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

Lerroux’s government, as well as bringing land reform to a halt, cancelled in May the confiscation of land belonging to the grandees of Spain and annulled the law which provided agricultural workers with the same protection as industrial employees. Landowners are supposed to have told hungry labourers seeking work to ‘eat the Republic’. The agricultural subsidiary of the UGT³⁰ called for a general strike but it took effect only in the provinces of Cáceres, Badajoz, Gíudad Real and in certain parts of Andalucia. To start a strike in such circumstances, without any parliamentary support, was a serious error for it played into the government’s hands.

That summer of 1934 also saw a clash between the Madrid government and the Generalitat of Catalonia, which was involved in its own version of land reform, affecting the tenant farmers of vineyards. On 2 October 1934 the new government of Ricardo Samper, an associate of Lerroux, became a casualty of this imbroglio, under pressure from an intransigent right, and Samper resigned.

President Alcalá Zamora had to manage this crisis in the face of outrage from the left, which claimed that the right was determined to destroy the Republic and that new elections must be held, and the right which wanted to be represented in the government. Gil Robles announced that he would not support a government from the back benches unless it included members of the CEDA.

Largo Caballero himself had acknowledged the previous year that there was no danger of fascism in Spain, yet in the summer of 1934 the rhetoric of the caballeristas took the opposite direction, crying fascist wolf–a tactic which risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Following an outcry over a shipment of arms to socialists in the Asturias, Gil Robles, the leader of the CEDA, announced that they would ‘no longer suffer this state of affairs to continue’.³¹ Despite being the largest party in the Cortes, the CEDA had received no ministerial posts, and Gil Robles now demanded a share. The UGT, which suspected the CEDA’s lack of commitment to the Republic (due primarily to the anti-clerical clauses in its constitution), announced in turn that they ‘would not answer for their future action’. Following the fall of the Samper government on 4 October, three members of the CEDA, but not Gil Robles himself, entered the new government of Alejandro Lerroux.

The socialist PSOE, fired up on militant rhetoric and prepared to rise against the government, decided to unleash a revolutionary general strike. Other parties of the left and centre-left, fearing that the Republic was about to be handed over to its enemies, proclaimed that from that moment they were breaking away from legality. The government felt compelled to outlaw the general strike and proclaim a state of war in Spain.

The general strike began on 5 October and took effect throughout most of the country. Largo Caballero and his followers compounded the irresponsibility of their actions. They launched an insurrection without any planning. It was the most obvious way of terrorizing the middle classes and forcing them into the arms of the right, just as Besteiro and others had warned.

When the UGT declared its general strike in Madrid, it asked soldiers and police to join the revolt as if the capital of Spain in 1934 were Petrograd in 1917. Largo Caballero was soon forced to recognize that this did not produce the spontaneous revolution of the masses that he had hoped for. The strikers tried to occupy the ministry of the interior and some military centres, a few of them firing pistols, but they were soon rounded up by the security forces. By 8 October nearly all the members of the revolutionary committee had been arrested.³²

In Catalonia the general strike took hold, despite the abstention of the CNT, whose leaders wanted nothing to do with a revolution started by socialists and republicans. The Catalan left, on the other hand, exasperated at the Madrid government’s treatment of their statute of autonomy, saw in the general strike an opportunity for accelerating their independence. At eight in the evening on 6 October, Companys appeared on the balcony of the Generalitat to proclaim ‘a Catalan state within a Spanish federal republic’. He invited ‘anti-fascists’ from all over Spain to assemble in Barcelona to establish a provisional government. Lerroux ordered the local military commander, General Domingo Batet, to proclaim a state of war and end this sedition. Batet, who was a prudent man, positioned a pair of field guns in the Plaza de Sant Jaume and gave the order to fire blanks. At six in the morning of 7 October, Companys surrendered. He and his followers were arrested and tried. Companys was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Manuel Azaña, who had been in Barcelona purely by chance, was arrested and confined on a prison ship. The Catalan statute of autonomy was suspended immediately and Manuel Portela Valladares was appointed governor-general of Catalonia.