People :
Author : Diego Abad De Santillán
Text :
July 19 has a place of honor in the modern political history of Spain. On the night of July 6–7 of 1822 Ferdinand VII attempted to carry out a bloody coup against the Constitution that he had accepted and against the popular militia to which he owed his restoration to the throne of Spain.
He failed due to the heroic action of the militiamen who fought against the Royal Guard; the following year, however, he succeeded in executing his program, plunging Spain into a maelstrom of martyrdom and grief until his death.
It was in July 1854 when the people of Madrid experienced the indelible events of their struggle against the dictatorship of general Fernández de Córdoba, episodes in no way inferior to others that have also been immortalized, such as the scenes of the assault on the Montaña barracks in July 1936.
In mid-June of 1856, the coup d’état of O’Donnell took place, a traitor born and bred, another Narváez in his ferocity, who imposed several years of terror and absolutism on the country in the name of Isabel II, successfully disarming the militia, which had taken up arms two years earlier to defend the liberty of Spain.
In July 1909 the people of Barcelona rebelled against the massacre in Morocco, in heroic and bloody battles that ended with the victory of the reactionaries, but which left deep traces in the memory of that great industrial city and laid the groundwork for the events of 1936.
The military uprising that was being concocted in the barracks, in the most perfect solidarity with the ecclesiastical power, which is so important in Spain, and with the leading forces of industrial and financial capitalism, along with the assistance it was receiving from outside Spain, became more obvious and more unstoppable with each passing day. Even the most politically indifferent people commented in public about the preparations that were underway in the ranks of the army, of that army that was the source of so many disasters and which had become an instrument of oppression of every freedom.
It is a proven fact that the generals involved in the conspiracy, as well as representative figures of the monarchist current and of the spirit of reaction, participated in negotiations in advance with Italy and Germany for the purpose of obtaining material and diplomatic support from those countries. Secret shipments of such contraband have been attested, which arrived long before the first shots were fired. We are only relating what has been divulged by writers who sympathized with, as well as who opposed, the military conspiracy.
The contents of the agreements signed with Mussolini, for example, have been published. And the documents that we discovered and published under the title, El nazismo al desnudo [Nazism Exposed], reveal the operations of Hitler’s skilled spies. The Italian network and its ambitions with respect to our country were no less dangerous.[11] The generals who rebelled against Spain in intimate alliance with the bishops only followed in the footsteps of all those who, throughout the 19th century, paid court to the governments of France and England, imploring their military and financial support to restore absolutism in Spain.[12]
Nor should we forget that the First Republic was assisted by the British and the German fleets when it suppressed the Commune of Cartagena in 1873. We would have no objection at all to the military revolt against the republican regime if this revolt was not accompanied by a nauseating immorality. We deny no one the right of rebellion against something that he or she thinks is unsuitable for assuring a more just and dignified life. We have ourselves rebelled against the Republic on various occasions, and since before its proclamation we have manifested our complete independence, knowing in advance that it neither knew how to solve, nor was it capable of solving, the country’s age-old problems.
The military conspirators, however, were not in our position. We had not sworn any oaths nor had we given our word of honor, nor had we ever undertaken any commitment of loyalty to the republican regime. The military officers who joined the revolt had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Republic, they were in positions of the highest responsibility in the pay of the Republic. The conspirators’ first step consisted of their betrayal of their own pledges; their second step was to admit the participation of the troops of foreign powers in their uprising. In order to obtain this foreign assistance they had to sell the independence of their country, or promise to cede territories or alienate the country’s mineral wealth and other resources. Their momentary victory could only be achieved in exchange for the servitude and pauperization of future generations of Spaniards. And there is no comparison between the international brigades that fought on the side of the Republic, and the troops organized, equipped and armed by foreign powers; the former were composed of volunteers who felt a profound sympathy for the struggle of the combatants on one side of the trenches, while the latter were the tools of foreign special interests that were in conflict with the interests of Spain.
In Spanish tradition, the sworn word of honor is inviolable. The military rebels failed to abide by their word, and for this reason alone they will never be able to disavow, despite their victory, the term that is applied to all those who deceitfully renege on freely and spontaneously contracted commitments. There were some exceptions, a small number of monarchists who refused to recognize the Republic and who were always its declared enemies. For them, in their passive resistance or in their active revolt, we grant all the respect that is due to enemies.
Victory can make a lot of things possible, but what it cannot do is subvert the fundamental values of our history, our temperament and our upbringing as Spaniards.
Let us now turn to the pronunciamiento of July.
Fully informed of the danger that threatened us, we were the ones who were most seriously affected and the ones who had the greatest interest in opposing the military coup that was being planned. This time it was not a putsch like that of Primo de Rivera, during the occurrence of which one could philosophically stand to one side and wait while while the adventure naturally peters out. We had the recent experiences of other countries, and the memory of the open wounds in the heart of the progressive world caused by the current wave of dictatorships, right before our eyes.
A few days before July 19, 1936, when it had become a sign of unforgivable obtuseness or suicidal tendencies to have any doubts about the imminence of the revolt, precipitated by the death of Calvo Sotelo, the regional government of the Generalitat of Catalonia—feeling completely powerless to confront the coming events, and in view of the fact that there was no organized force in the autonomous region that was capable of opposing the military revolt, except for the force that we represented—decided in favor of the only honorable solution that remained to it: that it should reveal the actual situation to us in all its ugliness, which we already knew, and its possible significance.
Up until that point we had been the sacrificial victims of the inquisitorial spirit that had been passed down as government policy, in the central and regional governments, for centuries. Only a few months before, one of the last of the executioners of the Catalonian proletariat was gunned down in the streets of Barcelona: Miguel Badía, a worthy successor of General Arlegui or Baron de Meer, and his death was blamed on our comrades. The prisons of Catalonia were once again filled with revolutionary workers, despite the amnesty that we achieved as a result of the elections of February 16.
In the face of the threat, which was this time aimed at both the republicans and at our forces, we forgot all our grievances and temporarily set aside all our unsettled business with the republicans, abiding by the viewpoint that the close collaboration of all the liberal, progressive and proletarian forces that were prepared to confront the enemy was indispensable, or at least advisable. As for fighting in the streets, and as for the question of who would take up arms and conquer or die, of course, it was our movement that almost alone constituted a factor to be reckoned with. A Liaison Committee was formed with the Government of the Generalitat, of which I was a member, together with other friends who were well-known for their combative spirit and their heroism.
In addition to encouraging all possible collaboration, we also thought that, in consideration of our enthusiasm and our state of preparedness, the authorities of the Generalitat would not refuse to give us some weapons and munitions, since most of our reserves and various scattered, small caches had disappeared after December 1933, and during the two black years of the Lerroux-Gil Robles dictatorship much of what we had obtained in October 1934, when the “escamots” abandoned the weapons they had been given, disappeared. And we spared no efforts in our attempts to obtain arms.
Long and wearisome were the negotiations and we were constantly told that the Generalitat did not have enough arms. We knew that most of the population that was ready to fight were sympathizers or members of our organizations; we did not ask for twenty thousand rifles for the men that were waiting for battle in our trade unions and at the agreed-upon staging points, but for a minimum of aid to commence the struggle. We only asked for enough weapons to arm a thousand men and we promised that with these weapons we could blockade the barracks of the Barcelona garrison, and force them to surrender. Nothing. But with or without arms our people were ready to fight and to risk their lives.
Direct action achieved what we could not obtain in our negotiations with the Generalitat. On the night of July 17, Juan Yague led the assault on the weapons lockers of the ships anchored in the port of Barcelona, and on July 18 the night watchmen and security guards of the city were disarmed. In this manner we obtained a few pistols and revolvers, with very little ammunition.
The initiative of Juan Yague deserves to be memorialized. He was a man of the people, the stuff from which heroes are made, all self-abnegation and spirit of sacrifice. His field of action and propaganda was the maritime district, where he had aroused a great deal of sympathy and earned the confidence of the sailors and dock workers. He knew that every foreign ship had a locker with a few Mauser carbines and a few boxes of cartridges for emergencies, and when he became aware of the paltry results of our negotiations, he resolved to try something different and very soon the ships’ weapons were in our power, held by the Transport Workers Trade Union. The Government of Catalonia still had some small shred of hope that the military conspirators would back down and therefore ordered us to return the requisitioned weapons. The Transport Workers Trade Union headquarters was surrounded by the forces of public order.
In order to prevent a massacre that would have destroyed the unity of action that we thought was indispensable, some of the rifles taken from the ships were handed over to the police authorities thanks to the personal intervention of Durruti and García Oliver—who at that moment were exposed to great danger between the hostile attitudes of the Assault Guards and of the Transport workers who were refusing to surrender the guns—whose emotionally moving appeals were very effective. The problem was resolved with the surrender of some of the weapons, leaving others in our hands for the struggle against the military revolt.
We recall that, during those sleepless nights we spent at the offices of the Generalitat, there was an endless series of phone calls from various police precincts informing us of the arrest of comrades from whom the police had seized pistols and even that some were being charged with illegal possession of weapons. We intervened in hundreds of such cases and, although we always managed to reach an amicable agreement, this did not diminish the painful fact that, on the eve of July 19, we had to spend so much time and effort to protect the few weapons that we had for the fight against fascism.
If this was the attitude of the Government of Catalonia, which knew that without our intervention any resistance against the troops of five military barracks would be impossible, one can only imagine the behavior of the members of the Popular Front Government in almost every other part of Spain, instructed by the Madrid Government, which denied the facts and the reality of the uprising. Days before the revolt, the military pilot Díaz Sandino went to Madrid and presented ample documentation proving what was going to happen, and his warnings were ignored. The information we have obtained, for example, from León, Vigo and La Coruña, whose civil governors were shot after the uprising, shows us just how blind the men of the Republic really were, insofar as they were more afraid of the people than of the enemies of the people and that, for that reason, they adamantly refused to distribute to the popular forces the weapons that they possessed so that the people could defeat the rebels.
On the night of July 18 the atmosphere was thick with a sense of the tragedy that would soon unfold. At the local offices of a branch of the Construction Workers Trade Union that had been converted into our general headquarters, we suggested to a group of comrades that it would be advantageous to have access to vehicles for transport. An hour later, we saw requisitioned personal automobiles being driven along the Ramblas emblazoned in chalk with the initials “CNT-FAI”. The transit of these first vehicles, signifying that everything was now at stake, caused spontaneous outbursts of pro-anarchist cheers among the pedestrians.
It was four or five in the morning of July 19 when the government was first notified of the departure of the rebel troops from the garrisons of Barcelona.
The proclamation of a state of war by the military conspirators came to our attention. There was not much room left for illusions. And that is how all the parties and organizations understood it, glad to see that we were there to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. The plan drawn up by the rebels was a kind of military parade to occupy the strategic points, communications centers and government buildings.
There was no room for doubt, even for those who had up until then still harbored some doubts, of the reality of the revolt. It seemed that even breathing had been interrupted. Only our people feverishly worked in the darkness and hurried to meet the rebel columns.
The first light of dawn had not yet broken when we saw a crowd of people gathered around the Government Palace insistently demanding arms. They had to be placated to some extent from a balcony. There we saw the first signs of fraternization between the Assault Guards and the revolutionary workers. Guards who possessed both rifles and pistols unstrapped their holsters and gave their pistols to volunteers.
With barely a hundred pistols we departed for the Construction Workers Trade Union headquarters. Within seconds they were distributed among our men who reached out with eager hands and who immediately left with guns in their hands to confront the advancing troops.
Several gun shops were sacked, which yielded nothing but hunting rifles, but even these guns were used during the first few days.
The rifles from the ships, the pistols and revolvers taken from the night watchmen and security guards of Barcelona, and the remnants of our small deposits of arms and the hundred side arms distributed by the Generalitat, were all that we had to meet the attack of 35,000 men from the Garrison.
We had no faith at all in the loyalty of the forces of public order, especially the Civil Guards, many of whose officers and troops had signed pledges to support the revolt, which had to some extent come to the attention of the authorities in Catalonia. The weaponry was vastly unequal and the prospect of victory was insignificant or entirely absent. It might be interesting to point out that while some of us performed our allotted tasks out of a sense of duty, but without optimism or hope, others were fully convinced that we would be victorious. We can still vividly recall the rage and desperation of Francisco Ascaso on the night of July 18, when he heard people saying that the military would not leave their barracks. For our part, we would have preferred not to have to engage in such an unequal struggle that was forced upon us, and from which we could not expect anything but death in battle or in front of a firing squad after our defeat. Regardless of our individual states of mind, however, we had the satisfaction of confirming that none of our people deserted their posts. The combatants of the FAI all took up their positions. Those who did not have weapons, followed behind those who did, waiting for one of them to fall so they could take his place. Two or three light machine guns appeared. Behind those who manned them, lines of envious persons formed who may have actually desired deep in their hearts that the privileged comrades using these guns would be killed so that they could fight with a gun like that. It was truly a moving sight.
The armed forces that had remained loyal to the Republic were in this way encouraged by the example set by our militants who really did their duty and fought alongside them. The enemy had planned to cut off all communications between the various districts of the city, to link up its forces and isolate the various dangerous pockets of resistance, in accordance with a carefully crafted plan.
The troops of Pedralbes, the best units of the Garrison, reached the Plaza de la Universidad, the Plaza de Cataluña and las Rondas, occupying the most defensible buildings, the University, the Hotel Colón and the Telephone Exchange Building. As they passed down the streets of the city they were subjected to extensive attacks by snipers, but were not stopped. Upon their arrival at the Paseo de Gracia from the direction of the Diagonal, they met with the most violent resistance they had yet experienced, when they came under fire from the Assault Guards.
At the Plaza de la Universidad a unit of soldiers, pretending to be fraternizing, mixed in with the groups that were stationed there and suddenly turned their guns on our people and took numerous prisoners, including Angel Pestaña, Molina and many others. The fighting became more terrible with each passing minute. The troops were attacked from all sides and every step of the rebel columns was contested with rapid maneuvers on the part of our people, who appeared everywhere and did not present a solid mass of fighters anywhere. In one of these intense firefights, the soldiers who were advancing down Claris street left several artillery pieces in the middle of the street while they took shelter from the shooting in the doorways of adjacent buildings. In the blink of an eye, some elements of the people’s units ran up to the artillery pieces, aimed them at the advancing column and fired, without anchoring the cannons, and left the street strewn with dead animals and shattered equipment. With the surrender and disarming of the soldiers in the vicinity, and with several artillery pieces in our hands, our morale did not take long to improve.
The cavalry regiment rode out of the Santiago barracks and the people of the neighborhood of Gracia forced it to retreat and take refuge once again in its barracks. The people of the Sans neighborhood assumed the task of neutralizing the units stationed at the Lepanto barracks.
There were intense bursts of gunfire from Churches and monasteries and a cordon of fire and steel was established around these locations.
The barracks of the light mountain artillery was entrusted with the mission of taking the General Headquarters and linking up with the troops from the Pedralbes barracks, and occupying the harbor district, the railroad stations and the Catalonian government buildings. The troops from the San Andrés barracks were unable to advance very far from their base and were quickly surrounded as a result of indescribable acts of anonymous heroism.
Our comrades from Barceloneta, with the help of a few companies of Assault Guards, were the first to savor the delights of victory. At nine in the morning the barracks that they had besieged in their district was forced to surrender, defeated in the first skirmishes. The gigantic rolls of paper that were stored in the warehouses of the port were instantly transformed into solid, mobile barricades. With this stronghold of the rebels’ plans now in our hands, one of the greatest hopes of the conspiracy was dashed. We soon began to see the combatants of the people wearing the steel helmets of regular soldiers, with Mauser rifles and ammunition belts, with machine guns with their muzzles pointing toward the ground, asking to be told how to operate them. Despite the violence of the attack, the first encounters, although the situation was still not clear, encouraged those who were fighting as well as those who watched the battles unfold.
During the first hours we stood alone except for the Assault Guards skillfully mobilized by captain Vicente Guarner. Between nine and ten in the morning we saw the ranks of the people’s fighters swell considerably. Waves of workers from the trade unions joined groups from the FAI who took the initiative to organize groups of combatants throughout the city.
There was still the question of which side the Civil Guards would support. General Aranguren was established in the Government Palace with the commander of the Third Regiment, colonel Brotons. Captain Guarner succeeded in gathering together the troops of the two regiments located in Barcelona in front of the balconies of the Government Palace and could then breathe easy. He ordered the 19th regiment to attack the Plaza Cataluña, where the rebels were well entrenched. There can be no doubt about it; the Civil Guard was a well disciplined body of troops.
As opposed to the irregular and impetuous action of the people’s units, and of that of the Assault Guards, now mixed with the people in complete fraternity, the forces of the 19th regiment under colonel Escobar advanced to perform the mission they had been assigned. They marched in battle order, at a slow pace, and despite all the gunfire not one man broke step with the solid rhythm of the march.
Our people walked alongside this column, wary and suspicious. Was it true that it was going to fight against the army? The Plaza de Cataluña was swarming with people, from the subway entrances to the intersections of the adjoining streets. The column was going to attack the Hotel Colón, the Telephone Exchange Building, and the other refuges of the rebels. The Civil Guards quietly took up positions, and a furious outburst of gunfire commenced, and one began to hear the roar of the artillery pieces that had been seized shortly before on Claris street. The rebels’ machine guns mowed down avalanches of people, but within half an hour of fighting, with the Plaza littered with corpses, you could see the white flags of surrender begin to wave above the last strongholds of resistance. Almost simultaneously, the troops in the Hotel Ritz surrendered, another one of the improvised fortresses of the revolt.
Encouraged by this great victory, which provided us with regular military weapons, and crazed by the smell of gunpowder, it was an easy task for our men to storm the Plaza de la Universidad, liberating the prisoners who were expecting to suffer the worst fate.
The modern idea of the struggle, as it took shape from our previous integral preparations, was good for something after all. While some people fought in the streets, others devoted themselves to setting up field hospitals for the wounded, and others went to the metal factories to manufacture war materiel, especially hand grenades. By the afternoon, the popular fever was uncontainable; there was fighting on las Rondas and all the barracks were besieged. The units of the Quartermaster’s Corps had passed entirely, along with their commander, Sanz Neira, to the side of the forces that remained loyal to the government. Díaz Sandino was hard at work at the military airfield at Prat, and he also succeeded in securing that base, although not without serious difficulties.
A lot had happened by the mid-afternoon; but we had not achieved very much, much less victory. In expectation of a counterattack and without significant resources to defend our general headquarters at the offices of the Construction Workers Trade Union, we stockpiled an enormous quantity of explosives taken from the quarries at Moncada, intent upon blowing up the whole building rather than allowing ourselves to be taken prisoner.
Every neighborhood and every major fighting group of the people’s resistance assumed responsibility for a particular objective. Although some army units had been defeated, the greater part of the garrison was still intact.
The Transport Workers Trade Union, at las Ramblas, with Durruti, Ascaso and many other comrades, manned the siege of the Atarazanas barracks, one of the most tenacious centers of resistance. Now that the other barracks had been immobilized by similar sieges, we could operate safely. During the first hours of the night the directive was issued to attack the Military General Headquarters itself, where general Goded was based, the military leader of the revolt, who had arrived in a seaplane from Mallorca. This was no simple task. The Headquarters staff defended itself bravely; the people who had gathered there, however, were undaunted. The battle began and the enemy’s bullets were no longer able to contain the combative spirit of Barcelona. The artillery pieces seized on Claris street were sent to join the assault on the Military General Headquarters, under the command of the dockworker Manuel Lecha, a former artilleryman. When general Goded was informed of these preparations, he made a telephone call to the Government Palace to demand nothing less from general Aranguren than our surrender.
General Aranguren, colonel Escobar and colonel Brotons were later shot by Franco. Concerning Aranguren, certain innuendoes have circulated regarding his relations with Goded. Aranguren’s conduct was perhaps characterized by an inappropriate degree of courtesy. When Goded made his phone call to Aranguren to ask for our surrender, since, according to his reports, the events had been favorable for the military revolt, Aranguren responded respectfully, and in a subdued tone of voice.
“My general, I sympathize with you very much, but the reports I have received are quite the opposite of yours and I am told that the revolt has been suppressed. I beg you to proclaim a ceasefire, where resistance is still underway, in order to avoid more bloodshed. I must also tell you that we have resolved to give you a half hour to surrender; at the end of this time, our artillery will open fire.”
Goded, of course, responded in a most uncivil manner, but Aranguren, with his soft, elderly voice, simple, unfazed, without even the least trace of annoyance, once again relayed the order of surrender with guarantees that the lives of the besieged men would be spared.
The attack began precisely one half hour later. More than forty salvos of the artillery pieces, exploding against the solid building, made the besieged military personnel aware of the fact that the people had acquired real weapons. The intense gunfire, always drawing nearer, left no room for doubt. The Military General Headquarters was totally isolated and in danger of being stormed by the forces that surrounded it. A white flag appeared. A phone call from the Government Palace informed general Goded that an officer who was loyal to the government, captain Sanz Neira, would assume responsibility for the prisoners. When Sanz Neira approached the besieged building, the machine guns in the Military General Headquarters began to roar furiously. There was no other recourse than to resume the battle and get ready for the assault. Our men were on the verge of forcing the gates of the building when the white flag once again appeared. Already betrayed once, the besieging forces, including the artillery commander Pérez Farraz, stormed the building and captured its occupants. Strenuous efforts had to be made to save general Goded from the fury of the crowd. These efforts would not have been necessary had Goded consented to accept general Aranguren’s invitation and there would have been no more shooting after the white flag had been raised.
The rebel general was taken prisoner and brought to the Generalitat, while the other officers who accompanied him were interned in other prisons, especially onboard ships anchored in the harbor. General Llano de la Encomienda, who was taken prisoner at the Military General Headquarters, was subsequently wounded by a stray bullet and remained in the private apartments of the Government Palace until he recovered; later, we occupied the building in the name of the army of the people, the militias.
Goded was accused of cowardice for having confirmed, in his radio address from the Generalitat, that the game was lost and that all those who had joined the conspiracy in obedience to his orders were totally released from their pledge and free to do as they wished. Goded was not the kind of man who would act like a coward. We saw him as always self-composed and conscious of what was in store for him, and we saw him meet his fate with a manly attitude that demanded respect. The general we defeated enjoyed all the consideration he merited: why didn’t general Aranguren merit such consideration, who treated his defeated comrade with irreproachable courtesy and gentlemanly decency?
Goded’s surrender naturally had an impact. Among some because of demoralization, among others because of even more encouraging news. Gunfire was continuously directed against the last pockets of resistance throughout the entire day and the siege became even more stifling at night. The barracks at San Andrés was taken by assault and the same fate befell the Artillery Depot, at dawn on July 20. Upon entering the barracks at San Andrés, our men came across a large number of bottles of fine wine with which their officers had sought to instill courage into the hearts of the deceived soldiers. A unique spectacle was afforded by the Carmelite monastery, hosting machine guns manned by officers and monks that swept the streets from its vantage points. They finally surrendered, and one of the men of the cloth was seen throwing gold coins to the crowd to placate it and to see if he might be able to escape somehow. But you did not buy the people of July 19 with gold coins!
Our occupation of most of the barracks yielded a large quantity of arms, especially rifles, although the officers had taken the precaution of hiding the firing pins of more than twenty thousand rifles stored at the Artillery Depot.
The first measure we took was to discharge the common soldiers we had taken prisoner, while we imprisoned the officers. On July 20 the Atarazanas barracks was the last stronghold of resistance in Barcelona, but the struggle could not remain undecided for very long. The besieged troops defended their lives and their position courageously, but the resolve of the people’s detachments to attain victory only grew more indomitable. Díaz Sandino mobilized some of his available military aircraft to bomb the barracks. By then we controlled the coastal batteries and the artillery of the Barcelona garrison. If resistance lasted much longer, the fortress would be flattened. But there was no sign of any attempt to surrender. It was at this point that Francisco Ascaso, who was firing a rifle from behind cover was shot in the head and died instantly. The news spread like wildfire and inflamed the ardor of the besieging forces for the final assault. It was waged with irresistible fury and our men burst into the barracks. One of the first, if not the first, was Durruti.
Barcelona was totally in the hands of the combatants of the FAI, particularly the barracks, which we kept under our control until it was later resolved to hand some of them over to the parties and organizations that wanted to organize militias for the war against the fascist forces.
Naturally, we suffered significant losses, and some of them had a major impact on subsequent developments. Many of the men who had proven their mettle over many years of struggle and sacrifice contributed to the great victory with their blood and their lives. And then, to replace them, people showed up among our ranks who could never compare with those who had fallen, even if they claimed to wave the same flag.
Despite the severe blows we suffered, we could not resist feeling deep satisfaction as a result of the victory we had achieved, although we understood the grave responsibility that would fall upon our shoulders as a result.
The Barcelona prison, filled with our comrades, was opened and the prisoners poured forth to swell the ranks of the hosts of combatants.
Barcelona celebrated the great event with unprecedented joy. Spectacles like that of July 20, after the fall of the Atarazanas barracks, are seldom seen during the lifetime of a generation, and are only rarely attested in historical chronicles.
Everyone fraternized with everyone else with such sincerity! There were no parties, there were no organizations, even though the black and red insignia of the victors was everywhere. There was only one people in the streets! A people with only one idea, one will, one strength. When this ideal was attained, everything that tended, due to the party mechanism, and its programs, to once again turn the people into a conglomeration of hostile atoms, seemed as unthinkable as jumping off a cliff, like an irreparable catastrophe.
There is no organizational program, no declaration of principles or party program, no theory, superior to what took place on July 20!
Barcelona became an armed people proud of its victory and conscious of the power it had acquired.
The ostensibly neutral military centers of the region, although they were basically on the side of the enemy, such as the garrison of Tarragona, the machine gun regiment of Mataró, etc., surrendered without resistance. Catalonia was liberated. What happened in the rest of Spain?
The people of Madrid fought bravely, too, as in 1808, and as on many other occasions during the 19th century, with enemy resistance concentrated in the Montaña Barracks. In Levante, Martínez Barrios attempted to form a new Government by offering some Ministries to the rebel generals. The commanders of the garrison wanted to appear to be neutral, until they saw which way the wind was blowing.
The revolt was successful in Morocco, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Andalusia, Navarre, Old Castille, Galicia, León and Oviedo, the latter city thanks to the stupid belief of the Asturian socialists in the loyalty of Aranda. Vizcaya, Catalonia, the Center, Levante and part of Estremadura, almost all of Asturias, and part of León, were in our hands. Were we victorious? A map of the Peninsula told us that we still had a long way to go. We were particularly alarmed by the obvious fact that the main arms and munitions factories were in the hands of the enemy. And we were also alarmed by the excessive euphoria of many so-called leaders, who did not want to face the fact that the first few days, as brilliant as they may have been, did not yet add up to victory. Victory could have been achieved in almost all of Spain and any possibilities for a resurgence of the military revolt could have been seriously undermined if the statesmen of the Republic were a little more competent and a little more in touch with the mood of the people. Most of the fleet was on our side; military aviation properly speaking was of no account because of the small number of planes under our control.
Once the revolt was liquidated in Catalonia, the President of the Generalitat, Luis Companys, summoned us to a meeting to discover our intentions. We came to the office of the President of the Catalonian government with arms in hand, not having slept for several days, unshaven, confirming with our appearance the veracity of the legend that had been woven around us. Some of the members of the government of the autonomous region were pale and trembling during the meeting, which Ascaso was unable to attend. The Government Palace was invaded by the bodyguard of combatants that formed our escort.
Companys congratulated us on our victory. We could, all by ourselves, impose our absolute will, declare the Generalitat defunct and institute in its place the real power of the people; but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was exercised against us and we did not desire it when we could exercise it to the detriment of others. The Generalitat would remain in place with President Companys at its head and the popular forces would be organized to continue the struggle for the liberation of Spain. This is how the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias was born, in which we allowed the entry of all the liberal and working class sectors.[13]
The scandal of the burning of churches and monasteries has been blown out of proportion. The Duchess of Atholl aristocratically reports that the arson was our work or that of enemy agents who had infiltrated our ranks. And she states that the communists, on the other hand, had no part in these acts and always treated places of worship with respect. Where did she get such fairy tales?
We had more important things to do and to think about than burning churches and monasteries. While Gil Robles denounced in the legislature the arson attacks on churches during the period between February 16 and July, did he ever mention even one single case in Catalonia, when it was very well known that we were the dominant force in the region? We did not prevent the churches and monasteries from being attacked in retaliation for the fact that they served as bases of resistance for the army and the servants of God. We found arms in all of them, or we forced the armed men entrenched within them to surrender. The people, on their own initiative, exacted a very understandable vengeance. But they did so while also trying to preserve works of art, libraries, treasures and valuable ornaments. Neither the CNT nor the FAI encouraged these fruitless actions, based on mere revenge. We say this because it is true, and if even if we had not followed such a policy, it would not have been a crime that we should regret having committed.
Let us recall the words of Mariano de Larra in his pamphlet, “From 1830 to 1936”, explicitly referring to such popular excesses:
Such scenes of incendiarism and bloodshed might be terrible, but their explanation is simple and just.
We must not forget that in Spain the monasteries were not perceived as anything but so many other natural focal points of the civil war, and the monks as the paymasters. Civil war is the most painful wound of the peninsula, and one that affects everyone; hence the general outburst of the country against the monasteries and their inhabitants: to strike a blow at them is to strike a blow at the rebels and at Don Carlos, and so it begins, because this is where the danger lies, and society always attends to the most urgent matters. The consequences might be bloody, but we will at least confess that it is always consoling to think that if we examine the question in a really fundamental way, these deadly scenes are not, as is usually supposed, the effects of momentary caprice or of a blind and disorderly instinct, but merely the logical consequence of the right of defense that all of society possesses when it is attacked, and the indispensable accentuation in such moments of the instinct of self-preservation of each individual who composes that society….
On the significance of the Church in Spain and its permanent alliance with tyranny, there is nothing more definitive than the assessment of the Count of Montalambert, a militant French Catholic, whose book about our country deserves to be republished.
We shall be content to cite the following figures concerning the ecclesiastical power in Spain and its colonies in 1580 (during the reign of Philip II):
| Archbishops | 58 |
| Bishoprics | 684 |
| Abbeys | 11,400 |
| Religious Orders | 936 |
| Parishes | 127,000 |
| Monasteries | 46,000 |
| Convents | 13,000 |
| Brotherhoods and Religious Associations | 23,000 |
| Secular Clergy | 312,000 |
| Deacons and Subdeacons | 200,000 |
| Regular Clergy | 400,000 |
The ecclesiastical population, with its servants, sacristans, exorcists, etc., amounted to more than 1,500,000 persons, that is, one individual for every 45 inhabitants of the country.
The general trend with regard to the number of people devoted to the service of the Catholic Church in Spain is as follows:
| Population | Secular Clergy | Monks | Nuns | Year |
| 7,500,000 | 168,000 | 90,000 | 38,000 | 1700 |
| 9,300,000 | 143,800 | 62,000 | 36,000 | 1768 |
| 10,300,000 | 134,500 | 56,000 | 34,000 | 1797 |
| 13,300,000 | 75,784 | 37,363 | 23,552 | 1826 |
| 13,500,000 | 65,000 | 31,000 | 22,000 | 1835 |
Ecclesiastical incomes consumed the lion’s share of the product of the people’s labor. The properties, enterprises and privileges of the Church were the main cause of Spain’s backwardness. Its age-old alliance with all the causes of absolutism marked the Church as Public Enemy Number One. It was a question of life or death for the country to separate the Church from power and to expropriate its wealth.
In 1834, Olozaga and Cortina, by order of the government, destroyed a large number of monasteries in Madrid. There were still 72 of them left, however, in 1835. It has been said that the Spanish people are fanatical Catholics, but when the monasteries were demolished, there was a surplus of volunteers to help do the job, and the Ministers who were responsible for these measures, such as Olozaga, were able to make public appearances at the demolition sites and were applauded by the crowds.
Government bodies seldom took the initiative to restrict the power and the wealth of the ecclesiastics, as they did in the time of Mendizabal. Generally, it was the people themselves who participated in direct action to rid themselves of the crushing weight of inhuman exploitation in the name of religion. In no country in the world have so many churches and monasteries been burned as in Spain, and this is true of its entire history. The resurrection of Spain has always been blocked by the black wall of clericalism. The wave of arson of July 1936 coincided perfectly with the tradition of the people who sought to destroy the symbols of their misery and their slavery. They did not need an organization or a party to assume the responsibility for these deeds; the only author and instigator is the instinct of the people themselves.
Our response is that no official or informal instructions were disseminated by the libertarian organizations of Catalonia encouraging the burning of churches and monasteries; we can be certain, furthermore, that such a directive did not originate from any other movement or party, either.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 04, 2021 : Chapter 4 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 4 -- Updated.
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