Catalan autonomy was also high on the list of matters to be addressed. It was a question which greatly concerned old-fashioned Castilian centralists, who saw any concessions to the regions as a threat to the unity of Spain. The April elections had proved a victory for the party of the Catalan left, the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, an essentially middle-class organization led by Francesc Macià and Lluís Companys. The two of them had proclaimed on 14 April that a Catalan republic would be established within a federal state. This was not exactly what had been negotiated in the pact of San Sebastián, so three days later three ministers left Madrid for Barcelona to discuss with Macià and Companys the best way forward to enable the Cortes to approve a statute of autonomy. On 21 April Macià was named as president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the name of the mediaeval Catalan Commonwealth.
The relationship between the new secular Republic and the Catholic Church was unlikely to be simple, with the Concordat of 1851 still in force. No more than fifteen days after the announcement of the Republic, Cardinal Pedro Segura, the primate of Spain, issued a pastoral denouncing the new government’s intention to establish freedom of worship and to separate Church and state. The cardinal urged Catholics to vote in future elections against an administration which in his view wanted to destroy religion. The Catholic press followed his lead. The organ of Acción Católica, El Debate, dedicated itself to defending the privileges of the Church while the monarchist daily, ABC, aligned itself with the most traditionalist positions.
Faced with a revolt by the most important figure in the Spanish Church, republican ministers ordered the expulsion from the country of Cardinal Segura and another cleric, Mateo Múgica, Bishop of Vitoria. In the course of a curious spate of activity Cardinal Segura based himself in the south of France and instructed his priests in Spain to sell church property without transferring the proceeds into pesetas.8
The fanatical mysticism of the church provoked much of the anticlericalism in Spain, especially the ‘miracles’, which in the 1930s often involved a ‘red’ supposedly committing a sacrilegious act and dropping dead on the spot. The novelist Ramón Sender attributed the left’s vandalism against churches, such as the desecration of mummies, to the Church’s obsession with the kissing of saints’ bones and limbs. Anything, however ridiculous, was believed by the beatas, the black-clothed women who obeyed their priests’ every word like the devotees of a cult leader. In Spain there were more psychological disorders arising from religious delusions than all other kinds. This atmosphere influenced even unbelievers in a strange way. Workers formed gruesome ideas of torture in convents, and many natural catastrophes were attributed to the Jesuits in the same way as the Church blamed Freemasons, Jews and communists.
On 11 May, two weeks after the publication of Segura’s pastoral, serious disturbances were sparked off by an incident outside a monarchist club in Madrid, when a taxi driver was apparently beaten up for shouting ‘Viva la República!’. Crowds gathered and the buildings of the monarchist newspaper ABC were set on fire. The Carmelite church in the Plaza de España suffered next, followed by more and more churches over the next two days, with the outbreak spreading down the Mediterranean coast and into Andalucia–with arson in Alicante, Málaga, Cádiz and Seville. These disturbances finally obliged a reluctant government to impose martial law. The right, however, would never forget the notorious remark attributed to Azaña that he preferred that all the churches of Spain should burn rather than a single republican should be harmed.
On 3 June the Spanish bishops sent the head of government a collective letter denouncing the separation of Church and state, and protesting against the suppression of obligatory religious instruction in schools.9 But pressure against the government was also building up from the other side, especially from the libertarian left. On 6 July the anarcho-syndicalist CNT declared a telephone workers’ strike throughout Spain. This paralysed lines from Barcelona and Seville, but CNT members also carried out acts of sabotage against the North American-owned Telefónica network, which Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship had sold to ITT. The United States ambassador demanded the deployment of security forces and the Madrid government also brought in strike breakers from the UGT.
The CNT declared a national strike and in Seville the funeral of a worker killed by a strike breaker was broken up by the Civil Guard. The ensuing battle produced seven dead, including three civil guards. The Madrid government declared a state of war on 22 July. The army and Civil Guard, the traditional forces of law and order, acted with their customary brutality. They used light artillery as well as the ‘ley de fugas’, the excuse of shooting prisoners ‘while attempting to escape’. The casualty rate rose by another 30 dead and 200 wounded, as well as hundreds arrested. Spanish workers, who had placed great hopes in the Republic, came to the conclusion that it was as repressive as the monarchy. The CNT declared open war and announced their intention of overthrowing it by social revolution.
The Republic, following the elections on 28 June, was just starting its parliamentary business in the Cortes.10 The first session had taken place under the presidency of the socialist intellectual Julián Besteiro on 14 July. The socialists of the PSOE were for once united, with a rare harmony between Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto, the moderate from Bilbao who was a strenuous advocate of a centre-left alliance with liberal republicans. Largo Caballero had agreed to socialist participation in the government because he felt it was in the best interests of the UGT, his overriding concern. Even though his union was growing rapidly, the CNT was outstripping it, since becoming legal again the previous year. (Government figures in 1934 put UGT membership at 1.44 million and CNT membership at 1.58 million.)
At the end of August the first draft of the constitution was debated, including its declaration that ‘Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all classes’. The most contentious sections–articles 26 and 27–provided for the dissolution of religious orders. This precipitated a crisis, which was solved by the persuasive powers of Manuel Azaña. Only the Jesuit order was to be banned and its property nationalized.11 But article 26 provided for the ending of state subsidies to the Church within two years. The Church faced an acute problem. For the first time it found itself dealing with an administration which rejected the traditional idea that the Church was synonymous with Spain. The fact that religious attendance in Spain was the lowest of any Christian country did not stop Cardinal Segura from declaring that in Spain one was ‘either a Catholic, or nothing at all’. Less than 20 per cent of Spain’s total population went to mass. In most areas south of the Guadarrama mountains the figure was under 5 per cent. Such statistics did nothing to lessen the Church hierarchy’s view, both in Spain and in Rome, that the Republic was determined to persecute it.12
The debate over article 44 about the expropriation of land in ‘the national interest’, demanded by the socialists, produced an even greater crisis and once again (as with article 26) Alcalá Zamora nearly resigned. The policy of agrarian reform needed these powers to work, and even though only uncultivated land would be given to landless labourers, the centre and right were deeply suspicious about where such measures could lead.13 Finally, on 9 December the Constitution was voted through. Niceto Alcalá Zamora was formally elected president of the Republic and on 15 December Azaña formed a new government.14