A number of Carlist officers were trained in Italy with the help of Mussolini, while their leaders, Fal Conde and the Count of Rodezno, organized the purchase of weapons from Germany. The strength of the requetés is hard to calculate exactly, but there were probably more than 8,000 members in Navarre alone early in 1936. A figure of 30,000 for the whole country has been suggested. One of their backers, José Luis Oriol, organized a ship from Belgium which brought 6,000 rifles, 150 heavy machine-guns, 300 light machine-guns, five million rounds of ammunition and 10,000 hand grenades.26
In the spring of 1936 the Carlists’ Supreme Military Council was set up in Saint Jean de Luz, just over the French frontier, by Prince Javier de Borbón-Parma and Fal Conde. It was composed of former officers and began to plan a rising in conjunction with the right-wing Unión Militar Española, a secret association of right-wing officers within the army, with Alfonsine monarchists and the Falange. Their contact was Colonel José Varela (later one of Franco’s most important field commanders) who had earlier been training the Carlist requetés secretly in the Pyrenees mountains. So far only the vaguest rumours of these preparations had reached Azaña’s government in Madrid.
The Fatal Paradox
Political turmoil in the spring of 1936 created an uncertainty which paralysed industry and finance. Although imports had fallen, Spain’s principal exports–oranges, almonds, wine and oil, had fallen much further.1 The fact that the country’s balance of payments depended upon agrarian produce at the very time when agrarian reform represented one of the most bitterly divisive issues, did not of course help. Landowners, faced with worldwide price deflation and four months of almost constant rain in western and southern Spain, were trying to maintain a profit margin just when desperately underprivileged labourers were demanding better living standards. The bill for decades, if not centuries, of social, technological and political immobilism was being presented at the worst possible moment.
The Instituto de Reforma Agraria took up again its task of resettlement as best it could, but this proceeded with great slowness because of the legal actions launched by landlords. This exasperated the peasants, especially since they also had a feeling after the Popular Front’s victory in the February elections that they should be able to dictate conditions. In addition they had a longing for revenge after the sackings and wage reductions over the previous two years and the triumphalism of many landowners when the centre-right was in power.
In the first fortnight of March, landless braceros began to occupy estates in the provinces of Madrid, Toledo and Salamanca. Then, at dawn on 25 March, 60,000 landless peasants in the province of Badajoz seized land and began to plough it. Over the next few weeks, similar actions were launched in the provinces of Cáceres, Jaén, Seville and Córdoba. The security forces, subdued by the memory of Casas Viejas, acted with indecision, but this did not help. In one of the confrontations with peasants in Yeste, a civil guard was killed. The Civil Guard, known with approval or bitter irony as the Benemérita, replied by killing seventeen day labourers and wounding many others.2 In any case, during the government of the Popular Front fewer than 200,000 peasants were resettled in the whole of Spain on 756,000 hectares of land, yet it was still more than during all of the previous administrations under the Republic.3 But none of those who colonized the land had money for seeds or tools. The Banco Nacional Agrario, which had been envisaged in the initial legislation to address the problem, was never set up.4
The gradualist lines of social democrats could neither satisfy the inflamed aspirations of the workers, nor reassure landowners that private property would be respected. That spring strikes broke out not in pursuit of a particular demand but to show working-class muscle. There was a fierce satisfaction in the idea that the old saying of the downtrodden might come true: ‘when God in heaven wants justice to change/the poor will eat bread and the rich will eat shit.’5
Meanwhile in Madrid, on 3 April the Cortes reunited. Indalecio Prieto proposed the impeachment of the president of the Republic. Prieto’s accusation was that Alcalá Zamora had dissolved parliament unnecessarily, using a literal and sectarian interpretation of article 81 of the Constitution. His motion was won with 238 votes and only five against. Alcalá Zamora was unseated four days later. Less than a month after that, on 3 May, Manuel Azaña was elected president of the Spanish Republic. Prieto hoped to take over the leadership of the government, but his rival Largo Caballero was determined to prevent it by vetoing any socialist participation in the government. Azaña therefore appointed the Galician politician Santiago Casares Quiroga president of the council of ministers, the equivalent of prime minister.
During the following days a series of assassination attempts convulsed the country. The first victim was a judge, Manuel Pedregal, who had sentenced a Falangist to 30 years in prison for the murder of a vendor of left-wing newspapers. Then a bomb exploded next to the presidential saluting stand at a military parade on 14 April to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Republic. The escort of assault guards opened fire in error against a junior officer of the Civil Guard. This developed into a running battle between Falangists and members of the Assault Guard and more were killed and wounded. The Falange claimed the deaths of the journalist Luciano Malumbres in Santander, the journalist Manuel Andrés in San Sebastian, and in Madrid the socialist Carlos Faraudo, a captain. On 16 April Falangists opened fire with submachine-guns against workers in the centre of Madrid, killing three and wounding another 40.
The communists had meanwhile set up their own very effective paramilitary arm, the Milicias Antifascistas Obreras y Campesinas (MAOC), and the socialists organized their own column, the ‘Motorizada’, to take on the fascist squads. Weapons were carried almost as a matter of course, to such a point that members of the Cortes were asked to hand theirs in when they entered the parliament building. In Barcelona, which had been calmer than Madrid, a pistolero of the anarchist FAI shot down the two brothers Miquel and Josep Badia, leading members of Estat Català.
Largo Caballero’s rhetoric became even wilder. His declaration that ‘the revolution we want can be achieved only through violence’ was interpreted by the Socialist Youth as Leninist strategy. And on 1 May, when the great May Day parade swarmed through the streets and avenues of central Madrid, conservatives watched in trepidation from their balconies or from behind shutters. They eyed with mounting alarm the red flags and banners and portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Largo Caballero on huge placards, and listened to the chanting of the demonstrators, demanding the formation of a proletarian government and a people’s army. But it was not just these obvious political symbols that frightened them. The workers in the street had a new confidence or, in their view, insolence. Beggars had started to ask for alms, not for the love of God, but in the name of revolutionary solidarity. Girls walked freely and started to ridicule convention. On 4 May José Antonio delivered a diatribe from prison against the Popular Front. He claimed that it was directed by Moscow, fomented prostitution and undermined the family. ‘Have you not heard the cry of Spanish girls today: “Children, yes! Husbands, no!”?’6
Prieto attacked the ‘revolutionary infantilism’ of the left and warned that excesses in the streets and the burning of churches only pushed the middle classes into supporting a military rebellion. This formed part of his major speech on 1 May at Cuenca.7 Another socialist leader, Julián Besteiro, professor of logic at the University of Alcalá de Henares, tried to warn his party that Spain in 1936 was not Russia in 1917 and that the Spanish army was not about to mutiny like the Tsarist forces, exhausted by a long and terrible war. He was right, but after the left wing uprising of October 1934 it was almost certainly too late to expect either side to return to the rules of parliamentary democracy.