Kitabı oku: «A People Betrayed», sayfa 6

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflected on Cánovas and the system that he invented: ‘the Restoration, gentlemen, was a panorama of phantasms and Cánovas the great impresario of phantasmagoria … above and beyond being a great orator and a great thinker, Cánovas, gentlemen, was a great corruptor, as we might say, a professor of corruption. He corrupted even the incorruptible.’51

A demonstration in Barcelona in protest against the repression that followed the Semana Tragica or Tragic Week. (The History Collection/Alamy)

3
Revolution and War: From the Disaster of 1898 to the Tragic Week of 1909

With the humiliatingly swift defeat in an eight-month war against the United States, the effort to crush the rebels in Cuba and the Philippines came to a disastrous end. The shattering of the illusion of Spanish great-power status brought private grief and public chagrin to what had been a bellicose population. Lord Salisbury’s ‘dying nations’ speech was echoed in newspaper editorials and on political platforms. As Sebastian Balfour puts it, ‘the crisis occurred at the highest point in the age of empire, when the possession of colonies was seen as the bench-mark of a nation’s fitness to survive’.1 Yet the constitutional monarchy – which had gone into the war convinced that its own survival was at stake – did not suffer the fate of Napoleon III in 1870 or of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. This was a reflection of the fact that the principal arbiters of politics – the military – were busy licking their wounds and administering the complex process of demobilization. The rest of Spanish society was excluded from a corrupt political system which offered workers and the rural dispossessed only the stark choice of violent resistance or apathy.

The fallout from the disaster of 1898 eventually hit several parts of the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia, for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. The sectors most dependent on colonial trade were badly hit, although a diversification of export targets and technological change eventually eased the difficulties. Uprooted Spanish entrepreneurs came back home with business know-how and substantial capital. Nonetheless, Catalan industrialists were driven to campaign for political change and modernization to increase domestic consumption. Moreover, the disaster of 1898 intensified the pre-existing alienation of the Catalan middle classes from the Spanish state. Already a cauldron of social tension as anarchist labourers migrated from the estates of Andalusia, Murcia and the Catalan hinterland, Barcelona was the scene of strikes and terrorist atrocities by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Although the Spanish economy remained predominantly agrarian, in the early years of the century a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Cataluña, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias.2 Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than that from British mines. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the hesitant growth of these industries led to the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also fostered the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basque and Catalan industrialists paid a very high proportion of Spain’s tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy.

The notoriously corrupt elections of 19 May 1901 saw the machinery of caciquismo move from the exchange of favours for votes to outright purchase of them or the use of violence to force voting in one direction or another or simply to prevent voting altogether. Nevertheless, the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista, won its first electoral victory. It had been established only three weeks earlier by uniting the most conservative elements of Catalan nationalism with the express intention of working ‘by all legitimate means for the autonomy of the Catalan people within the Spanish State’. Its leader was the shrewd banker Francisco Cambó, the President of the industrialists’ association, the Fomento Nacional. Between 1901 and 1905, the Lliga and the republicans destroyed the turno system in Barcelona. In the elections of 1901, all four Lliga candidates and both republicans won their seats. Henceforth, elections would be fought on left–right lines, between the various left-wing republican groups and the conservative and Catalanist Lliga.3

Elsewhere, the corrupt system of the Restoration survived, with the increase in electoral competition being met by an intensification of corrupt practices. At the turn of the century, the accounts of the March Hermanos Company of Mallorca revealed substantial payments made in cash, cigars and even cakes (ensaimadas) to secure votes in elections and to bribe frontier guards (carabineros), to turn a blind eye to tobacco smuggling.4 In 1905, electors were abducted off the streets in Alicante. In Guadalajara and other provinces, in 1905 and in most elections of the period, the Conde de Romanones used his immense fortune to establish an arsenal of favours and threats that his agents could use to gain votes.5 The choice between the purchase of votes and the exercise of violence depended in part on the financial resources of the political group in question. Wealthy industrialists and mine owners in the Basque Country frequently resorted to purchase while the wheat growers of Old Castile were more often to be found using compulsion of one kind or another, especially the threat to foreclose mortgages or not to buy the wheat of the small producers. In order for any of this to happen, candidates had first to be authorized by the Ministry of the Interior. There, the encasillado (the list of candidates selected to win a seat) was drawn up according to the political needs of the day and the recommendations of influential figures.6 Thus electoral fraud signified that there would be wild swings of votes from one election to the next, especially in rural areas. In some poor regions, such as Andalusia or Galicia, the government of the day was able to maintain control of the elections. In Andalusia, between 1899 and 1923, some 49 per cent of Cortes seats went to members of the Liberal Party and 44 per cent to members of the Conservative Party. Only 7 per cent of seats were ‘won’ by members of opposition parties and, even then, only because the Ministry of the Interior had included them in the encasillado.7

The impact of 1898 among intellectuals of the right and the left saw unmitigated criticism of the deficiencies of the political system. One response came from the austere Conservative Antonio Maura, who tried to reform Spanish politics between 1900 and 1910 by means of the so-called ‘revolution from above’. Born in Palma de Mallorca in 1853, Maura had arrived in Madrid in 1868 to study law, barely able to speak Spanish. By the time he came to political prominence his eloquence in the language was legendary. He had long been committed to reform of Restoration politics, initially, as the brother-in-law of Germán Gamazo, in the Liberal Party. A rigidly austere Catholic, he would punish himself by renouncing smoking on any day on which an examination of his conscience revealed a sin.8 His scathing oratorical skills could crush opponents and rendered him a divisive figure. In fact, his arrogant and authoritarian manner belied his relatively liberal ideology. Nevertheless, his desire for reform of the political system was inhibited by a fear of the masses.9

Maura would be Prime Minister five times, the first from December 1903 to December 1904; the longest (with a brief one-month interruption in March 1907) from January 1907 to October 1909 and finally for three short periods during the death agony of the Restoration system: March to November 1918, April to July 1919 and August 1921 to March 1922. His successes, and even more his failures, illustrate the problems of the Restoration system. If he was the great white hope of the system in his first governments, by 1918 he would be called upon, in the words of his friend César Silio, to be ‘the fireman of the monarchy’.10 After the death of Gamazo, he had taken the remnants of his faction into Francisco Silvela’s Conservative Party in 1902. He had gradually come to believe that Silvela was more open to ideas of national regenerationism than the Liberals. In 1899, Silvela had underlined ‘the need for a real revolution carried out from above with a determination to change profoundly our political, administrative and social way of being’. In July 1901, Maura declared in the Cortes that there had to be a revolution imposed by the government in order to forestall a more catastrophic revolution from below.11

In April 1903, as Minister of the Interior in Silvela’s cabinet, Maura supervised ‘clean’ elections for the first time in the history of the Restoration. He undermined the networks of clientelism by appointing provincial civil governors without links to the local caciques. He also curtailed bribes to the press and refrained from using the encasillado, the imposition of governmental candidates on constituencies. His lifelong contempt for the press was reciprocated, which would always be a serious handicap. Since his speeches were often distorted, he declared that ‘the diary of parliamentary proceedings is my newspaper’. Although, thanks to the entrenched power of the caciques, the Conservatives achieved a healthy majority, with government intervention limited, in the 1903 elections, thirty-four republican candidates were returned in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. The Queen Regent was furious, convinced that Maura had endangered the monarchy with what she regarded as self-indulgent moralism. Still having enormous influence over her recently enthroned son, she mobilized him against Silvela. The young King told Silvela that he must either oblige Maura to use the full arsenal of electoral chicanery or sack him. He refused. In fact, suffering ill health, he was more than ready to resign and, ironically, his departure saw Maura become leader of the Conservative Party.12 This tension with the Royal Palace and Maura’s austere manner explain why he was the only minister whom Alfonso XIII did not address with the informal tú form, but rather with the more respectful usted and ‘Don Antonio’. This accounts for the underlying contradiction whereby, in the words of Maura’s protégé Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, ‘the King would regard him with profound respect and uncontrollable antipathy’.13

From the beginnings of their relationship, the young Alfonso XIII resented Maura’s attempts to make him act with the dignity becoming his role. The eighteen-year-old King was becoming obsessed with fast French cars. In early September 1904, several ministers expressed in cabinet their concern that Alfonso was risking his life with such powerful vehicles. Maura had declared: ‘We have only him and, if anything happens to him, no one else.’ The King bore a grudge. When Maura’s Minister of War tried to name a new chief of the General Staff, Alfonso insisted on his own candidate, General Camilo García de Polavieja. Opposing the view of the entire cabinet, he refused to back down and forced the resignation of Maura’s government. That his behaviour resembled an infantile tantrum was revealed when Alfonso took Maura’s successor, the seventy-one-year-old General Marcelo de Azcárraga Palmero, to watch him driving a car over blazing logs and then told him to make sure that he told Maura what he had seen. General Azcárraga’s government lasted little more than a month.14

After this brief hiatus, Maura returned to power following the election of 21 April 1907, managed by the Minister of the Interior, the thuggish Juan de la Cierva. It was one of the most corrupt in Spanish history. Maura disliked La Cierva’s open espousal of electoral corruption yet came to rely on him. The relationship would consistently undermine his own career. Although the anarchists eschewed establishment politics, the Socialists and Republicans were slowly becoming ever more effective in mobilizing working-class votes in order to secure representation in the Cortes. Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Republican Party had also had some success in this regard in Catalonia in the elections of 1901 and 1903.15 In consequence, La Cierva’s ‘skills’ came to seem indispensable.

Elections aside, in the two decades before the First World War the principal challenges to the system came from a burgeoning anarchosyndicalism and the more slowly growing Socialist movement. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), saw their ranks swelled by the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao, and the coalminers of Asturias. Given the ideological differences between anarchism and socialism, there was never much likelihood of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement. The possibility was definitively eliminated by the decision, in 1899, of the party’s rigid leader Pablo Iglesias to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent, this cut off the Socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was further hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism, mediated through the dead hand of Pablo Iglesias. He rendered the party isolationist, committed to the view that the Socialists should work legally for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.16

The differences between the Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists were illustrated by the general strike that paralysed Barcelona in mid-February 1902. In May 1901, the government had responded to a strike of tram workers by declaring martial law. So many workers were arrested that there was no room in the city prison and many were detained in the hold of the battlecruiser Pelayo.17 This was followed in December by a strike of metalworkers in favour of a reduction of the working day from ten to nine hours. The metalworkers had faced fierce obstacles. They had no strike funds, and widespread unemployment made it easy for the factory owners to recruit blacklegs. Nevertheless, 10,000 workers managed to stay out for the next eight weeks. Then on 17 February 1902, the anarchist unions declared a general strike in solidarity with the metallurgical unions. Within a few days, it involved around 80,000 of Barcelona’s workforce of 144,000. The city was without public transport, newspapers, shops, banks and cafés for a week. The response of the authorities was brutal. Martial law was declared within a week. Strike leaders were arrested and pickets broken up with cavalry charges. At least twelve workers were killed and several dozen injured. The strikers were defeated and returned to work on 24 February. The organized workers’ movement in Catalonia was dramatically weakened. Trade unions were suppressed and the anarchist movement forced underground. The Socialist leadership had urged its militants to stand aside for fear of such consequences. Pablo Iglesias later denounced the anarchists for their irresponsibility and the party newspaper El Socialista accused the anarchists of being ‘auxiliaries of the bourgeoisie’. Although it was a failure, the 1902 strike ultimately strengthened the anarchists and consolidated their hostility towards the Socialist movement.18

The long-standing monopoly of political power by the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization, but it would not be surrendered easily. Industrialization brought with it challenges from powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement. The system was also opposed by an increasingly influential group of middle-class republicans. As well as distinguished individuals like Joaquín Costa, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic. The most notable among them was the intensely learned man of letters Manuel Azaña, who would eventually become Prime Minister and later President of the Second Republic.

Some elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio Prieto, recognized that the non-violent triumph of socialism required the prior establishment of liberal democracy. The rise of republicanism inclined them to fight for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans. Anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and opposition to the Moroccan adventure was bringing the two closer together. Prieto’s experiences in Bilbao had shown that, alone, the Socialists had little chance of electoral success while, with the Republicans, it was possible. His advocacy of a Republican–Socialist electoral combination in 1909 opened up the long-term prospect of building socialism legally from parliament. However, it also brought him into conflict with local leaders such as Facundo Perezagua, who advocated an exclusively syndicalist strategy of confrontational strike action. After a long and bitter struggle within the Federación Provincial Socialista de Vizcaya, Prieto eventually defeated Perezagua, and thereafter Bilbao became a stronghold of Republican–Socialist collaboration. That was enough to earn Prieto the lifelong hostility of the UGT Vice-President, Francisco Largo Caballero, who shared Perezagua’s distrust of bourgeois Republicans. Republican–Socialist collaboration would be the basis of eventual PSOE success. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias himself was elected to parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the unrelenting animosity of Largo Caballero would bedevil Prieto’s existence and eventually, in the 1930s, have devastating consequences for Spain.19

Another Republican movement that seemed to be threatening the system was the brainchild of the outrageous rogue and virtuoso carpetbagger Alejandro Lerroux. After his success on the back of the Montjuïc tortures, his popularity was consolidated by his exposure of a series of provocations by a Civil Guard named Captain Morales. In 1903, Morales fabricated a supposed anarchist conspiracy to set off bombs in Tarragona. Having then ‘discovered’ a cache of bombs and thus ‘foiled’ the plot, he had numerous workers arrested who, after being tortured, confessed their involvement. Lerroux played a leading part in exposing the farce and securing the release of the prisoners and the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Morales.20 His skills as a rabble-rousing demagogue propelled him to the leadership of a mass Republican movement in the slums of Barcelona and his ability as an organizer built a formidable electoral machine. He was receiving money from the central government, a common practice in a period when politicians paid for news to be inserted in or excluded from newspapers. This gave rise to the widespread belief that he had been sent to Barcelona by Segismundo Moret, the Minister of the Interior in Mateo Sagasta’s government, in order to deploy his rabble-rousing skills to divide the anarcho-syndicalist masses and undermine the rise of Catalan nationalism.

Probably no government slush fund could have achieved what he did. His links to anti-monarchical terrorist conspiracies would also have made him far from suitable as an agent of Madrid. He had been called to Barcelona to be a republican parliamentary candidate in the 1901 general elections. To become ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’, the Barcelona district where misery, criminality and prostitution held sway, required more genuine appeal than anything that could be conjured up in Madrid ministries. His sincere concern for the injustice suffered by the working class did not need bribery. His popularity would be built on the Radicals’ provision of urban services, including libraries and ateneos (debating clubs) and, less salubriously, the near-pornographic techniques of his anti-clerical demagogy. Lerroux shared the profound anti-clericalism of immigrant labourers for whom the Church was the defender of the brutally unjust rural social order from which they had fled. It was only later that his venality saw anti-Catalanism and pro-militarism coming to the fore in his oratorical repertoire.21

The rural and urban proletariats believed that the Church was the ally and legitimizer of economic oppression. A factor that fed the notion was a deeply held conviction that priests systematically betrayed the secret of the confessional in the interests of the rich. It was believed that domestic servants were sent to confession so that the mistress might learn from the priest what the maid had been doing wrong and that crimes committed by the illegitimate children of clergymen were immune from prosecution. The religious orders were seen as parasites. Commenting on the ‘silent defiance’ of workmen, Rafael Shaw wrote: ‘For years past I have noticed that no member of the working classes salutes a priest or friar in the streets.’ Another factor in popular hostility was the fact that monasteries and convents undercut small tradespeople engaged in baking, laundry or needlework. Enmity was not one-sided. Through its press and pulpits, the Catholic Church carried out virulent and incendiary campaigns against lay education.22

There were two attempts on the life of the Prime Minister Antonio Maura in 1904, in Barcelona on 12 April and in Alicante two weeks later. Hoping to drive a wedge between Catalan Conservatives and the Republicans and anarchists, Maura had decided that it was time for King Alfonso XIII to visit Catalonia. For fear of terrorism, María Cristina had not been to Barcelona since 1888 and, since his coronation in May 1902, nor had her son. It was an adventurous gamble. On 4 April 1904, Lerroux wrote an article in La Publicidad, urging ‘the poor, the paralysed and the beggars’ to line the route of the King’s procession in their shabbiest rags: ‘Let them approach, let them see him at close range and observe how the monster of history has the face of a child and questioning eyes.’ Tramps and the disabled in rags thronged the centre of the city. The King made some pro-Catalan gestures, such as asking for the members of the landowners’ association, the Instituto Catalán de San Isidro, to address him in the language. Maura’s gamble paid off. Alfonso received a degree of public acclaim and the visit seemed to have passed off without major incident. However, on 12 April, as the royal party was leaving the Cathedral after a Te Deum, a nineteen-year-old anarchist stonemason, Joaquim Miquel Artal, jumped on the running board of Maura’s carriage, shouting ‘Long live anarchy!’ He leaned in and stabbed and slightly wounded Maura with a kitchen knife. He seems to have been acting, alone although he was carrying a copy of the newspaper with Lerroux’s article. He was given a seventeen-year sentence and died in prison in Ceuta in November 1909, allegedly as a result of a savage beating. Maura was not harmed in the second attack in Alicante two weeks later and the unknown assailants were never caught. The attacks and his survival massively consolidated Maura’s prestige.23

After the success of the Barcelona trip, Maura now decided that the image of Alfonso XIII could be improved even more by international visits. For Spanish revolutionaries, especially Lerroux, this constituted a threat to their efforts to present the Spanish monarchy as authoritarian and priest-ridden. It was also seen as an opportunity to kill the King and hasten the advent of a republic. By 1903, Lerroux, whose rhetoric was as radical as that of the anarchists, had managed to unite most republican groups into the Unión Republicana. Spanish revolutionaries exiled in Paris, led by the exiled republican Nicolás Estévanez, who had very briefly been Minister for the Army in the government of Pi y Margall, created a similar group, known as the Junta de Acción y Unión Republicana. Since early 1904, they had been publishing virulent pamphlets denouncing the monarchy as responsible for the tortures of Montjuïc and calling for Artal’s example to be followed. One of the authors was an anarchist medical student, Pedro Vallina, a protégé of Fermín Salvochea. He had suffered some months in prison, having been framed by the police for involvement in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Alfonso XIII during his coronation in May 1902. To avoid further police attention, Vallina had fled to France in October that year with a letter of introduction from Salvochea to Nicolás Estévanez. There, he had acquired some skill in bomb making.

Now, in response to news that Alfonso XIII was to make a state visit to France, the group began to plan his assassination. The mastermind and financier of the conspiracy was the fiercely anti-clerical educationalist Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the wealthy director of the rationalist Escuela Moderna and of a number of lay schools in Barcelona. Ostensibly bookish and respectable, Ferrer was using his fortune to sponsor major acts of terrorism. There were close links between the Paris and Barcelona groups of anarchists and radical republicans. Indeed, Vallina had visited Barcelona in February 1905 where he had persuaded Lerroux that the death of the unmarried and childless King would expose divisions in the army and facilitate a republican coup. To this end, Ferrer had paid for Vallina to set up a laboratory that could manufacture crude Orsini bombs in Barcelona. Lerroux and Estévanez made plans with sympathizers within the army. Lerroux also sent his friend Ricardo Fuente, the one-time editor of El País, to Paris, apparently to cover the royal visit but really so that he could telegraph him with the news of the outcome of the attempted regicide. The bombs to be used in Paris were prepared by Vallina. The bomb thrower was to be Mateo Morral Roca, the austere and highly educated son of a wealthy Catalan textile industrialist. Morral was a close collaborator of Ferrer, working as librarian and in the publishing section of the Escuela Moderna. He was also a devoted admirer of Estévanez whose pamphlet Pensamientos revolucionarios he had published and which Ferrer had paid for. On 25 May, the French police arrested Vallina and several other conspirators. Nevertheless, on the night of 31 May 1905, as Alfonso XIII and President Émile Loubet returned from the opera, Morral threw two bombs at the cavalcade as it passed down the Rue de Rohan. Only one exploded, injuring seventeen people, but the King and the President were unharmed.24

Morral escaped, but the planned coup in Spain came to nothing. The anarchists arrested alongside Vallina included an Italian, Carlo Malato, an Englishman, Bernard Harvey, and a Frenchman, Eugène Caussanel. Although Harvey was a teacher of English, his knowledge of chemistry had helped Vallina and Morral make the bombs. They were held for six months before eventually being put on trial in October 1906. Malato was a senior freemason and had influential political friends in the French establishment. A major campaign was mounted linking the trial to the scandal over the Montjuïc tortures and arguing that the assassination attempt had been a provocation prepared by the Spanish police in order to discredit the republicans in Spain. Among those who made eloquent speeches for the defence, as well as Lerroux and Estévanez, were the French Socialists Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand. Despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement in the assassination plot, Vallina and the three others would be found innocent.25

The first years of the twentieth century thus saw an explosive cocktail of intransigence on the part of landowners, industrialists and the military and subversion from a disparate array of anarchists, Lerroux’s Radicals, moderate republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in which rapid albeit sporadic industrialization and increasing labour organization coincided with a resurgence of terrorism and post-imperial trauma in the armed forces. Disappointed by defeat in Cuba and subsequent budgetary restrictions, a resentful army turned inwards, determined to lose no more battles. Wounded pride turned into a neurotic sensitivity to perceived slurs on military honour. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, General Camilo García de Polavieja, the Minister of War in Francisco Silvela’s Conservative administration, blamed defeat on political incompetence and floated the idea of a military dictatorship.

The army’s inflated sense of its importance in domestic politics was exaggerated by Alfonso XIII who saw himself as a soldier-king. He had been educated as an officer cadet and, like his admired cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, he delighted in dressing up in uniform, presiding over parades and granting audiences to favoured officers. He encouraged senior generals to discuss problems with him directly rather than through the official channel of the Ministry of War. He exceeded his constitutional powers by interfering in military appointments, promotions and decorations, favouring his pet officers to a degree that smacked of corruption. According to one minister, the future President of the Second Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, he behaved as if he was the Minister of War, in which capacity he frequently indulged petty personal caprices. He even charged the expenses of the deposed Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the Ministry’s budget. By his identification with the army and his insistence on his personal prerogatives, the King impeded the modernization of the Restoration system. In a series of clashes between civilian and military power, he undermined the authority of various governments and encouraged military insubordination.26