Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

This complex and confused situation in Spain was made even more involved by the struggle between Castilian centralization (which was frequently unenlightened and reactionary) and the supporters of local autonomy and separatism (which were frequently progressive or even revolutionary) in Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and elsewhere. This struggle was intensified by the fact that industrialism had grown up only in Catalonia and the Basque provinces, and, accordingly, the strength of the revolutionary proletariat was strongest in the areas where separatism was strongest.

Opposed to all these forces was that alignment of officers, upper clergy, landlords, and monarchists which came into existence after 1898 and especially after 1918. The army was the poorest in Europe and relatively the most expensive. There was a commissioned officer for every six men and a general for every 250 men. The men were miserably underpaid and mistreated, while the officers squandered fortunes. The Ministry of War took about a third of the national budget, and most of that went to the officers. Money was wasted or stolen, especially in Morocco, in lumps of millions at a time for the benefit of officers and monarchist politicians. Everything was done on a lavish scale. For example, there were no less than five military academies. But the army remained so inefficient that it lost 13,000 men a year for ten years fighting the Riffs in Morocco, and in July 1921 lost 12,000 killed out of 20,000 engaged in one battle. The army had the right, incredible as it may seem, to court-martial civilians, and did not hesitate to use this power to prevent criticism of its depredations. Nevertheless, the outcry against corruption and defeats in Morocco resulted in a parliamentary investigation. To prevent this, a military coup under General Primo de Rivera, with the acquiescence of King Alfonso XIII, took over the government, dissolved the Cortes, and ended civil liberties, with martial law and a strict censorship throughout Spain (1923).

The landlords not only monopolized the land but, more important than that, squandered their incomes with little effort to increase the productivity of their estates or to reduce the violent discontent of their peasant tenants and agricultural workers. Of the 125 million acres of arable land in Spain, about 60 percent was not cultivated, while another 10 percent was left fallow. The need for irrigation, fertilizers, and new methods was acute, but very little was done to achieve them. On the contrary, while the Spanish grandees wasted millions of pesetas in the gambling casinos of the French Riviera, the technical equipment of their estates steadily deteriorated. Making use of the surplus agricultural population, they sought to increase rents and to decrease agricultural wages. To permit this they made every effort to make leases shorter in duration (not over a year) and revocable at the landlord’s will and to break up every effort of agricultural workers to seek government or unionized action to raise wages, reduce hours, or improve working conditions.

While all this was going on, and while most of Spain was suffering from malnutrition, most of the land was untilled, and the owners refused to use irrigation facilities which had been built by the government. As a result, agricultural yields were the poorest in western Europe. While 15 men owned about a million acres, and 15,000 men owned about half of all taxed land, almost 2 million owned the other half, frequently in plots too small for subsistence. About 2 million more, who were completely landless, worked 10 to 14 hours a day for about 2.5 pesetas (35 cents) a day for only six months in the year or paid exorbitant rents without any security of tenure.

In the Church, while the ordinary priests, especially in the villages, shared the poverty and tribulations of the people, and did so with pious devotion, the upper clergy were closely allied with the government and the forces of reaction. The bishops and archbishops were named by the monarchy and were partly supported by an annual grant from the government as a result of the Concordat of 1851. Moreover, the clergy and the government were inextricably intertwined, the upper clergy having seats in the upper chamber, control of education, censorship, marriage, and the willing ear of the king. In consequence of this alliance of the upper clergy with the government and the forces of reaction, all the animosities built up against the latter came to be directed against the former also. Although the Spanish people remained universally and profoundly Catholic, and found no attraction whatever in Protestantism and very little attraction in rational skepticism of the French sort, they also became indelibly anticlerical. This attitude was reflected in the notable reluctance of Spanish men to go to church or receive the sacraments during the interval between confirmation at the age of thirteen and extreme unction on their deathbeds. It was also reflected in the proclivity of the Spanish people for burning churches. While other peoples expressed turbulent outbursts of antigovernmental feeling in attacks on prisons, post offices, banks, or radio stations, the Spaniards invariably burn churches, and have done so for at least a century. There were great outbursts of this strange custom in 1808, 1835, 1874, 1909, 1931, and 1936, and it was indulged in by the Right as well as by the Left.

The monarchists were divided into at least two groups. One of these, the Renovación Española, supported the dynasty of Isabella II (1833- 1868), while the other, the Comunión Tradicionalista, supported the claims of Isabella’s uncle, Don Carlos. The Renovation group was a clique of wealthy landowners who used their contacts with the government to evade taxes, and to obtain concessions and sinecures for themselves and their friends. The Carlists were a fanatically intolerant and murderous group from remote rural regions of Spain, and were almost entirely clerical and reactionary in their aims.

All these groups, the landlords, officers, higher clergy, and monarchists (‘except the Carlists), were interest groups seeking to utilize Spain for their own power and profit. The threat to their positions following the First World War and the defeats in Morocco led them to support Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. However, the general’s personal instability and his efforts to appease the industrialists of Catalonia, as well as his unbalanced budgets and his efforts to build up a popular following by cooperating with laboring groups, led to a shift of support, and he was forced to resign in 1930, following an unsuccessful officers’ revolt in 1929.

Realizing the danger to his dynasty from his association with an unpopular dictatorship, Alfonso XIII tried to restore the constitutional government. As a first step, he ordered municipal elections for April 12, 1931. Such elections had been managed successfully by wholesale electoral corruption before 1923, and it was believed that this control could be maintained. It was maintained in the rural areas, but, in 46 out of 50 provincial capitals, the antimonarchical forces were victorious. When these forces demanded Alfonso’s abdication, he called upon General Sanjurjo, commander of the Civil Guard, for support. It was refused, and Alfonso fled to France (April 14, 1931).

The republicans at once began to organize their victory, electing a Constituent Assembly in June 1931, and establishing an ultramodern unicameral, parliamentary government with universal suffrage, separation of Church and State, secularization of education, local autonomy for separatist areas, and power to socialize the great estates or the public utilities. Such a government, especially the provisions for a parliamentary regime with universal suffrage, was quite unfitted for Spain with its high illiteracy, its weak middle class, and its great inequalities of economic power.