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

The right, which had often called for harsh measures to restore order, now attacked Azaña for brutality. He was falsely accused of having given orders to kill the peasants and his reputation suffered. In the Cortes, deputies on the right argued that the events of Casas Viejas proved that the ‘rapidity’ of social change in the countryside was the problem and attacked the government’s socialist measures in the industrial sector. Azaña’s government suffered in the April municipal elections and by the autumn it was clear that he and his colleagues were badly weakened. In the circumstances, Alcalá Zamora entrusted a colleague of Lerroux, Diego Martínez Barrio, to form a cabinet which would call fresh elections.

Faced with the possibility of defeating the government, almost all the groups on the right united on 12 October to form a coalition called the Union de Derecha y Agrarios. Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Republican Party presented itself as the moderating force in the centre. The left, on the other hand, was divided when it went into the elections. The socialists were dissatisfied with the reformist caution of their republican colleagues and were pressured by the UGT to denounce what they saw as the reactionary repressiveness of the Azaña government. The anarchists, loyal to their anti-statist ideas and furious at the killings by the Civil Guard, called for abstention.

The elections took place on 19 November 1933. Thanks to the Republic’s new constitution, women went to the polls for the first time in Spain, yet many of them voted for the centre-right, which won the most seats.²² Alcalá Zamora, as president, entrusted the formation of a government to Lerroux. Lerroux’s cabinet, composed entirely of Radical Party members, needed the parliamentary support of the CEDA (the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right), which of course extracted its own terms. Its leader, José María Gil Robles, insisted on a range of measures, reversing some of the previous administration’s reforms, such as those affecting primary schools, ecclesiastical measures, agrarian reform and labour laws. Lerroux and Gil Robles also agreed an amnesty for all those involved in the coup of General Sanjurjo.

The most dangerous development at this time was the bolshevization of the socialists led by Largo Caballero. On 3 January 1934 El Socialista had declared: ‘Harmony? No! Class War! Hatred of the Criminal Bourgeoisie to the Death!’²³ Ten days later the socialist executive committee compiled a new programme. Among the points bound to alarm the centre as well as the right were:

Nationalization of the land

Dissolution of all religious orders, with seizure of their property

Dissolution of the army, to be replaced by a democratic militia

Dissolution of the Civil Guard²⁴

Following their electoral defeat, the more moderate Indalecio Prieto found himself losing power in the executive committee of the PSOE, which Largo Caballero now controlled. From then on the bulk of the socialists followed a process of radicalization, which led them to focus more outside the Cortes, such as their establishment of an Alianza Obrera–a Workers’ Alliance. On 3 February they set up a revolutionary committee ready to create an insurrection against the government, which should take on ‘all the characteristics of civil war’ and whose ‘success would depend on the extent of its reach and the violence which it produces’.²⁵

Largo Caballero ignored the warnings of the deposed leader of the UGT, Julián Besteiro, that such a policy constituted ‘collective madness’ and that an attempt to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat would turn out to be ‘a vain, childish illusion’.²⁶ Manuel Azaña had also warned the socialists that preparing an insurrection would give the army the excuse to re-enter politics and crush the workers.²⁷ Largo Caballero brushed such cautions aside. The attacks published in his newspaper Claridad against Besteiro, Prieto and other moderate socialists ‘were even more virulent than those against Gil Robles or the monarchists’.²⁸ Utterly irresponsible rhetoric and the debasement of political discourse fanned the flames of resentment and created fear. The socialist youth began to arm and train in secret, like the Carlists in the north-east and the minuscule Falange. Ortega y Gasset had warned the previous June of the ‘emergence of childishness, and thus violence, in Spanish politics’.²⁹