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

The Carlist movement was purely arch-conservative. Its official title was the Traditionalist Communion and it has been described as a form of lay Jesuitry. It believed that a ‘judaeo-marxist-masonic’ conspiracy was going to turn Spain into a colony of the Soviet Union.²⁵ Liberalism, in the view of Carlists as well as the Church hierarchy, was the source of all modern evils, and they dreamed of reviving a royal Catholic autocracy in a populist form. The main Carlist strength lay in the Pyrenees, though they did have supporters in a number of other areas, such as Andalucia. The Carlists no longer showed their former sympathy with regionalist aspirations. This had stemmed from their stronghold being in the former kingdom of Navarre and had also been a means of winning Basque and Catalan support for the Carlist wars in the nineteenth century. By 1936 they had come to detest Basque and Catalan nationalism.

A number of Carlist officers were trained in Italy with the help of Mussolini, while their leaders, Fal Conde and the Count of Rodezno, organized the purchase of weapons from Germany. The strength of the requetés is hard to calculate exactly, but there were probably more than 8,000 members in Navarre alone early in 1936. A figure of 30,000 for the whole country has been suggested. One of their backers, José Luis Oriol, organized a ship from Belgium which brought 6,000 rifles, 150 heavy machine-guns, 300 light machine-guns, five million rounds of ammunition and 10,000 hand grenades.²⁶

In the spring of 1936 the Carlists’ Supreme Military Council was set up in Saint Jean de Luz, just over the French frontier, by Prince Javier de Borbón-Parma and Fal Conde. It was composed of former officers and began to plan a rising in conjunction with the right-wing Unión Militar Española, a secret association of right-wing officers within the army, with Alfonsine monarchists and the Falange. Their contact was Colonel José Varela (later one of Franco’s most important field commanders) who had earlier been training the Carlist requetés secretly in the Pyrenees mountains. So far only the vaguest rumours of these preparations had reached Azaña’s government in Madrid.

The Fatal Paradox

Political turmoil in the spring of 1936 created an uncertainty which paralysed industry and finance. Although imports had fallen, Spain’s principal exports–oranges, almonds, wine and oil, had fallen much further.¹ The fact that the country’s balance of payments depended upon agrarian produce at the very time when agrarian reform represented one of the most bitterly divisive issues, did not of course help. Landowners, faced with worldwide price deflation and four months of almost constant rain in western and southern Spain, were trying to maintain a profit margin just when desperately underprivileged labourers were demanding better living standards. The bill for decades, if not centuries, of social, technological and political immobilism was being presented at the worst possible moment.

The Instituto de Reforma Agraria took up again its task of resettlement as best it could, but this proceeded with great slowness because of the legal actions launched by landlords. This exasperated the peasants, especially since they also had a feeling after the Popular Front’s victory in the February elections that they should be able to dictate conditions. In addition they had a longing for revenge after the sackings and wage reductions over the previous two years and the triumphalism of many landowners when the centre-right was in power.

In the first fortnight of March, landless braceros began to occupy estates in the provinces of Madrid, Toledo and Salamanca. Then, at dawn on 25 March, 60,000 landless peasants in the province of Badajoz seized land and began to plough it. Over the next few weeks, similar actions were launched in the provinces of Cáceres, Jaén, Seville and Córdoba. The security forces, subdued by the memory of Casas Viejas, acted with indecision, but this did not help. In one of the confrontations with peasants in Yeste, a civil guard was killed. The Civil Guard, known with approval or bitter irony as the Benemérita, replied by killing seventeen day labourers and wounding many others.² In any case, during the government of the Popular Front fewer than 200,000 peasants were resettled in the whole of Spain on 756,000 hectares of land, yet it was still more than during all of the previous administrations under the Republic.³ But none of those who colonized the land had money for seeds or tools. The Banco Nacional Agrario, which had been envisaged in the initial legislation to address the problem, was never set up.⁴