Chapter 3 : The King Abdicated, but the Generals Remained—The Frustrated Dictatorship of Gil Robles—The Military Conspiracy

The king abdicated, but the generals remained—The frustrated dictatorship of Gil Robles—The military conspiracy

One of the many organized centers of resistance of the civil war in the mid-19^th century, the 1854 Zaragoza Junta, declared, in an interesting manifesto to the nation that advocated extensive reforms in the domains of ideas, institutions and customs: “The military empire is not an element of liberty, nor is ignorance the seed of prosperity.” The republicans of the Second Republic—like those of the First Republic—forgot these postulates, and carried on the work that brought a temporary interruption, in order to prevent greater evils, of the discredited and putrescent monarchy.

So the king abdicated and his generals remained; if there was any force was capable of upholding the Bourbon monarchy it was the king’s own army, formed for the defense of the royal person, a task that the Republic was incapable of performing. Along with the generals of the monarchy, servants of the altar and the throne, the power of the Church remained intact, and generalized ignorance was cultivated just as assiduously as it was in the past. In April 1931 more than 60% of the population of Spain was illiterate; the few schools that did exist were infected with religious superstition and by the age-old hatred of the Church for all culture.

The Moroccan war, after major disasters in the colonies, consumed tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of pesetas, not having served any purpose besides incubating a military caste in which the doctrine of despotism found its favorite home.

The military caste, educated in the monarchy and for the monarchy, could not bear the change of regime with equanimity, and, on various occasions after April 14, 1931, openly manifested its opposition, baring its claws. The conspiracy of Sanjurjo, on August 10, 1932, and other planned coups that were subsequently aborted, were treated by the republicans in power with kid gloves, in contrast to what happened when the rebellion and protest came from below, from the working class masses and the peasants who were tired of suffering humiliation, deceit and poverty.

A few weeks before the military uprising, the tragedy of Yeste occurred, in Estremadura, where 23 peasants were murdered and more than 100 were wounded because they cut down some trees owned by one of the big Estremaduran feudal landowners. The Minister of the Interior went out of his way to praise the Civil Guard, the author of that valiant act in defense of anti-republican and anti-Spanish privileges.

The character of the men of the Second Republic is neatly summarized by the following anecdote:

There was a small group of brave young officers who were ready to fight for a new regime of social justice, and the first step towards this goal was the overthrow of the monarchy. They worked with enthusiasm and audacity, making contact with the representative figures of the parties of the left and with the working class organizations and lying to all of them in order to get them to commit their forces to a revolt. They sent confidential messages, for example, to Party A, telling it that the members of Party B were ready for action and that the army was at their disposal. No one wanted to be totally left out of this conspiracy that did not even exist and elements of the most varied backgrounds joined it, even dyed in the wool monarchists. Pledges of commitment were being received one after another and the conspirators found themselves, against their will, committing to a project that, strictly speaking, they really did not want to go through with.

These officers had an idea that they thought would turn their conspiracy into a reality. This idea involved seizing the government while it was in session, from the President to the Ministers, liquidate it in a few minutes and then carry the revolt into the streets. The procedure they planned to employ was as follows: a handful of the conspirators would disguise themselves as members of the Presidential staff and present themselves at the homes of the various Cabinet Ministers to summon them on behalf of the King to an extraordinary emergency meeting. The uniforms of the Presidential staff would allay any possible suspicions.

In fact, this was the usual procedure followed when the members of the Cabinet were summoned to emergency meetings. When the Ministers left their homes to be driven to the meeting, the conspirators would shoot them and then try to disappear, taking advantage of the confusion in the street that would necessarily ensue.

They informed Azaña, whom the young officers respected because of his prestige as an intellectual, of their idea. Azaña was almost beside himself with rage, saying that those men were doing their duty and that he did not by any means approve of murdering them.

Azaña pondered the question for a while and proposed a different approach. When the various Ministers come out of their homes to be driven to the meeting with the President, the conspirators should kill the chauffeurs and take the Ministers hostage, bound and gagged, and then take them to a place where they could not be discovered.

This plan was not only more complicated, but the conspirators asked another question: Isn’t the chauffeur just doing his duty, too?

This mentality, indicative of Azaña’s own status as an heir of the old aristocracy, which measured men by their social status or the privileges they enjoyed, explains the suicidal policies of the Second Republic. For some, “Aim for the belly”; for others, the greatest respect, although the criminal revolt against the regime of April 14, 1931 was of precisely the same kind.

A large percentage of the Republic’s bureaucrats, the immense majority, both in the civilian as well as the military branches of the government, were the same bureaucrats who had faithfully served the Bourbon monarchy. The political transfer of power in 1931 hardly changed them at all. At both the highest and the lowest levels of the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats continued to favor the same views and the same routine, and still had the same disdain for anything that smacked of real life, dynamism, or understanding new realities. And the bureaucracy that was incorporated into the new Republic only caused the latter to acquire the vices of the old monarchist administrative system.

Under these conditions, the intentions and statements of Ministers who sympathized with the republican cause necessarily came to naught in their collision with the passive resistance and deliberate sabotage of the bureaucrats.

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with the various departments of the central government could predict, as we did at the time, that the Government Ministers would inevitably fail to achieve their goals due to their powerlessness, regardless of their intentions, against the impenetrable wall of a bureaucracy whose sympathies lay more with the enemy than with so-called Loyalist Spain.

Just as the Republic would have to pay a high price for its toleration of reactionary militarism and clericalism, it would also have to pay a high price for its welcome, among the officialdom of the so-called new regime, of the bureaucrats who had been born in, and trained to serve, the monarchy. New wine, if the Republic really was new wine, in old bottles.

This chapter of the ongoing fascist, monarchist, and ultramontane conspiracy, based in the civil service and the military command structure and its bureaucracy, could only lead us to the precipice from which we have since plummeted. We are reminded of the words of a working class militant who wrote, in El eco de la clase obrera, a newspaper published in Madrid in 1855: “Every social revolution, in order to be possible, must begin with a political revolution, just as every political revolution is sterile unless it is followed by a social revolution.”

Such ideas were quite popular in working class milieus and among the ranks of the liberals in Spain during the 19^th century. The men who took the reins of the Second Republic, however, had completely forgotten them. They occupied high profile offices, which is not the same thing as the highest levels of the command structure, and let everything remain just as it was before.

In return for this betrayal of the hopes of the people, the military caste, very closely aligned with clericalism, became increasingly more aggressive and demanding, and caused the Republic to become a facade for all the immorality and vices of the old regime. We would even venture to assert that, among the politicians of the Republic, the role of ignorance or bad faith with regard to the real economic and social problems of Spain was even greater than it was among the old social conservatives.

Anti-working class policies, or policies that favored one sector of the working class at the expense of another, were mercilessly implemented, and the cornerstone of the new regime, that is, the workers, filled the jails, and they eventually decided that it was not worth making any sacrifices in defense of institutions that had not changed essentially when the national flag was changed.

In its application against us, this policy of repression knew no limits. It reached the point where we had approximately 30,000 comrades in civilian and military prisons. The old politicians of the monarchy possessed the requisite skills and convinced the parties and the so-called leftists and even workerists to carry out this repression. The traditional rivalry between Marxists and anarchists was assiduously cultivated, both by the Marxists themselves as well as their erstwhile republican enemies.

The alarms raised by Orobón Fernández, and by us, were utterly unheeded or misinterpreted, until May 1936, when the idea of a pact between the two big national trade unions was finally accepted, a pact that, in its later development, would be renounced by Orobón Fernández, just as we, its first advocates, also came to reject it.[7]

The deportations to Bata [Equatorial Guinea in Africa] and the draconian sentences handed down for the crimes of going on strike and distributing newspapers were even more harsh than those of a few years before.

The revolutionary workers had constituted a significant part of the Spanish population for more than three-quarters of a century when the elections of November 1933 were held, after two years of persecution, deportation, and unforgettable episodes like Casas Viejas, and they did not want to go to the ballot box to reinforce, with their own hands, the men and the parties that were primarily responsible for the first two republican years of proletarian bloodshed and mourning.

A violent anti-electoral campaign was waged throughout the country by our organizations, which had attempted, at Figols in late 1931 and in various other places in Spain in January 1933, to consolidate their position against the Republic, focusing on the road of historical social demands. Naturally, their abstention handed power to the pro-monarchist conservatives, militarism and the Church, which were also enemies of the legitimate Spain, whose most important foundation was composed of the Spanish workers and peasants, the only historical heirs of the Iberian race and its spirit.

The republicans did not want to learn this lesson, nor did they want to understand that the revolutionary working class, working class Spain, was a force of authentic progress and that without it no regime that was more or less liberal and social could be established, and that any attempt to rule over it would require openly reactionary methods.

The openly restorationist tendency led by Gil Robles, with the support of the Vatican and international capital, gradually consolidated its position within the Republic. In December 1933, after the victory of the right wing in the recent elections, the anarcho-syndicalist revolt took place, and was particularly intense in Aragon, Rioja, Estremadura and Andalusia. This uprising meant that just as the workers rejected the republicans of the two red years (bieno rojo) of 1931–1933, they also rejected their successors, who were equally disastrous for progress and justice in Spain.[8]

The left wing parties knew full well what the Gil Robles tendency stood for and did not want to allow this restorationist current to openly take power, although they did consent to help moderate this power with their influence and their vast resources. They issued threats. It was from these threats that the movement of October 1934 arose, when the leader of the CEDA, Gil Robles, accepted a Cabinet post in the government of Alejandro Lerroux, with rather dubious credentials as a republican of the Republic.

The insurrection of October would have been victorious if the so-called left republicans would have acted like left republicans and would not have refused to give satisfaction to the working classes, who had not been given any reasons by the Republic to feel any solidarity with it. But its leaders did not want to see the real situation of Spain and it was an insurrection that dispensed with us, and in some regions, as in Catalonia, it was much more aimed against us than against the forces of Gil Robles.[9]

The famous plot of the Catalonian nationalists Dencas and Badia was essentially conceived as a war of extermination against us. The directives issued to their “escamots” who surged onto the streets of Barcelona on the evening of October 5 declared open season on the FAI, a “product of Spain”. Minister Dencas and his lieutenant in the offices of the service of public order, Badia, recreated, with the complicity and the silence of the entire Generalitat, the horrors of Martínez Anido and Arlegui and were therefore incapable of playing any kind of role as factors of unity and collaboration in the struggle against the fascists who had legally seized power. We were in a unique position. The separatists accused us of being products of Spain; the centralists accused us of being tools of the separatists; the monarchists revealed that we were body and soul with the republicans, and the republicans disclosed that we were taking our orders from the monarchists.

All we could do was dodge the attacks of the right and left and, without us, the sixth of October in Catalonia was nothing but a risible flop, suppressed within a few hours by two undermanned companies of soldiers under the command of general Batet, who was later shot by the rebels in July 1936 in Burgos, perhaps to pay him off for his loyalty to the republican abstraction in October 1934.

Their confidence that the FAI would not intervene in the struggle encouraged the forces of repression to impose their hegemony, which no one seriously challenged. We recall one captain of the Civil Guard in the plaza at the University of Barcelona, infuriated by his inability to find any criminals.

“Cowards!”, he shouted—as if the men of the FAI would fight him face to face, and face the consequences.

If the movement of October 1934 in Asturias acquired the same aura as the movement of July 1936, resisting the loyalist army and the Lerroux-Gil Robles Government, which then betrayed the cause of the people, this was because in Asturias the workers possessed a desire for unity that was strong enough to resist the campaigns of the politicians who were trying to prevent that unity and turn them against each other. Asturias finally fell, defeated, and was repaid for its determination to resist the advent of fascism with arms in hand with tens of thousands of victims and indescribable tortures.[10]

The unforgettable two years of the republican-socialist government were followed by the no less bloody two years of Lerroux-Gil Robles. The military and ecclesiastical castes consolidated their power in Spain. Every church and every monastery, just like every barracks and every Military Headquarters, became active focal points of conspiracy. The Republic was in the hands of its declared enemies. And it had to deal with us, for the simple reason of self-defense, to survive….

The empire of trite expressions and sacred rites is a reality only in the domain of everyday, lazy and conservative routine. Even in revolutionary movements, it appears more often than one would imagine, tyrannically leading individuals and groups. Generally, when one speaks and acts, one does not reflect or meditate. The weight of the environment, mental habits, and reflex reactions performs the function that should always be performed by free and deliberate thought.

When preparations were underway for the elections of February 1936, we faced a dilemma that our usual routine would have solved without any drama, but which, viewed with a little bit of good sense, offered a panorama that was pregnant with grave consequences. A regional plenum of the CNT was held in Zaragoza and we were disturbed by some of its resolutions insofar as they advocated an intensive anti-electoral and abstentionist campaign.

If we were to reaffirm our abstentionism we would have undoubtedly handed over power to the dictatorship promoted by Gil Robles, whose sacred maxim was, “The leaders are never wrong!” And to give victory to Gil Robles would be equivalent to giving our sanction to the tortures of October and to the continued imprisonment of thirty thousand men. In effect, depending on the position we adopted, we had the keys to the prisons and to the immediate future of Spain in our hands. With the victory of Gil Robles we would have entered into a period of fascism under the cloak of legality, we would have returned to the delights of the Exterminating Angel of the first half of the 19^th century and other similar spectacles. If we were to declare our support for voting in order to increase the chances of the success of the left, we would have left ourselves open, for those who were incapable of understanding our reasons, to the charge that we had betrayed our principles. The left, in its permanent blindness, was not aware of the fact that we were the key to the situation. The right understood this perfectly well, and made every effort to encourage us to advocate abstentionism; its representatives even went so far, as in Cádiz, as Ballester revealed—one of our best Andalusian militants, murdered by the rebels—as to offer a half million pesetas to us in order to enable us to pursue our usual public campaign against voting.

In November 1933 we had uprooted from power, which had been used in the Republic to reaffirm the class privileges that had existed in the monarchy, those responsible for Casas Viejas; in order to do so we employed the political weapon of abstention, an abstention that was a real, negative intervention in the electoral battle. It was not that we regretted the lesson we taught the alleged republicans of April 14; under the circumstances that we faced in February 1936, however, abstention meant victory for Gil Robles, and the victory of Gil Robles was the victory of the restoration of the old monarchist and clerical powers.

We benefited from the fortunate circumstance of the full agreement of various militants whose opinions carried a lot of weight in our circles, in the groups of the FAI, in the trade unions of the CNT, and in the libertarian press. For the first time, after so many years, we challenged everyone to cast down all the previously impenetrable barriers of sacred dogma. We had the courage to openly confront the concern that everyone brandished against us, and conceded that we were not opposed to the electoral victory of the political left, because if we helped to bring about its defeat, we, too, would go down to defeat.

A view similar to ours had also arisen spontaneously in other regions, and the voices of the prisoners themselves were an eloquent and decisive contribution to the debate. Some of us, like Durruti, who did not understand the need for subtlety, began to openly recommend that people should vote.

We avoided the repetition of the anti-electoral campaign of November 1933, and that was enough; the good instinct of the masses of the people, which is always brilliant in Spain, led them to agree to deposit their little slips of paper in the ballot boxes, for no other purpose than to contribute in this way to evict the political forces of fascist reaction from the Government and to free the prisoners. On other occasions the same result might have been achieved with abstention; on this occasion voting was advisable.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but we nonetheless do not hesitate to reaffirm that line of conduct, and to assert the correctness of our views at that time. Without the electoral victory of February 16, there would have been no July 19. The attempts on the part of a handful of pseudo-puritans to confute our way of looking at the question were easily repulsed. We handed power over to the left, convinced that under the circumstances this was the lesser evil. That is why the Republic could continue to exist, and we were very well aware of what we could expect from it.

We also had to deal with the impact of hoary dogmas in our struggle against fascism. We were intimately familiar with this morbid affliction, and all the deliberations concerning the danger that it represented seemed to fall far short of the reality as far as we were concerned. In our meetings, plenums and congresses, it was one of our favorite topics, although we failed to generate much serious interest among the comrades. We even encountered distinguished militants who proclaimed in their speeches that fascism was a fanciful invention of the anti-fascists. We had witnessed such movements based on the resurrection of every kind of barbarism in various countries and we maintained that it was not a racial question but a class question, a question of the defense of privileges, a preventive counterrevolution, and that if the proletariat did not defend itself in time, fascism would become a reality in Spain, too.

Our warnings were not heeded, and this alarmed us, because it was possible that fascism would assume a certain kind of demagogic aura and might even catch us by surprise and be established in Spain. Thus, we were immensely pleased when, a couple of weeks before July 19, we saw the comrades at their posts, awaiting the onset of the events that they presumed were imminent.

Once the left was in power, thanks to us, we saw its leaders persist in the same incomprehension and the same blindness. Neither the industrial workers nor the peasants had any reasons to feel more satisfied than before. The real power remained in the hands of the anti-republican capitalists, the Church and the military caste. And thus, just as the left had prepared for its Sixth of October, although with very little skill, the military feverishly set about preparing a coup that would deprive the republicans and the parliamentary socialists by force of what they had legally conquered in the elections of February 16.