Antony Beevor: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Alfonso XIII, the driver of the broken-down car, became king at the age of sixteen in 1902. Poverty was so great at the beginning of the twentieth century that over half a million Spaniards, out of a population of eighteen and a half million, emigrated to the New World in the first decade of the century alone. Life expectancy was around thirty-five years, the same as at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Illiteracy rates, varying sharply by area, averaged 64 per cent overall. Two thirds of Spain’s active population still worked on the land. Yet it was not just a problem of property rights and tensions between landowners and landless peasants. Within the total of five million farmers and peasants, there were huge differences in standards of living and techniques, according to region. In Andalucia, Estremadura and La Mancha, agriculture remained primitive and ineffectively laborious. In many other areas, such as Galicia, León, Old Castile, Catalonia and the north, small proprietors worked their own land with fierce independence while the rich coastal plain of the Levante represented perhaps the best example of intensive culture in Europe. 2

Industry and mining provided only 18 per cent of the jobs available, little more than domestic and other services. 3Spain’s main exports came from agricultural produce, particularly the fertile coastal region around Valencia, and only a certain amount from mining. But after the collapse of the last vestiges of empire, money was repatriated and along with other investment from Europe, above all from France, a banking boom followed during which some of the major Spanish banks of today were founded. 4The government subsidized industrial development and, in Catalonia especially, huge fortunes were made.

The country remained neutral in the First World War. Its agricultural exports, raw materials and rising industrial output at such a time created what seemed like an economic miracle, with thousands of new enterprises. The new prosperity led to a significant rise in the birth rate, which would have its effect twenty years later in the mid 1930s. Spain’s balance of payments were so favourable that the country’s gold reserves increased dramatically. 5But when the war was over the economic miracle faded away. The governments of the day fell back on protectionism. Expectations had risen, and disappointment and resentment were bound to follow in the unemployment that ensued.

The first attempt to organize some form of trade union in Spain had occurred as early as the 1830s, and there were small non-political associations in existence at the middle of the nineteenth century. Then new political ideas arrived across the Pyrenees and began to take root. The anarchist, or libertarian, form of socialism arrived first and its fundamental disagreement with Marxist socialism was to have great repercussions in Spain. Proudhon had already been translated by Pi y Margall, the president of the First Republic, when Giuseppe Fanelli arrived in Spain in 1868. Fanelli was an admirer of Bakunin, Marx’s great opponent in the First International. He came to Madrid without speaking any Spanish and with no money, but the ‘Idea’, as it became known, found a very enthusiastic audience. Within four years there were nearly 50,000 Bakuninists in Spain, of whom the majority were in Andalucia.

There were several reasons why anarchism in the early days became the largest force within the Spanish working class. Its proposed structure of co-operative communities, associating freely, corresponded to deep-rooted traditions of mutual aid, and the federalist organization appealed to anti-centralist feelings. It also offered a strong moral alternative to a corrupt political system and hypocritical Church. Many observers have pointed to the naive optimism which anarchism inspired among the landless peasants of Andalucia. Much has also been made of the way in which the word was spread by ascetic, almost saint-like characters and how the converts gave up tobacco, alcohol and infidelity (while rejecting official marriage). As a result it was often described as a secular religion. Even so, the intensity of this early anarchism led converts to believe that everybody else must see that freedom and mutual aid were the only foundation of a naturally ordered society. An uprising was all that was needed to open people’s eyes, unfetter the vast potential of goodwill and set off what Bakunin called the ‘spontaneous creativity of the masses’.

Their frustration at being unable to ‘unlock the mechanism of history’, as the Russian writer Victor Serge described it, led to individual acts of political violence in the 1890s. The tigres solitarios , as their fellow anarchists called them, acted either in the hope of stirring up others to emulate them or in reprisal for the indiscriminate brutality of the Brigada Social, the secret police. The most famous example was the torturing to death in 1892 of several anarchists in the castle of Montjuich in Barcelona. This led to an international outcry and to the assassination of Cánovas del Castillo, the organizer of the restoration. A vicious circle of repression and revenge was to follow.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Marxist wing of socialism, los autoritarios , as their opponents called them, developed much less rapidly. In late 1871 Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue arrived after the fall of the Paris Commune and within a year the basis of Spanish socialism was laid in Madrid. The Marxists’ comparative lack of success was partly due to the emphasis which they placed on the central state. The socialists under Pablo Iglesias, a typesetter who emerged as the leading Spanish Marxist, proceeded cautiously and concentrated on building an organization. Eventually in 1879 they founded the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and formed their General Union of Labour (UGT) in 1888. Iglesias still insisted that the class struggle should be waged in a moderate and evolutionary manner (the PSOE did not formally repudiate the monarchy until 1914). The socialists accused their anarchist rivals of ‘irresponsibility’, but they in turn were seen as heavily bureaucratic and received the nickname of ‘Spanish Prussians’.

Another reason for the socialists’ slow development in a predominantly agricultural society came from Marx’s contempt for the peasantry and what he called ‘the idiocy of rural life’. He believed that capitalism would be overthrown only by its own creation, the industrial proletariat. However, in Spain, the major part of industry was concentrated in Catalonia, which had become the stronghold of anarchism. As a result the ‘Castilian’ socialists had to look to Bilbao for support among industrial workers. The central mass of Spain and the northern coast were to be their main spheres of influence, while the anarchist following was greatest down the Mediterranean belt, especially in Catalonia and Andalucia.

From the 1890s until the early 1920s Spain experienced many turbulent years, especially those which coincided with the Russian and German revolutions at the end of the First World War. The main areas of strife were the large landed estates, the latifundia of Andalucia and Estremadura, the mining valleys of Asturias and Vizcaya, and industrial Catalonia. In fin de siècle Barcelona, nouveaux riches factory owners had indulged in triumphant ostentation, both architecturally and socially.

The cycle of violence between industrial revolt and repression became chaotic at times. The Brigada Social, the secret police, interpreted its role as the guardian of public order in an extraordinary manner, often hiring gangsters to take on the anarchist ‘ pistoleros’ or strike leaders. The first explosion of urban unrest, the Semana Trágica, or ‘Tragic Week’, at the end of July 1909, was not, however, caused by industrial dispute in Barcelona. It was a by-product of the colonial war in Morocco. Riffian tribesmen had wiped out a column of soldiers sent to secure mining concessions bought by the Count de Romanones, one of Alfonso XIII’s advisers. The government called up the reserves; the poor could not afford to buy themselves out of military service and married workers were the most affected. 1A strong anti-militarist mood had grown up in the years following the Cuban disaster, and the spontaneous reaction in Barcelona to the Morocco crisis was sudden and overwhelming.