Kitabı oku: «A People Betrayed», sayfa 2

A satirical cartoon published in the magazine La Araña in August 1885. ‘Poor Spain. How beautiful she is. The more they strip her, the more beautiful she is.’ Among the watching European leaders are Otto von Bismarck and King Umberto of Italy. Among those ripping the flag from her body are the architects of electoral corruption, Francisco Romero Robledo, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.

1
Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption

Spain has often been seen through the myths of national character. One of the most persistent has been that of corruption and dishonesty, which owed much to the numerous translations into other European languages of the first and hugely popular picaresque novels, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (o Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos; ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños) (written 1604, published 1626). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spain was a frequent, and conveniently exotic, setting for operas by foreigners. Among the most extreme examples of operas based on myths of national character, especially Spanish, are almost certainly Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Il trovatore and La forza del destino and Bizet’s Carmen. Artists wishing to portray violent passions drew upon a view of Spain, its history and its people as the embodiment of fanaticism, cruelty and uncontrolled emotion. This image went back to the Reformation, when a series of religiously inspired pamphlets had denounced the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Tribunal of the Holy Office and the terrors of the auto-da-fé. Religious hatreds aside, the European perception of Spain was confirmed by the experience of an empire in the Americas, Italy and Flanders built on greed and maintained by blood. The Peninsular Wars, or the wars of national independence, and the subsequent nineteenth-century series of civil wars did nothing to undermine stereotypes which survived into the twentieth century in the literature spawned by the Spanish Civil War.

Collectively, this view of Spain constituted what the Spaniards themselves came to call ‘the black legend’, the most extreme examples of which were collected in the celebrated work by the historian Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra. Combating the notion of universal laziness and violence, Juderías railed against ‘the legend of the inquisitorial, ignorant, fanatical Spain, under the yoke of the clergy, lazy, incapable of figuring among civilized nations today as well as in the past, always ready for violent repressions; enemy of progress and innovations’.1 What Juderías had in mind were definitions of Spain such as that by Sir John Perrot, Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputy of Ireland (1584–6), who observed: ‘This semi-Morisco nation … is sprung from the filth and slime of Africa, the base Ottomans and the rejected Jews.’2 The stereotypes which caused greatest outrage to Spaniards, however, were fundamentally the product of the romantic era. From 1820 to 1850, British and French travellers were drawn to Spain by what they saw as the picturesque savagery of both its landscapes and its inhabitants. Rugged mountains infested by brigands, their paths travelled by convoys of well-armed smugglers, the bloody rituals of the bullfight, the ruins of Moorish palaces and castles, and erotic encounters (probably imagined) with languid olive-skinned beauties became the clichés of romantic literature about Spain. The stereotypes would be maintained even in the 1920s when bar owners in the sleazy Raval district of Barcelona exploited the reputation of the ‘Barrio Chino’ for the benefit of foreign tourists. They would stage ‘spontaneous’ incidents in which ‘gypsies’, apparently inflamed with jealousy by the sight of their women (the waitresses) flirting with the tourists, waved knives, the incidents being settled with rounds of expensive drinks.3

Bizet’s Carmen remains perhaps the most famous ‘Spanish’ opera, largely because of its deployment of most of these Spanish stereotypes. Carmen presents the archetypes of the passionate Andalusian woman, the knife-wielding murderer and the bullfighter set in a context of smugglers, bandits, sex and violence. The notion that the Spaniards were sex-crazed underlay the fact that syphilis was known in France as le mal espagnol. The German writer August Fischer also wrote of the frantic, indeed fanatical, sexuality of Andalusian women – a view shared by Lord Byron, who visited Andalusia in 1809. The French diplomat Jean-François Bourgoing, in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne (1788; expanded in 1803 into the three-volume Tableau de l’Espagne moderne), complained about the open sensuality of flamenco dancing and excoriated the vice-ridden daily life of gypsies.4 Rather more wistfully, Giacomo Casanova, the Venetian sexual athlete, praised the fandango thus: ‘Everything is represented, from the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of love. I could not conceive a woman refusing her partner anything after this dance, for it seemed made to stir up the senses.’5

It was Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832) that really put Spain on the map for romantics. A decade later, he was outdone by Théophile Gautier whose Un Voyage en Espagne (1843) described the dusky, flashing-eyed Andalusian beauties who warmed his blood with their flamenco dancing and the blood-chilling gypsy knife fighters and their fancy cutlery.6 English writers like George Borrow (The Bible in Spain, 1843) and Richard Ford (Handbook for Spain, 1845, and Gatherings in Spain, 1846) portrayed Spaniards’ alleged obsession with honour, their religious fanaticism, their extremes of love and hate, and the proliferation of lawless cut-throats. This was intensified even more by Alexandre Dumas. Massively famous as a result of the success of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas had been invited by the Duc de Montpensier to attend his wedding on 10 October 1846 to the Infanta Luisa Fernanda, daughter of King Fernando VII. Dumas spent two months in Spain on the basis of which he wrote his massive four-volume De Paris à Cadix. Here he described his disgust at Spanish food and at what he saw as the licentiousness and depravity of gypsy dancers in Granada. Yet, in Seville, he was delighted by the voluptuousness of professional flamenco dancers and rejoiced in the flirtations between young army officers and the pretty girls who worked in the great Fábrica de Tabaco.7 Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845) concentrated all the romantic clichés about Seville in one personage. A cigarette factory worker, Carmen was also a flamenco dancer, lover of a bullfighter, accomplice of smugglers and bandits, voluptuous, independent, untamed – just the thing to titillate the Parisian bourgeois who seemed to view Spain as a kind of human zoo.8 Mérimée’s patronizingly anthropological attitude to his characters was popularized even further by Bizet’s opera.

A context of readily familiar assumptions about Spain had long since been established by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy. Her Mémoire de la cour d’Espagne (1690), published in English as Memories of the Court of Spain written by an ingenious French lady, was a prurient account of the allegedly syphilis-ridden royal court in Madrid. Uninhibited by the fact that she had almost certainly never visited Spain at all, this armchair fantasist then quickly produced her immensely influential Rélation du voyage d’Espagne, which was first published in 1691 and was regularly reprinted in several languages well into the nineteenth century. Despite claiming to relate ‘nothing but what I have seen’, Madame d’Aulnoy described a country full of exotic animals including monkeys and parrots. Her cast of invented characters was based on other travel books, diplomatic memoirs and the plays of Calderón and other Spanish dramatists. Her wild exaggerations presented corrupt officials, aristocratic men ever ready to kill or die for questions of honour and promiscuous women invariably in the throes of passion.9 Nevertheless, the caricatures created by Madame d’Aulnoy, including the notion that virtually the entire population was afflicted with venereal disease, allowed Bizet to present the insolent and primeval sexuality of Carmen as somehow typically Spanish.10

In Britain, the image of an exotic, semi-oriental Spain of crumbling cathedrals and mosques, castles and bridges, inhabited by colourful, passionate and sensual people, drew on the exquisite paintings and drawings of David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis in the 1830s and of Charles Clifford in the 1850s. Many of their most characteristic works became immensely popular through collections of best-selling lithographs. Their views of Spain were confirmed by many Spanish painters of the romantic era, particularly Genaro Pérez de Villaamil, whose work was exhibited and published in Paris.11 Nothing symbolized the Spain of the romantic era more than Andalusian beauties and bandit-infested sierras. Foreign travellers returned home to dine out on stories of the risks they claimed that they had undergone.12 Virtually all travellers to Spain, whatever their nationality and whatever they thought of the sex, the bandits, the bulls and the Inquisition, complained about the rutted tracks which passed for roads. They often declared confidently that Spain would never be penetrated by railways.13 In fact, it was the introduction of railways from the late 1850s onwards that dramatically changed the stereotypes. As Spain enjoyed an extremely uneven industrial revolution, foreign investment increased. Thereafter, observers and travellers were concerned less with romantic stereotypes than with political instability, corruption and social violence.

In fact, the fundamentals of Spanish society had little to do with the steamy erotic stereotypes beloved of foreign travellers. The reality was altogether more mundane, its central characteristics the linked factors of social inequality and violence and political incompetence and corruption. In 1883, the Tribunal Supremo entitled part of its annual report on criminality ‘On the Violent Customs of the Spanish People’. It was symptomatic of Spain’s dysfunctional society that, between 1814 and 1981, there were more than fifty attempted pronunciamientos, or military coups of which only a handful succeeded.14 That crude statistic provides a graphic indication not just of the divorce between soldiers and civilians but of the extent to which the Spanish state did not adequately serve its citizens. A tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. The year 1833 saw the outbreak of the first of four civil wars with the battlefield hostilities of the last coming to a close in 1939. In fact, to some extent, the civil war of 1936–9 is the war that never ended. Indeed, in some respects, Spain still suffers today from some of the divisions of 1936.

The early 1830s experienced both the loss of the bulk of the once great Spanish empire and the beginning of dynastic conflict. The death in 1833 of Fernando VII, succeeded as queen by his infant daughter, Isabel, and the attempt by his brother Carlos to seize power provided the spark that ignited what came to be called the first Carlist War, which raged until 1840. Carlos sought support among deeply reactionary landowners and extreme ultramontane Catholics and was opposed by modernizing liberals led symbolically at least by Isabel’s mother, the Queen-Regent María Cristina. Carlist forces were commanded, even more symbolically, by the Vírgen de los Dolores, a commitment to theocracy that guaranteed the support of the Church hierarchy. A second, rather more sporadic, Carlist war was fought from 1846 to 1849 and a third from 1872 to 1876. The active role of the Catholic Church in these Carlist Wars, with some lower clergy even taking up arms, contributed to the subsequent popular perception of priests as deeply reactionary.15 In the 1860s, there had been fewer than 50,000 secular priests, monks and nuns in Spain. In the period between the monarchical Restoration of 1874 and the end of the century, the numbers would increase to more than 88,000. When the Primo de Rivera dictatorship fell in 1930, the clergy had swelled to over 135,000.16 In the view of the anarchists, the Catholic Church commercialized religion but did not practise morality. They saw it as a corrupt and rapacious institution which exploited the people and also blocked social progress.

Thus, even though black, reactionary Spain was startled by the French revolution and was shaken out of its lethargy by the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, many of the European stereotypes of Spain lamented by Juderías, certainly those based on the violence of its political life, were confirmed rather than shattered by the cycle of nineteenth-century civil wars. The notion that deep social and political problems could be resolved by violence was to afflict Spain well into the twentieth century. The Franco regime which followed the civil war was a regime built on terror, plunder and corruption. None of these elements was the invention of Franco. Indeed, it is the central thesis of this book that the violence, corruption and incompetence of the political class have betrayed the population at least since 1833 and almost certainly before. There are many possible historical reasons to do with religion and empire but perhaps the most potent and enduring has been the lack of a state apparatus popularly accepted as legitimate. After a state of near civil war between the death of Franco in 1975 and the military coup of 1981, it looked as if Spain was witnessing the creation of a legitimate state. The prosperity of the late twentieth century masked the extent to which the new polity was as mired in corruption and incompetence as its predecessors. An especially vibrant economic boom fuelled by the cheap credit facilitated by Spain joining the euro drew a veil over rampant corruption that reached as far as the royal family. The recession that followed saw the veil torn away, the political establishment lose legitimacy and problems such as regional nationalism divide the country in, rhetorically at least, violent terms.

In the nineteenth century, the Spanish state was weak in the face of geographic obstacles, poor communications and historical and linguistic traditions utterly opposed to a centralized state. Unlike, say, France or Italy after 1871, Spanish governments failed to create an all-embracing patriotism and sense of nationhood. In other countries, this task was largely assumed by the armed forces. However, in Spain, the army was an engine of division, above all because of the appalling conditions faced by conscripts in overseas wars. By the early twentieth century, army officers were ripe for persuasion by extreme conservatives that it was their right and duty to interfere in politics in order to ‘save Spain’. Unfortunately, that ostensibly noble objective actually meant the defence of the interests and privileges of relatively small segments of society. The armed forces were thus not the servants of the nation defending it from external enemies but the defenders of narrow social interests against their internal enemies, the working class and the regional nationalists. In the hundred years before 1930, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocs. Accordingly, popular hostility to the armed forces grew as deep-rooted social conflicts, at a time of imperial decline and military defeat, were repressed by the army. A further layer of the dialectic between violence and popular discontent was the way in which regional nationalism was crushed in the name of a patriotic centralism. Military resentments of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular were the other side of the same coin.

Ironically, it was in 1833 that the biggest step towards creating a state had been taken. This was the adoption of a highly centralized French territorial model with fifty broadly uniform provinces under the control of a civil governor appointed by Madrid. This systematized the distribution of patronage and therefore fostered corruption. Although the idea of Spain had long existed, the country seemed to be a flimsy collection of virtually independent provinces and regions whose languages and dialects were often mutually unintelligible. The 1833 definition of regions and provinces has subsequently been modified but, broadly speaking, it still holds good and can be recognized in the current system of so-called autonomies into which Spain is now divided. Similarly, further measures taken in the 1840s saw the beginnings of something resembling a central state with a crude and divisive taxation system and the creation of local and national police forces. However, with the exception of the Civil Guard, it was an inadequately implemented process. Taxation did not finance the state because wealth was not taxed, whereas consumption was. Ancient forms of politics, social influence and patronage, caciquismo or clientelism, took precedence over any kind of modern political machinery, poisoning what falteringly developed as electoral politics and leaving the state underfinanced and weak, other than in its coercive capacity.

After the process known as the disentailment or desamortización, Spain ceased to be a feudal society in legal and economic terms. However, it remained so in social and political terms. Traditional rural elites retained their power long after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1874 and the attempt to create a modern state by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in his Constitution of 1876. That state worked only in so far as it was in the interests of the local bosses or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’) to allow it to do so. It was only with the growth of industry in the Basque Country, Asturias, Catalonia and Madrid that a different and more modern politics became even a remote possibility. Then, the vested interests of the landed caciques ensured that their superior power was exerted over the reforming bourgeoisie which, itself under pressure from the first signs of working-class discontent, scurried to make an alliance in which it was the junior partner. Loss of empire would lead to a weakening of the alliance but it would always be consolidated when the industrial bourgeoisie needed the protection of the repressive machinery that was the state’s principal asset. Pressure for political change and social development was simply dismissed as subversion.17

Richard Ford wrote in the 1840s: ‘I once beheld a cloaked Spaniard pacing mournfully in the burial ground of Seville. When the public trench was opened, he drew from beneath the folds the dead body of his child, cast it in and disappeared. Thus, half the world lives without knowing how the other half dies.’18 In a land in which oppressive poverty coexisted with an equally parasitical government and Church, the law was not respected and smugglers and bandits were the objects of hero worship. When Ford enquired of Spaniards where brigands hid, he was frequently told that ‘it was not on the road that they were most likely to be found, but in the confessional boxes, the lawyers’ offices, and still more in the bureaux of government’. Of the Civil Guard, Ford wrote that they were nothing but rogues ‘used to keep down the expression of indignant public opinion, and, instead of catching thieves, upholding those first-rate criminals, foreign and domestic, who are now robbing poor Spain of her gold and liberties’.19

Founded by two royal decrees of 28 March and 13 May 1844, the Civil Guard was intended to be a disciplined nationwide police force, staffed by men seconded from the army. The corps was organized by the Inspector General of the Army, the Duke of Ahumada.20 Between 1844 and the 1860s, the Civil Guard established itself as a dour and brutal army of occupation protecting the great estates and mines against the resentment of their workers. It became part of the army in 1878. Banditry was gradually eliminated, but the Civil Guard’s ominous ubiquity forced the peasants to direct their rebelliousness against it and therefore against the state. ‘Every Civil Guard became a recruiting officer for anarchism, and, as the anarchists increased their membership, the Civil Guard also grew.’21 In fact, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the death of General Franco, many Civil Guards were actually recruited from the sons of men who had served in the corps.

The sense that the Civil Guard was a hostile institution imposed from outside was intensified by the fact that social interaction was forbidden between the rank and file and the inhabitants of the area where they served. Needless to say, this prohibition did not extend to the officers, who usually maintained cordial relations with the local clergy and those who owned the land, the mines and the factories. In small towns and villages, Civil Guards and their families lived in fortified barracks known as the casa-cuartel. In Asturias, the casa-cuartel was often paid for by the mining companies. In many places, it was common for the local fuerzas vivas (notables) and employers’ organizations to subsidize the casa-cuartel with gifts of food, wine and, sometimes, furniture. Such gifts were publicized in the local press as well as in the official publications of the Civil Guard, which intensified the sense that the corps was a force at the service of the wealthy.22 This perception was reinforced by the fact that a Civil Guard could not serve in the area where he or his wife had been born. In a country of fierce localism (patriotismo chico), where any stranger could be seen not just as an outsider but virtually as a foreigner, this increased the hostility towards the Civil Guard. In Asturian mining villages, for instance, the hatred of the Civil Guard was intense both for political reasons and also because they were often from Galicia. Guards were not permitted to move about unarmed or alone and so were usually in pairs (la pareja). Thus ‘their relations with the working classes were of open hostility and suspicion. Living as they did among their enemies, they became unusually ready to shoot.’23

The Civil Guard responded to any social upheaval with aggression. In particular, signs of anarchist ideology were perceived as an especially pernicious and barbaric foreign doctrine. Anarchists were seen as ‘harmful beasts’, worse than common criminals because of their utopian ambitions for society. So the destructive influence of ‘those who have ideas’ had to be eliminated. Anarchists were the enemies of society and especially of the Civil Guards.24

Ford believed that bad government and poor communications were the principal cause of poverty and economic backwardness.

It has, indeed, required the utmost ingenuity and bad government of man to neutralise the prodigality of advantages which Providence has lavished on this highly favoured land, and which, while under the dominion of the Romans and Moors, resembled an Eden, a garden of plenty and delight, when in the words of an old author, there was nothing idle, nothing barren in Spain – ‘nihil otiosum, nihil sterile in Hispania’. A sad change has come over this fair vision, and now the bulk of the Peninsula offers a picture of neglect and desolation, moral and physical, which it is painful to contemplate.

He added, ‘Spain is a land which never yet has been able to construct or support even a sufficient number of common roads or canals for her poor and passive commerce and circulation.’25

For Ford, the essence of bad government in Spain was corruption. ‘Public poverty’, he wrote,

is the curse of the land, and all empleados or persons in office excuse themselves on dire necessity … Some allowance, therefore, may be made for the rapacity which, with very few exceptions, prevails; the regular salaries, always inadequate, are generally in arrear, and the public servants, poor devils, swear that they are forced to pay themselves by conniving at defrauding the government; this few scruple to do, as all know it to be an unjust one, and that it can afford it; indeed, as all are offenders alike, the guilt of the offence is scarcely admitted. Where robbing and jobbing are the universal order of the day, one rascal keeps another in countenance … A man who does not feather his nest when in place, is not thought honest, but a fool; es preciso, que cada uno coma de su oficio. It is necessary, nay, a duty, as in the East, that all should live by their office; and as office is short and insecure, no time or means is neglected in making up a purse …

He offers an example:

We remember calling on a Spaniard who held the highest office in a chief city of Andalucia. As we came into his cabinet a cloaked personage was going out; the great man’s table was covered with gold ounces, which he was shovelling complacently into a drawer, gloating on the glorious haul … This gentleman, during the Sistema, or Riego constitution, had, with other 1oyalists, been turned out of office; and, having been put to the greatest hardships, was losing no time in taking prudent and laudable precautions to avert all similar calamity for the future. His practices were perfectly well known in the town, where people simply observed, ‘Está atesorando, he is laying up treasures,’ – as every one of them would most certainly have done, had they been in his fortunate position … Donde no hay abundancia, no hay observancia. The empty sack cannot stand upright, nor was ever a sack made in Spain into which gain and honour could be stowed away together; honra y provecho, no caben en un saco o techo; here virtue itself succumbs to poverty, induced by more than half a century of misgovernment, let alone the ruin caused by Buonaparte’s invasion, to which domestic troubles and civil wars have been added.26

For all that Spanish intellectuals resented the belittling of their country by foreign writers, there were those who did it themselves, albeit in a different way. There was a substantial literature that lamented Spain’s loss of empire, uninterrupted military failures, deep-rooted political instability and economic backwardness.27 In November 1930, the intellectual Manuel Azaña, a future prime minister and president of the Second Republic, echoed Richard Ford’s judgement. He described the political system as functioning with two mechanisms, despotic authoritarianism and corruption. The great practitioner of the first was the reactionary General Ramón María Narváez, who was seven times Prime Minister between 1844 and 1868. He was notorious for remarking on his deathbed: ‘I have no enemies. I have shot them all.’ The wizard of electoral falsification was Luis José Sartorius, who, in the 1840s and 1850s, according to Azaña, ‘elevated political corruption into a system and became a master in the art of fabricating parliamentary majorities’. During their collaboration, in Azaña’s view, ‘the most illustrious elements of Spanish society applied themselves to squeezing profit out of politics’.28

The civil war of 1936–9 represented the most determined effort by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reforming project which might threaten their privileged position. The enduring dominance of reactionary forces reflected the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. The painfully slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain accounted for the existence of a numerically small and politically feeble commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were broken. The power of the monarchy, the landed nobility and the Church remained more or less intact well into the twentieth century. Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth-century Spain did not see the establishment of an incipiently democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. The legal basis for capitalism was established albeit without there being a political revolution and with the survival of elements of feudalism. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that its industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the political pattern established by Prussia.

Within this authoritarian model, until the 1950s capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian except for Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country in the north. Spanish agriculture is immensely variegated in terms of climate, crops and land-holding systems. There have long existed areas of commercially successful small and medium-sized farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the most politically influential sectors were, broadly speaking, the large landowners. In the main, the latifundios, the great estates, are concentrated in the arid central and southern regions of New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, although there are also substantial latifundios to be found scattered throughout parts of Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy saw occasional tentative challenges by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes. However, reliant on the repressive power of the oligarchy, their efforts met with little success. Until well into the 1950s, the urban haute bourgeoisie was obliged to play the role of junior partner in a working coalition with the great latifundistas. Despite sporadic industrialization and a steady growth in the national importance of the political representatives of the northern industrialists, power remained squarely in the hands of the landowners.