western Andalusia. In subsequent military trials, despite lack of concrete evidence, other than the testimony of Grávalo obtained under duress, four labourers were condemned to life imprisonment. Four more were sentenced to death and executed by garrotte in the market place of Jerez.23

One of the consequences of the repression was the creation of an anarchist martyr in the form of the saintly Fermín Salvochea. He was accused of being the brains behind the entire event in Jerez despite already being in prison. In 1873 he had been Alcalde of Cadiz and had long been a target of the authorities who were frightened by his immense popularity. In April 1891, they had shut down his newspaper La revolución social and, after the May Day celebrations, arrested him. While in jail, he had been visited by the organizers of the Jerez invasion whom he had tried to dissuade from what he saw as a suicidal project. It was claimed that he was behind the assault on Jerez via ‘El Madrileño’ who was deemed to be his puppet. Several prisoners were taken out and tortured so that they would declare that Salvochea had offered the support of the anarchists of Cadiz for the Jerez operation. He was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour but was amnestied in 1899 after serving for eight years.24

The knowledge that confessions had been obtained by torture intensified the spread of anarchism in other parts of Spain. In particular, in Barcelona there were numerous acts of solidarity with the Andalusian labourers which in turn provoked state violence in the form of indiscriminate arrests, torture and executions in the Catalan capital. Initially, anarchist efforts to emulate the terrorist campaigns taking place in France and Russia were notable for their incompetence.25 On 24 September 1893, as a direct response to the repression in Jerez, there was a failed attempt on the life of the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, who, it will be recalled, had led the military coup that had restored the monarchy in December 1874. He was noted for his open hostility to the workers’ movement. The bomb attack during a parade in honour of the patroness of the city, the Virgin of Mercy (La Mare de Déu de la Mercè) was the beginning of three of the bloodiest years of terrorism in Barcelona. One Civil Guard and several horses were killed and sixteen people badly injured. Although Martínez Campos was thrown from his horse and had shrapnel in his leg, he was otherwise unharmed. The would-be assassin, a thirty-one-year-old printer and father of three, Paulí Pallàs, a member of an affinity group, made no attempt to escape and was arrested on the spot.

It is an indication of the inefficiency of the police that Pallàs was the first author of a bomb outrage to be caught. He was arrested and tried five days later. He declared that his only regret was not to have succeeded in killing ‘that reactionary representative of the abuse of power’. He was sentenced to death on 30 September 1893 and executed by firing squad on 6 October. A huge crowd gathered and some of those present were heard to shout, ‘Long live dynamite!’ and ‘Long live anarchy!’ Pallàs’s execution was the beginning of a major repression. In subsequent years, the police persecuted his wife, who had known nothing of his plans. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, sixty anarchists were arrested and six innocent men were executed on 21 May 1894, on the grounds of a non-existent complicity with Pallàs in the attack on General Martínez Campos. Two of them had been in prison at the time and one of those, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, would be avenged years later by his son Ramón in the assassination of the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato. Over the next two years, more than 20,000 men and women were imprisoned, many to be tortured. The blind lashing out by the police confirmed the working-class view that the state had declared war on them. At the same time, Pallàs was regarded in anarchist circles as a martyr. His last words were allegedly ‘Vengeance will be terrible!’ and calls for his death to be avenged began to be heard in anarchist circles. The bloodiest possible revenge would soon be carried out in the temple of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Gran Teatre del Liceu.26

Terrorism was facilitated by the fact that, until 1895, the poorly paid and inadequately led police in Barcelona lacked a photographic archive and even a basic filing system. Its consequent incompetence was compensated for by its brutality. Despised by the working class, it was known as the ‘muddle’ or the ‘stink’. It was not until September 1896, after one of the most extreme terrorist attacks, in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous, that the Conservative government of Cánovas del Castillo responded to the protests of prominent citizens and created a specialist unit or brigade for the investigation of political and social crimes. Given the inefficiency of the police, the government relied increasingly on the army. The high command considered that the only valid response to the threat of anarchist terrorism was blanket repression. Indiscriminate brutality hit those elements of the anarchist movement that condemned violence. The anarchists were already virulently anti-militaristic for both theoretical reasons and in response to the appalling experience of conscripts and their families who paid the cost of unjust colonial wars. As one anarchist newspaper declared: ‘If the bourgeois want war, all they have to do is enlist and go to Cuba.’ Repression exacerbated anarchist hostility to the army.27

Within one month of the execution of Paulí Pallàs, one of the most dramatic outrages took place on 7 November 1893, at the Gran Liceu de Barcelona, the opera house frequented by the wealthy bourgeoisie. Since there had been various warnings of an anarchist attack, to attend the opera in evening dress was an act of provocative irresponsibility. Before a packed house of 3,600 people, a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell opened the season. At the moment in Act 2 when William Tell swears he will free his country from oppression, the anarchist Santiago Salvador i Franch hurled two Orsini bombs from the fifth-floor balcony into the high-priced stall seats. Fortunately, only one exploded but, even so, twenty people died including a fourteen-year-old girl and nine women and a further thirty-five were injured by shrapnel, shards of glass and flying splinters from smashed seats. It was estimated at the time that had both bombs gone off, the death toll would have been massive.28

The subsequent repression was carried out implacably by the fifty-eight-year-old General Valeriano Weyler, who was appointed Captain General of Catalonia on 5 December 1893.29 After more than 400 virtually indiscriminate arrests, six innocent men were put on trial. They were condemned to death after confessions of complicity in the attack on Martínez Campos had been secured by torture. Those death sentences were meant as a warning to the anarchists of the serious determination of the authorities to clamp down on terrorism. Santiago Salvador was not captured until 1 January 1894. A petty criminal of violent tendencies, he had previously been arrested for robbery and fighting. His family background was murky. In 1878, when he was thirteen, he had tried to murder his father, a notoriously violent man who was subsequently shot by the Civil Guard in 1891. In early 1893, Salvador had been badly beaten by the police in Valencia after which he is alleged to have said: ‘every blow that I received would cost tears of blood’. He denied that his action was meant as revenge for the execution of Pallàs. Yet, at another time, he claimed that ‘The death of Pallàs had a terrible effect on me and to avenge him, as a tribute to his memory, I decided to do something that would scare those who had derived pleasure from his death and thought that they no longer had anything to fear. I wanted to disabuse them and also enjoy myself.’

Salvador told a journalist that, after the explosion, he had remained in the street outside the Liceu to rejoice in the panic of the bourgeoisie. He had hoped to go to the funeral of the victims on 9 November to throw more bombs into the crowd of mourners, but his alarmed comrades refused to supply him with the necessary explosives. He and two others were not tried until 11 July 1894. While in prison, he faked reconciliation with the Catholic Church as a device to secure a more comfortable existence. In his well-appointed cell, he was surrounded by devotional books, holy pictures and crucifixes. He dropped the pretence when his sentence was confirmed and claimed that he had merely been playing one last joke on the bourgeoisie. When on 21 November, before a large crowd, he was executed by garrote vil, he died shouting, ‘Long live anarchy and social revolution’ and ‘Down with religion’. Despite having murdered numerous innocents and then fled, he was hailed as a hero by some elements of the anarchist press, although severely condemned by others. Like Pallàs before him, Salvador seemed oblivious to the fact that, in addition to causing so many innocent deaths, his actions brought down a fierce repression on the anarchist movement, many of whose members were opposed to terrorism.30

The Liceu bombing came in the midst of a series of catastrophes which, taken together, did nothing to consolidate public confidence in the political establishment. In October 1893, small-scale conflict had broken out in Morocco. The military governor of the garrison town of Melilla, General Juan García Margallo, had initiated fortification works on land considered sacred by local Berber tribesmen. When the tomb of a Rifian saint was desecrated, 6,000 Rifeño tribesmen armed with Remington rifles attacked Melilla on 3 October. They were driven back by artillery fire which destroyed a mosque and so escalated the initial conflict into a jihad which necessitated considerable Spanish reinforcements. Then a strategic error by Garcia Margallo occasioned numerous Spanish losses in an action in which he himself was killed. It was rumoured that he had been shot with a revolver by a young lieutenant, Miguel Primo de Rivera, who in 1923 would establish a dictatorship. Primo was allegedly indignant that the rifles with which the Moors were armed had been sold to them by the General. No proof was ever found, but the rumour exposed the entirely justified belief that the military administration was corrupt. Incidentally, Primo de Rivera was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, and promoted to captain. The campaign was ended only by a massive show of force that Spain could ill afford.31

Four days before the Liceu atrocity, there had taken place the greatest civilian disaster in nineteenth-century Spain. On 3 November 1893, the cargo ship Cabo Machichaco carrying dynamite caught fire in the harbour of Santander. While crew members from nearby ships and local firemen tried to extinguish the fire, a vast crowd gathered to watch. When the ship blew up, the explosion threw up a huge column of thousands of tons of water which hurled many people into the sea. The shock wave destroyed many buildings in the town and fragments of iron and body parts were blown immense distances. Five hundred and ninety people died and a further 525 were seriously injured, nearly 2 per cent of the population of the city. Among the dead were the principal military and civilian authorities including the Civil Governor whose baton of office was found several kilometres away.

In the wake of the Liceu attack, there were many demands for suppression of the anarchist movement. On 9 November, the government initiated a suspension of constitutional guarantees in the province of Barcelona which remained in force until 31 December the following year. For a brief period, vigilante groups patrolled the streets of bourgeois neighbourhoods. In July 1894, the law was strengthened to make the placing of bombs in public places or causing loss of life punishable by life imprisonment or death. It also widened the penalties against those suspected of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. The exceptional measures did not just limit the rights of those of anarchist ideas but were also used to justify the arrests of republican workers, teachers from lay schools and other freethinkers. General Weyler’s ruthless application of these measures provided Barcelona with nearly two years of tranquillity in large part because the horror provoked by the attack on the Liceu silenced any criticism of police methods.32

Posted to Cuba, Valeriano Weyler was succeeded in Barcelona in January 1896 by the somewhat more moderate General Eulogi Despujol i Dusay. Nevertheless, mass arrests followed a further terrorist outrage on 7 June that year. A bomb exploded in the midst of the Corpus Christi procession moving towards the beautiful Gothic church of Santa Maria del Mar in the Born district of Barcelona. This spectacular annual ceremony was a local tradition that was an excuse for dressing up and it always attracted large crowds. Unusually for a religious ceremony, the monstrance with the host and the ecclesiastical dignitaries did not lead the procession but came after the principal banner. This was always carried by the Captain General with its ribbons held by the Civil Governor and the Alcalde. As the banner was entering the basilica, an explosion was heard at the rear of the procession. The bomb exploded in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous as the crowd was kneeling before the monstrance. Because, a few moments earlier, it had started to rain, the bishop and the other clerical dignitaries had hastened into the church. The bomb killed twelve people including a six-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy and seriously injured a further fifty-four people. Since the bishop and other dignitaries were unhurt and all the victims were working-class citizens, there were suspicions that the perpetrator was a police agent provocateur. Another theory was that the culprit, ignorant of the particular arrangements of this procession, had assumed that the military and civil authorities would have been walking behind the monstrance. Whatever the doubts, the atrocity united public opinion in general and the bourgeois press of Barcelona and Madrid, Liberal and Conservative. The entire city of Barcelona declared mourning, the street lights dimmed.33

There were widespread demands for harsh reprisals against the anarchists who were assumed to be the culprits. The almost unanimous calls for revenge were the prelude to a brutal repression which would take place over the next months. Despite international condemnation, there was a hardening of the legal measures open to the Spanish authorities with the introduction that September of the law for the repression of anarchism. A new police squad was created which imitated the techniques of the Russian Okhrana, using bribery, informers, undercover operatives and agents provocateurs commanded by a Civil Guard, Lieutenant Narciso Portas Ascanio.34 The Captain General placed the investigation in the hands of a military judge, Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Marzo Díaz-Valdivieso, who had presided over the trial after the attack on Martínez Campos that had led to the execution of six anarchists. The torture of prisoners was carried out under the supervision of Lieutenant Portas. Admitting that they had no clues, the authorities proceeded to arrest more than 500 anarchists, republicans and freethinkers. Among them were the widows of previously executed anarchists such as Paulí Pallàs, writers, women who took food to those already imprisoned and even the staff of cafés frequented by leftists. Policemen were paid a bonus for every arrest, so local prisons were bursting at the seams. Workers’ centres were closed down en masse. The majority of the anarchist and other leftist prisoners were held and interrogated in the bleak fortress of Montjuïc, the Spanish Bastille, which loured over Barcelona. The fact that among them were prominent anarchist intellectuals such as Anselmo Lorenzo, Federico Urales, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Teresa Claramunt and lawyers such as Pere Coromines ensured that articulate accounts of the abominable treatment of prisoners reached the outside world.35

One of the most effective of those drawing attention to the scandal was Alejandro Lerroux. Born in 1864 in Cordoba, he had started his adult life as a deserter from the army after squandering his Military Academy fees in a casino. As a fluent if rather lightweight journalist, he had acquired a spurious fame in 1893 by dint of an inadvertent victory in a duel with a newspaper editor. Elevated to the editorship of the then scandalmongering and left-wing El País, Lerroux acquired a popular following as a result of his exposés of the tortures in the Montjuïc prison. He achieved further celebrity with a series of revelations of military repression and government scandals. In March 1899, he launched a new weekly, El Progreso, in which he renewed the denunciation of what had happened in Montjuïc.36

It is probable that the explosion in the Carrer del Canvis Nous was the work of a French anarchist called either Jean or François Girault, who subsequently escaped to Buenos Aires after hiding in London.37 The alleged principal culprit, also a Frenchman, Tomàs Ascheri, a police informer, was arrested two days after the bombing. His denunciations led to the arrest of two Catalan anarchists, Josep Molas and Antoni Nogués. After being subjected to intense tortures, they named others. Horrendous cruelties endured by those subsequently arrested included the crushing of bones, the tearing out of fingernails and toenails, the application of red-hot irons to flesh and the cutting out of tongues. Under these torments, one prisoner – Luis Mas – was driven insane, five died and another twenty-eight confessed to having placed the bomb. On the grounds that one of the victims had been a soldier, the accused were tried by court martial between 11 and 15 December 1896. The prosecutor demanded the death sentence for twenty-eight men. In the event, on the basis of the confessions extracted by torture, lengthy prison sentences were imposed on sixty-six and eight were condemned to death. Three death sentences and forty-six prison sentences were commuted by the Supreme Military Court. Among 194 men sentenced to banishment were numerous famous prisoners who then played a part in drawing international attention to the inquisitorial behaviour of the Spanish authorities. Finally, despite the doubts raised about confessions extorted by torture, five were executed. Before a large crowd, Ascheri as the alleged bomber and Molas, Nogués, Mas and Joan Alsina, the alleged bomb maker, as accomplices, were shot by firing squad at dawn on 4 May 1897 in the fortress moat. The four supposed accomplices died proclaiming their innocence. The prisoners condemned to hard labour suffered inhuman conditions in Spain’s African colonies.38

International press exposures of the tortures brought immense discredit on Spain at the same time as the repression of independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines. In particular, the campaign in France likened the Spanish repression to that in Tsarist Russia. In Britain, a Spanish Atrocities Committee organized mass demonstrations. The exiled prisoners participated in mass meetings and provoked indignation when they showed their wounds and recounted the horrors of Montjuïc. Such campaigns stimulated support for the Cuban and Philippine rebels. However, the repression succeeded in putting an end to terrorism in Barcelona for some years at least. Some of the more violent militants had fled. Intellectuals like Tarrida and Anselmo Lorenzo advocated non-violent action. One of the last violent initiatives of this period took place in September 1897. The journalist Ramon Sempau shot and wounded Narciso Portas and his second-in-command, Joan Teixidó, in a public urinal in the Plaça de Catalunya. However, although Sempau was initially sentenced to death two days later by a military court, his case was passed to a civilian court – an indication of the impact on public opinion of the revelations about the Montjuïc atrocities. The following October, to widespread public approbation, he was found to have acted in self-defence. Portas became the target of public loathing. Cafés emptied when he entered them and he was the object of another failed assassination attempt in Madrid. He was obliged to go everywhere with several bodyguards. Alejandro Lerroux, at the height of his popularity in Barcelona, called him an ‘executioner and a hitman’, comparing him to Nero and Caligula. Portas challenged Lerroux to a duel. He refused on the grounds that a gentleman could have nothing to do with a torturer. Finally, Portas bumped into him in the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid. They went at each other with their walking sticks but neither could be said to have won the day.39

The Montjuïc trial and the preceding repression opened a new phase in the history of the anarchist movement. A direct consequence of the Montjuïc affair was the revenge assassination, on 8 August 1897, of the then Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, by a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist journalist, Michele Angiolillo. It had been widely rumoured that the tortures had been carried out on the direct orders of Cánovas. This was suggested during demonstrations held in Paris and London in protest against the mistreatment of the prisoners. Angiolillo had attended a huge rally in Trafalgar Square at which some of the victims showed the burns and scars that they carried from Montjuïc. After meeting them, he travelled to Spain. He went to Santa Águeda near Mondragón in the Basque Country where Cánovas was taking the waters. He shot him three times. When Cánovas’s wife Joaquina de la Osma shrieked ‘assassin’ at him, he bowed courteously and said: ‘I respect you because you are an honourable lady but I have done my duty and I am calm. I have avenged my brothers from Montjuïc.’ In fact, the savage violence inflicted on the anarchists was successful in curtailing individual terrorism and inclining the movement towards the use of the general strike.40 Cánovas was replaced by the now seventy-two-year-old Sagasta, who immediately put an end to the strategy of total war in Cuba. In this sense, the assassination may have boosted the liberation movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

According to Joaquín Romero Maura,

the most significant factor of the Montjuich repression lies perhaps elsewhere. For the excesses committed by the police did not occur simply because the men in charge of the investigation happened to be heartless and brutal. The Spanish Administration was top-heavy, cumbersome, undisciplined and often corrupt. Scrupulous civil servants had only their conscience to restrain them from abuses. The legislation regarding civil service responsibilities was confused and rarely applied, and no efficient control mechanisms existed. Under these circumstances, with the police force as badly paid as most other lower grade civil servants, its recruitment totally haphazard and providing no security of tenure, scrupulousness could hardly be expected. But the conditions which in other branches of the civil service gave rise to bribery and tiresome delays, resulted in the police harassing individuals and making unwarranted arrests; arbitrariness was accentuated by a lack of self-assurance bred of inefficiency.41

The proliferation of social violence within Spain was matched and indeed intensified by the deterioration of the situation in what remained of the empire. The Cuban rebellion had resurfaced in 1895 and, despite the despatch of large numbers of troops, remained an immense drain on Spanish resources. Swift-moving and flexible guerrilla forces, known as the mambises, were more than a match for the Spanish garrisons. They were supported by consignments of arms, ammunition and other supplies from sympathizers in Florida. By the beginning of 1896, they had virtually won the war. The appointment of the ruthless General Weyler was Madrid’s response. To deprive the mambises of the logistical support of the peasantry, Weyler adopted the policy of reconcentración. Large numbers of peasants were forcibly moved to concentration camps where, without adequate food, sanitation and medical care, around 160,000 died, nearly 10 per cent of the island’s population. Weyler’s brutal strategy intensified hatred of the colonial power and increased American support for the rebels. In October 1897, thanks to international censure and Sagasta’s desire for conciliation with the rebels, Weyler was obliged to resign. However, it was too late for his departure to make a difference.42

In 1897, the Philippines were also in revolt with their defence an additional drain on Spanish resources. To make matters worse, on 15 February 1898 the battlecruiser USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour, killing 266 American sailors. The explosion may well have been accidental or possibly the work of Cuban anarchist provocateurs hoping to see the blame placed on Spain. This was certainly the consequence and it pushed American popular opinion further in favour of the Cuban rebels. Outrage in the United States at Weyler’s measures together with their impact on American trade with Cuba forced President William McKinley to reiterate a demand first made in 1848 that Spain abandon Cuba, albeit by selling the island to the US. In Spain, a wide spectrum of jingoistic sentiment, excluding only the conscripts who had to go and fight, was in favour of war.43

On 25 April, President McKinley, egged on by Theodore Roosevelt, declared war on Spain. Spain’s troops in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico numbered more than the entire United States army, nearly a quarter of a million to 28,000. However, they were scattered across many garrisons. In Cuba, the more efficient American forces, in alliance with powerful local guerrilla movements, quickly targeted key strategic objectives. Armed with rapid-fire Gatling guns, they seized the advantage over the demoralized Spanish conscripts. Moreover, the Americans had dramatically shorter supply lines and were favoured by British command of the seas. In naval terms, the difference was not just of superior resources but rather that the US strategy of heavily armoured battleships with long-range firepower had exposed the weaknesses of the Spanish option of swift cruisers with lighter guns. On the morning of 1 May 1898, at the Cavite naval station in the Bay of Manila, Commodore Dewey annihilated the Spanish Pacific fleet. On 3 July, the Spanish Atlantic fleet was also wiped out just outside the bay of Santiago de Cuba. The war had lasted less than three months. It was the end of Spanish naval power and prestige. The subsequent peace treaty in December 1898 saw Spain lose all its colonies apart from Morocco.44

Despite the reality that a vastly more numerous Spanish army had been defeated, there grew the myth cherished by General Franco that Spanish heroism had held out against overwhelming odds and been ‘cheated’ by technological superiority. Contemporary imagery about the greasy capitalist pig trampling on the dying Spanish lion contrasted with the American view that moral superiority and technical know-how had overcome a decadent enemy. Franco’s perception would continue to reverberate through his career. He was five and a half when the great defeat at the hands of the United States occurred. Although, at such an age, he cannot have been aware of the significance of what was happening, he saw the coffins and the wounded being landed in the small naval garrison town of El Ferrol where he lived. Thereafter, the disaster had an ongoing effect that influenced him profoundly. Many of his schoolmates wore mourning, having been orphaned or lost relatives. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. Living in a military family, he heard the indignant conversations that his father had with colleagues from the naval base in which the defeat was blamed on dark forces such as freemasonry. An essentially middle-class intellectual movement, freemasonry was vilified by the Catholic Church for its anti-clericalism and by army officers because of its foreign links. Subsequently, when Franco became a cadet in the Military Academy, he encountered an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Just as in Ferrol, in Toledo defeat was attributed to the machinations of American and British freemasonry and to the treachery of Spanish politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources.45

The aftermath of defeat saw private grief and public chagrin at the destruction of the illusion of Spanish great-power status. Newspaper editorials, intellectuals and politicians raked over the so-called ‘dying nations’ speech made on 4 May 1898 by the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to the Conservative Party’s Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall. Salisbury had stated that ‘the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’. His words were taken as an accurate prophecy of the future of Spain.

While the agonized inquest went on, the economic ruin that had been expected to follow the loss of empire failed to materialize. There was a minor economic boom as the return to peace brought lower inflation, less public debt and a higher level of capital investment. The drop in the value of the peseta occasioned by defeat stimulated an export boom to other European countries. Some products, such as footwear, olive oil and garlic, were still in demand in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Moreover, there were unexpectedly good harvests in both 1898 and 1899 which increased rural demand for industrial goods, as did the return of 200,000 colonial troops flush with wage arrears to spend on new clothes. Most importantly, there was a massive repatriation of capital from Spanish America. The return of colonial settlers brought both investment and entrepreneurial expertise to the areas, such as Galicia, from which they originated. Nonetheless, although the consequences of 1898 were less dramatic than might have been feared, they were still deeply damaging for the Atlantic ports and the Catalan textile industry. Already inefficient, built on a proliferation of small family firms with out-of-date machinery, Catalan textiles had survived on protection from foreign competition and a guaranteed overseas market. Both advantages disappeared with the loss of Cuba.46

Moreover, the few favourable circumstances that followed the disaster were short-lived. The troops had soon spent their back pay. With subsequent harvests poor, domestic demand slumped. By the autumn of 1900, more than thirty factories in Catalonia had been closed and, in others, workers were being laid off. Industrial militancy was on the increase. Accordingly, the loss of Cuba fostered resentment of Madrid and accelerated the development of Catalan nationalism. Government measures to balance the budget and pay off the war debt provoked a taxpayers’ strike, the so-called tancament de caixes, shop closures and riots. It also fostered the growth of the independence party, the Lliga Regionalista. Eventually, Catalan industry would find new markets, especially in Argentina, and would also diversify into automobiles, electricity and chemicals. However, there remained the problem that the army was assuaging its guilt by concentrating its anger on Catalonia. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish army had known nothing but defeat at the hands of foreign enemies, its only successes being chalked up in domestic civil wars. It was hardly surprising that, when the last significant remnants of empire were lost, the army would cling to a determination that the final battle that would not be lost was the defence of national integrity. Ironically, the defeat which thus fed the flames of Spanish nationalism also breathed life into its greatest enemy.47

The reaction to this monumental humiliation, known thereafter as the ‘Disaster of 1898’, was a national examination of conscience. Regenerationism, as it was known, was an introspective analysis of what was wrong with Spain carried out by intellectuals and politicians in meetings, articles, books and private correspondence. The ‘generation of 1898’ grappled with the so-called problema nacional. The turmoil of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, the revolution of 1868, the chaos of the First Republic in 1873 and the loss of Cuba in 1898 had stimulated an endless poking through the national entrails. The progressive republican intellectual Ricardo Macías Picavea denounced the apparently legitimate institutions and democratic parliament of Restoration Spain as merely ‘the wallpaper with pictures of a parliamentary system which hid the wall of brick and plaster, the caciquismo that was the harsh reality of our government’.48 The towering figure of the regenerationist movement was the visionary Aragonese polymath, lawyer and agronomist Joaquín Costa Martínez. It was he who responded to the defeat with the war cry ‘Schools, larders and double padlocks on the tomb of El Cid’ – that is to say, no more military adventures. In 1902, at the age of fifty-six, he presented to the great intellectual club the Ateneo de Madrid his report ‘Oligarchy and caciquismo as the present form of government in Spain’. He denounced caciquismo and the oligarchy, the political system and the political class as the principal problems of Spain. He compared the cacique to a cancer or tumour, an unnatural excrescence on the body of the nation. Accordingly, the political class had putrefied and blighted Spain through caciquismo and its corrupt practices, obstructing the forces of progress and thus keeping the nation in servitude, ignorance and misery. The solution had to be the iron surgeon who would sweep away caciquismo to facilitate democratic reform: ‘That surgical policy, I repeat, has to be the personal burden of an iron surgeon, who knows well that anatomy of the Spanish people and feels for it an infinite compassion … For Spain to be a parliamentary nation tomorrow, she must renounce it today.’49 In fact, Costa insisted that his surgical solution was compatible with parliament and did not imply dictatorship.50 Ultimately, regenerationism was open to exploitation by both the right and the left since among its advocates were both those who sought to sweep away by democratic reform the degenerate political system based on the power of local bosses or caciques and those who planned simply to destroy caciquismo by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’, to put an end to representative politics and restore the values that were thought to have made Spain great – unity, Catholicism and hierarchy.

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflected on Cánovas and the system that he invented: ‘the Restoration, gentlemen, was a panorama of phantasms and Cánovas the great impresario of phantasmagoria … above and beyond being a great orator and a great thinker, Cánovas, gentlemen, was a great corruptor, as we might say, a professor of corruption. He corrupted even the incorruptible.’51

A demonstration in Barcelona in protest against the repression that followed the Semana Tragica or Tragic Week. (The History Collection/Alamy)

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