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

The head of the Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux, who had hoped to lead the government instead of Azaña, found himself vetoed by the socialists. With justification, they considered his party corrupt. From then on Lerroux would look to make his alliances with the right. His support came mainly from conservatives and businessmen who had disliked Alfonso, but had no deep-rooted opposition to the principle of monarchy.

The opponents of republican reform, supporters of the large landowners, the clergy and the army, represented only a small minority of seats within the Cortes, but this did not slow their mobilization to defend traditional Spain.¹⁵ Fascism was a negligible presence at this stage, with a couple of reviews and a handful of right-wing intellectuals gathered round José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the late dictator.¹⁶

Following the proclamation of the Republic, the anarchists had split between those who followed the syndicalist, or trade union, path, which was the case with ‘treintistas’ of Ángel Pestaña and Joan Peiró, and those who belonged to the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica). The FAIistas, including Juan García Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti, believed passionately in the struggle against the state, with strikes and risings, dubbed la ‘gimnasia revolucionaria’, which was supposed to bring about the social revolution. But it was a small event in the countryside that was to lead to the first major threat to the government.

Castilblanco, a village in the province of Badajoz near the Portuguese border, was on strike during the last days of December 1931. A detachment of the Civil Guard arrived to restore order and one of them opened fire, killing a local man. The reaction of the peasants was ferocious. They lynched four civil guards. The spiral of violence was immediate. In another incident far away in the Rioja, civil guards appear to have avenged their comrades in Castilblanco by killing eleven people and wounding 30 more. Azaña summoned Sanjurjo, upbraided him for the actions of his force and removed him from his post, half-demoting him with the appointment of inspector general of carabineros.¹⁷

General Sanjurjo, who had assisted the arrival of the Republic in April by refusing to support the king, felt badly treated. He began to contact other senior officers with a view to mounting a coup d’état. ‘The government was well aware of what was happening and Sanjurjo’s coup, when it came in August, was a humiliating failure. It had a momentary success in Seville, but Sanjurjo’s inactivity and the CNT’s immediate declaration of a general strike finished it off. Sanjurjo tried to flee to Portugal but was arrested at Huelva.¹⁸

The government in Madrid arrested other conspirators, including José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Ramiro de Maeztu, and deported 140 altogether to Villa Cisneros in the western Sahara. Because a number of aristocrats had been implicated, the government decreed the confiscation of lands belonging to grandees of Spain, a sweeping and illegal measure which naturally hardened their hostility. Sanjurjo was condemned to death, but the sentence was immediately commuted to imprisonment. The general did not have long to wait in jail. As soon as Lerroux came to power he pardoned him. Sanjurjo then went into exile in Lisbon to ‘organize a national movement which will save Spain from ruin and dishonour’.

The immediate effect of Sanjurjo’s rebellion was to speed up the pace of legislation in the Cortes, of which the next most contentious parts were the statute of autonomy for Catalonia and land reform.¹⁹ The right bitterly opposed Catalan devolution but Azaña, in one of the most brilliant speeches of his career, carried the day. The statute was passed on 9 September, helped by the collapse of the Sanjurjo coup and on 20 November, elections to the Catalan parliament took place, won by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya led by Lluís Companys.²⁰

The year of 1933 began badly for Azaña’s government. During the first days of January, as part of the recurring revolts in Andalucia, a wave of violence broke out in the province of Cádiz. A small town, Casas Viejas, with a long anarchist tradition, saw the arrival of ‘the day’, that is to say the introduction of libertarian communism. On 11 January a group of anarchists besieged the Civil Guard post and firing broke out. More civil guards and assault guards arrived from Cádiz, and they surrounded a house in which an old anarchist known as ‘Seisdedos’, or ‘six fingers’, fought them off. The director-general of security ordered an Assault Guard captain, Manuel Rojas, to put an end to the stand-off. Rojas had the house set on fire and two men who escaped from the flames were shot down. Rojas then ordered his men to kill in cold blood twelve of the anarchists who had been arrested previously. Altogether twenty-two peasants and three members of the security forces died in Casas Viejas.²¹