[44] The disintegration of the Canovite political settlement
was accelerated by the impact of the Great War of 1914-18. Rapid economic
expansion, class conflict, and ideological bitterness -- already discernible
in prewar Spain -- were intensified by the war; the resulting stresses
on an already precarious political structure brought the monarchy first
to the brink of revolution and ultimately to its demise in 1923. Although
the Spanish army was spared the ordeal of the Western front, it was a protagonist
in the political and social struggle that marked the collapse of the parliamentary
regime in the postwar period.
The first step in the breakdown of the parliamentary monarchy was the
emergence of the military Juntas de Defensa in 1917. Spain's enforced neutrality
during the world war drew attention to the professional incapacity of the
Spanish army, giving the politicians and the senior hierarchy the determination
to pursue military reform that they had hitherto lacked. But by 1916 economic
distress had alienated many junior officers from the political system,
the policy of merit promotions had opened a gulf between them and their
superiors, and professional frustration at Spanish neutrality had made
them more sensitive than ever to criticism. In 1917 junior army bureaucrats,
organized as in 1905 into "defense committees," once again pressured the
government into meeting their demands. Unlike 1905, however, their rebellion
was not deflected into traditional channels by their military superiors.
Instead, the junior officers asserted themselves as an independent pressure
group. Claiming to represent the army as a whole and posing as the instrument
of national "renovation," the Juntas de Defensa were in fact created to
defend vested military interests, threatened by the novel determination
of the dynastic politicians and the senior hierarchy to press for army
reform. The effect of their successful rebellion was to dramatize the weakness
of the dynastic parties and to widen the support for democratic reform
within the nation.
[45] The Perils of Neutrality
The Crown and the dynastic parties clung fiercely to neutrality from
the moment the conflict in Central Europe threatened to become a general
European war. (1) Given Spain's relative
diplomatic isolation and the obvious unpreparedness of the Spanish army,
intervention was clearly impossible, although the Conservative prime minister,
Eduardo Dato -- and much of official Spain -- were markedly sympathetic
to the Central Powers. (2) The official
position of the government did not alter throughout the war. Although the
dynastic politicians did not unanimously support Germany and her allies
(the Liberal party chief, the Conde de Romanones, was strongly pro-Allied),
(3) they did agree that only neutrality could spare Spain a certain
military defeat and might possibly win her an influential place as a mediator
at an eventual peace commission. (4) The
king, too, skilfully maintained an impenetrable neutrality throughout the
war, although the early triumphs of the German army seem to have inclined
him to anticipate a German victory. (5)
But strict neutrality proved difficult to maintain because the international
struggle soon became identified with the bitter domestic quarrel between
the "two Spains." (6) The battle was fought
among the educated, politically aware upper third of the nation; the other
two-thirds, largely rural and illiterate, remained indifferent to the outcome
of the war. In general, the right -- the aristocracy, the ruling elites,
the church, and the army -- supported the Central Powers, while the left,
with the exception of the Anarchosyndicalists and a minority faction of
Socialists who preached proletarian neutrality, desired an Allied victory.
The country divided geographically as well, with the industrial periphery
pro-Allied and the rural center -- and the court in Madrid -- pro-German.
Barcelona, however, was the focal point of German espionage in Spain, at
least partly because of the antiwar convictions of the Anarchosyndicalists
and their followers, who considered both sides to be bourgeois reactionaries.
For nearly everyone else in political Spain, the outcome of the war was
of the greatest significance. The right viewed a German victory as insurance
against the extension of liberal and democratic values in Spain; the left
yearned for an Allied victory for the same reason. Indeed, as it became
clearer that Spanish neutrality could only benefit Germany (and her supporters
in Spain), the pro-Allied and progressive left clamored impatiently for
Spanish "moral intervention" on the side of the Western powers.
Fully conscious that the army was neither morally nor materially prepared
for a full-scale war, the officer corps accepted Spanish neutrality in
1914 with an almost audible sigh of relief. "Moral intervention" [46]
on either side would have exposed the incapacity of the army for active
belligerency; thus they insisted on adhering to strict neutrality throughout
the war. Officers were nevertheless humiliated and frustrated by Spain's
isolation from world affairs. Spain had become a "toy in the hands of foreign
neighbors, with less freedom of action than a small country like Holland
or miniscule Switzerland." (7) Officers
vehemently denied their own responsibility for Spain's military impotence,
blaming instead the politicians for their neglect of military affairs.
While advocating neutrality, the officer corps was overwhelmingly germanófilo,
for both positive and negative reasons. Admiration for the Prussian army
had been a tradition among Spanish officers since the Prussian victories
fifty years earlier, its technical accomplishments only slightly less envied
than the discipline and authoritarianism that were a reflection of Prussian
society as a whole. The army's enthusiasm for a German victory was also
inspired by its hatred of the Allies and of the Allies' supporters within
Spain. Aliadofilismo was for many officers but another expression
of the unpatriotic antimilitarism that had characterized the Spanish left
since the 1890s.
The presence of England in the Triple Entente was the biggest obstacle
to military aliadofilismo. Unreconciled to the loss of Gibraltar, even
after two centuries, Spanish officers eagerly awaited a German victory
that would return the lost territory to Spain. (8)
In March 1917 the Military Governor of Cadiz, General Miguel Primo de Rivera
y Orbaneja, publicly proposed an alternative: the abandonment of the Moroccan
Protectorate and the transfer of Ceuta to Britain in exchange for Gibraltar.
(9) The suggestion met with little favor, either in the government,
which quickly deprived him of his command, or in the rest of the officer
corps, which was largely pro-Moroccan and anti-British.
Many officers regarded France with almost equal distaste. Ill feeling
over French intrusions into Spanish Morocco in 1911 had not dissipated
with the treaty of 1912; the military hiatus in the zone imposed at French
request in 1914 only deepened their suspicion. Historical and ideological
antipathies also played a role. Like England, France was a traditional
enemy whose past sins outweighed, present economic and diplomatic interests.
Furthermore, the anticlericalism and antimilitarism of the Third French
Republic did not recommend continental parliamentary democracy to Spanish
officers, who were also inclined to make invidious comparisons between
the "degenerate" and "anachronistic" French and the "scientific" Germans.
(10) Aliadófilo assertions that the war represented
the struggle of Western "civilization" against German "barbarism" were
vigorously rejected by the military press.
Of course, military attacks on the political and cultural values of
[47] the Western powers were also intended for their partisans within
Spain, particularly the left-wing intellectuals affiliated with the magazine
España, edited by the Socialist Luis Araquistáin.
Founded in 1915, España was aliadófilo, interventionist,
and also (somewhat contradictorily) antimilitarist; in the summer of 1916
it contributed to the Republican deputy Marcelino Domingo's exposé
of corruption in the African army. (11)
Both these campaigns aroused the military press to a fever pitch of denunciation
against intellectuals and interventionists in general, and the contributors
to España in particular. (12)
For the left, Spanish neutrality was an outgrowth, like the war in
Morocco, of the corrupt constitutional system that allowed the king, the
oligarchy, and the army to rule without regard for popular opinion. Increasingly,
they viewed an Allied victory as the precursor to a long-overdue political
revolution that would democratize the Spanish regime. On February 1, 1917,
the German announcement of renewed submarine warfare against all neutral
shipping with England and France exacerbated the tensions between germanófilos
and aliadófilos and brought the constitutional issue into focus.
The German blockade, which threatened both commercial and agricultural
interests in Spain, lent credence to the left's demands for a rupture with
Germany, if not intervention on the Allied side.
(13) Even the right was shaken by the German announcement. But
a rupture without a declaration of active belligerency would have placed
the Spanish army in a humiliating position by exposing its inability to
fight. When the Romanones government responded to the blockade on February
6 with a note stiff enough to lead to a break in relations with Germany,
(14) germanófilos in the officer corps intensified their
public and private support for absolute neutrality.
(15) On February 16 aliadófilos in the Cortes, including
Catalan regionalists and Republicans of various stripes, demanded clarification
of the government's foreign and colonial policy, while asserting parliamentary
responsibility for the formation of such policy.
(16) Caught between the opposition parties in the Cortes and
the germanofilo majority in the army and in his own party, Romanones dismissed
the claims of parliamentary sovereignty with a call for patriotic unity
the following day. (17) Then, mindful that
unity was entirely rhetorical, Romanones precluded the possibility of further
divisive discussion by closing the Cortes on February 24. In suspending
the parliament, Romanones reaffirmed the inviolability of the political
settlement of 1876. At the same time, of course, he exposed the principal
weakness of the Canovite system: its ambivalent attitude toward popular
sovereignty and its dependence on the military.
[48] The Economic Effects of the War
The impact of the European war on Spain was not only ideological but
also economic. The nations at war eagerly purchased all the raw materials
and manufactures that Spain could send them, regardless of quality. But
governments in Madrid proved incapable either of moderating the deleterious
effects of excessive demand or of profiting from the economic boom by facilitating
industrial expansion. Instead, they clung to their traditional policies
of industrial laissez-faire and agricultural protection, thus providing
further ammunition for the groups demanding political renovation.
The failure to expand Spain's industrial plant during the war has been
blamed alternatively on the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among Catalan
businessmen and on the representatives of Castilian agricultural interests
who controlled the government in Madrid. (18)
Certainly, the hostility of Madrid to Catalan demands for a free port and
export subsidies was unrelenting, particularly after the appointment of
Santiago Alba, a representative of the Castilian wheat growers, to the
Ministry of Finance in December 1915. (19)
As a consequence, the party of Catalan big business, the Lliga Regionalista,
stepped up its nationalist rhetoric, becoming a vocal segment of the pro-Allied,
renovationist opposition to the political status quo in Madrid.
But Spanish industrialists were also partly to blame for the wasted
opportunity for industrial expansion. Production of most goods, particularly
iron and steel, did not rise nearly as rapidly as prices.
(20) The principal beneficiary of the wartime boom was the banking
complex that would dominate Spanish finance in the twentieth century. As
gold reserves expanded, some prewar foreign investments passed into Spanish
hands, and the peseta was strengthened and stabilized on the world market.
(21) Otherwise, the only beneficiaries of the war boom were the
entrepreneurs and speculators who profited from the Allied demand for Spanish
goods. Particularly in Catalonia, a new class of nouveaux riches appeared
whose disregard for bourgeois virtue and moderation scandalized both the
poor and the well-established rich.
For most Spaniards, however, the war brought scarcity and inflation.
As foreign demand for goods and foodstuffs outstripped the ability of Spain's
inefficient industries and agriculture to supply them, prices in Spain
rose, gradually until 1917, then vertiginously until 1920. Although employers
generally acceded to wage demands in order to avoid costly strikes, wages
always lagged behind prices, partly because the steady influx of agricultural
workers into the industrial centers [49] undercut labor's bargaining
power, (22) partly because employers transferred
higher wage costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. From 1914
to March 1917, prices rose 23 percent while wages rose only 10 percent.
By 1921) the difference would be even greater--a 79 percent increase in
wages alongside a price rise of 100 to 120 percent.
(23)
Both Conservative and Liberal governments proved incapable of dealing
effectively with the economic crisis. Attempts to regulate the export of
scarce commodities, especially food and fuel, were timid and ineffectual.
Nor were there any successful efforts to equalize the economic burden of
wartime inflation. In 1916 Santiago Alba, Minister of Finance in the Romanones
government, prepared a program of "national reconstruction" to be financed
by new sources of tax revenue and by cutbacks of government employees.
On June 3, 1916, he introduced a bill levying a direct tax on "excess"
wartime profits, (24) but was forced to
withdraw it on July 11 after it was opposed by the already truculent Catalan
industrialists, who quite correctly pointed out that no taxes were to be
levied against the profits of the Castilian agricultural interests represented
by Alba. (25) The result of the confrontation
was a further decline in the authority of the Liberal party, balanced by
a rise of the political stature of the Catalan Lliga Regionalista and its
leader, Francisco Cambó. Meanwhile, the tremendous profits in both
the industrial and the agricultural sectors remained untaxed.
(26)
Inflation and scarcity, and the absence of vigorous government measures
to control them, hit the urban working classes first; their restlessness
would spread in 1918, like the inflation itself, to the countryside. During
1916 food shortages, unemployment, and strike activity in the cities increased
along with membership in the two major labor federations, the Socialist
Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the Anarchosyndicalist CNT.
In order to harness popular discontent and to force the government to take
action, representatives of the two rival unions established contact in
July 1916, thus taking the first step toward healing the debilitating division
within the Spanish labor movement. (27)
This meeting was immediately followed by a successful strike for union
recognition by the Railworkers' Union of the North, and by a joint UGT/CNT
pact signed on November 26 in Saragossa that committed the two unions to
a twenty-four-hour general strike on December 18 to protest scarcity and
high prices. When this strike had no effect, the union leaders agreed on
March 27, 1917, to a more radical measure to force the government's hand
-- a general strike of indefinite duration. Planning for the strike began
in April. (28)
Thus, by March 1917 the labor movement, unified for the first time
[50] in Spanish history, was demanding government intervention on
a scale that would have substantially altered both political and economic
power in the nation. The government's response to labor, like its response
to the political left and to the Catalan regionalists, was defensive. At
each show of labor strength, union leaders were arrested and workers' centers
closed. In July 1916 Romanones suspended both the Cortes and the constitutional
guarantees, repressive measures he repeated the following spring. While
affecting a grim bravura and offering the war as an excuse for these acts
of desperation, Romanones exposed the inflexibility of the dynastic parties,
who preferred to view the labor problem as one of order rather than as
one of social change. (29)
Nevertheless, the threat of an indefinite general strike aroused governmental
concern and attracted attention to the plight of the urban working class.
The publicity given working-class grievances and the success of the strike
tactics were a discernible source of tension in the officer corps. After
the UGT/CNT agreement of March 27, La Correspondencia Militar editorialized:
"There is no governing party or party willing to govern that does not inscribe
at the head of its program a series of reforms aimed at the limitless improvement
of the working classes. They have attained benefit after benefit, without
a hint of declaring themselves satisfied, while another class -- unhappy,
helpless, and amorphous -- the middle class, sees its situation grow daily
worse without glimpsing any hope of relief." (30)
Salaries in the civil and military bureaucracies, inadequate even before
the war, had not been raised, in spite of the accelerating price rise.
The military press, especially La Correspondencia Militar, complained
daily about the export of scarce commodities, profiteering, and the high
price of food and lodgings. By early 1917 many officers were impatient
both with the government's inactivity and with the legal restraints that
prohibited the organized public expression of military grievances.
In the spring of 1917 the political and economic tensions generated
by the war appeared to be approaching a climax. In March the abdication
of the czar in Russia and the formation of a bourgeois provisional government
containing Liberals and Socialists gave hope to the Spanish left, who predicted
a similar fate for the Spanish monarchy, once an Allied victory was assured.
That victory seemed more plausible in April after the entry of the United
States into the war. On April 9 outrage in Spain over the German blockade
reached its peak when the Spanish freighter, the San Fulgencio,
was sunk off the French coast. Romanones, still a convinced aliadófilo,
endeavored to persuade the majority of his party to support a severe note
to Germany; when he failed, he resigned on April 19. The same day, the
king asked the [51] leader of the neutralist faction in the Liberal
party, Manuel García Prieto, to form a government.
Alfonso's failure to use his constitutional powers to support an interventionist
position further angered the left. Alfonso, however, was worried about
the security of his throne, particularly after the sudden collapse of the
Russian monarchy in March. Republican and Socialist rhetoric increasingly
stressed the extensive power of the monarchy under the Spanish Constitution
of 1876; in a well-publicized speech in the Socialist Casa del Pueblo in
Madrid on February 27, the Catalan Republican Marcelino Domingo had laid
the entire responsibility for the Moroccan war at the foot of the throne.
(31) Democratization of the political system might well eliminate
the monarchy altogether. Thus Alfonso prepared to use his considerable
power and influence to resist political change.
To draw attention to the key role of the monarchy, the pro-Allied left
sponsored a meeting in the Madrid bullring on the king's birthday, May
27. Representatives of the bourgeois left, together with some Socialists,
(32) assembled to urge "moral intervention" on the Allied side
in order to align Spain with the progressive and democratic forces of the
West. Comparing the struggle in Europe to the struggle within Spain, a
parade of Republican and Radical notables denounced strict neutrality as
pro-German, excoriated the Spanish army, and called on the king to initiate
the impending transformation of Spanish society. The Radical Republican
leader, Alejandro Lerroux, captured the emotions of many in his opening
exhortation: "Citizens: left and right, progress and reaction, justice
and despotism -- that is for me the problem contained in this war."
(33) Spain was neutral, but not isolated. The battle had been
carried to the very heart of the country.
The Formation of the Barcelona Junta
The formation of the military Juntas de Defensa and their triumph over
the Liberal government of Manuel García Prieto on June 1, 1917,
can be understood only in the context of the political and economic crisis
brought about by the war. By exposing the incapacity of the army, the war
forced the dynastic politicians to confront the necessity of serious military
reform. The proposed reforms, however, struck at the security of bureaucratic
middle-ranking officers, who also suffered most from inflation, shortages,
and the antimilitaristic propaganda of the aliadofilo left. When junior
officers organized to protect themselves from further reforms damaging
to their interests, the government and [52] the Crown were too shaken
by the prospect of political and social revolution to offer effective resistance.
Civil supremacy was thus sacrificed to secure army loyalty.
Parliamentary consideration of military reform had begun within a year
after the outbreak of the war. On November 8, 1915, General Ramón
Echagüe, Minister of War in the Conservative government of Eduardo
Dato, had introduced a group of reform bills that included earlier retirements,
personnel reductions, and the reestablishment of the two chief organs of
military planning, the General Staff and the Junta of National Defense,
both abolished by General Luque in 1912. (34)
Only the last two administrative reforms had been approved, however, when
the government fell after a Liberal interpellation on the preparation of
a new budget. General Echagüe's reforms were abandoned, and the officer
corps seemed once again to have escaped the agony of radical surgery.
The reprieve was a brief one, however, for the new Liberal prime minister,
the Conde de Romanones, brought to the War Ministry General Agustín
Luque, the reformer who had engineered the conscription law of 1912. During
1916 Luque prepared a comprehensive military reform bill, which was introduced
in the Senate immediately after the opening of the Cortes on September
27. (35) At the heart of the plan was an
increase of the standing army to 180,000, financed by a substantial, though
hardly radical, reduction of officers. Luque proposed a reduction of the
first-line army from fourteen divisions to ten, with another eight divisions
in cadre; the active divisions were to be strengthened and relocated for
strategic defense. Although the eight skeleton divisions provided active
posts for more officers than before, Luque calculated that the new organization
would require only 13,805 officers, making 3,171 active and paid reserve
officers currently with assignments superfluous.
(36) Nearly all the excess officers were at the rank of captain
or above; (37) in fact, the new organization
required 1,067 more lieutenants than were available on the lists in 1916.
Although the excess -- nearly 25 percent of the names in the Anuario
Militar -- would continue to receive their current salary "as a burden
of justice," their numbers were to be gradually reduced by a combination
of amortizations, earlier retirements and selective promotions. As a first
step, Luque had established a 50 percent freeze on promotions in January
1916. In the long run, Luque predicted his reductions would amount to an
annual savings of 11 million pesetas. The savings could be directed toward
modernization of equipment and training and to the elevation of salaries
for the remaining officers.
The bill also addressed the touchy question of merit promotions. [53]
Out of both habit and conviction, Luque was a die-hard supporter of selective
promotions. Nevertheless, he was anxious to placate the advocates of the
seniority principle, who still remembered his deluge of battlefield promotions
in 1910. As a compromise, Luque suggested a theoretical affirmation of
the selection principle at all ranks, with proportional representation
for all branches at the ranks above colonel -- to be implemented, however,
at some unspecified time in the future, when his proposed reforms had made
a selection procedure based on aptitude and experience more meaningful.
In the meantime, the existing peacetime seniority system would continue,
modified only by aptitude tests administered to officers eligible for seniority
promotions. In this fashion, the physically or professionally unfit could
be prevented from rising above their capabilities.
In another effort to overcome his personal unpopularity, Luque proposed
reopening the reserve list, which he had closed to noncommissioned officers
in 1912. While this contradicted his goal of reducing the number of officers,
it was a gesture aimed at expanding the social base of the officer corps
and at opening career opportunities for the lower classes, while at the
same time redressing the deficit of subalterns. The bill also proposed
lower retirement ages for all ranks in order to speed up promotions and
to modify the age structure of the officer corps, which was excessively
elderly. In order to soften the blow for the senior hierarchy, Luque advocated
a two-tier system to allow generals to retire in stages.
Luque's reform bill was a brilliant exercise in compromise. The number
of divisions was reduced, but the number of active commands was reduced
very little, thus minimizing the necessary cutbacks. The aptitude tests
undermined the cherished principle that an officer's job was his inalienable
property, but stopped short of a selection process based solely on merit.
Luque opened the reserve list to NCOS, but hesitated to challenge the traditional
separation of active and reserve lists. Officers would retire earlier,
but in stages. It was the bill's moderate approach to reform, however,
that made it a plausible first step after decades of immobility. By December
3, 1916, it had passed the Senate and had been introduced in the Congress.
Its success was not entirely due to Luque's skill as a political compromiser,
but also to the profound shock of the European war, which had exposed Spain's
military disarray to public scrutiny. Even the most tradition-bound military
senators, agreeing for once on the need for action, declined to oppose
the bill because of its retirement provisions, as they had in the past.
Of course, the sacrifices imposed by the bill would have affected the
senior hierarchy least; its major provisions threatened officers in the
[54] ranks below colonel, who wanted military efficiency and higher
salaries without cost to themselves. Even before the details of the reform
bill had become known, La Correspondencia Militar, and the middle-
and lower-ranking peninsular officers for whom it spoke, began to protest
the promotions freeze and the aptitude tests, which were already in effect,
pending passage of the law. When the Ministry announced in January 1917
that in one year 272 vacancies had been amortized, at a savings of 1.4
million pesetas, the paper reminded Luque and its readers that "exaggerated
virtues degenerate into vices." (38) By
that time, however, junior officers in Barcelona had moved beyond complaints
into action, forming a defense committee to resist implementation of the
reforms. (39)
The incident that touched off their rebellion was the announcement
in mid-1916 of the commencement of proficiency tests for officers eligible
for seniority promotions. The protest arose in Barcelona, where envy and
resentment of the favored Madrid garrison was strongest and where the economic
and political tensions created by the war were most concentrated. The Captain
General of the Fourth Region, General Felipe Alfau Mendoza, proposed a
series of exercises that would have halted the advancement of officers
grown fat and lazy after long, inactive careers behind their desks. One
general asked to be passed to the reserve immediately rather than submit,
and overall resistance was so great that the matter was dropped for several
months. When Alfau returned to it, he chose to examine two majors and a
lieutenant colonel from the Infantry on a public field before a large audience
of not very reverent spectators. Although the officers passed the tests,
which were simple enough, their public humiliation aroused much indignation
in the Barcelona Infantry regiments, particularly after they learned that
the Artillerists and Engineers had refused to submit to the inspections.
(40)
After discussing their grievances, junior Infantry officers concluded
that the Juntas de Defensa of the technical corps were responsible for
their immunity from the detested reform. The Artillery's Central Junta,
created in response to the reforms of 1888-89, had successfully lobbied
against measures detrimental to the interests of the Corps on several occasions,
preserving the Corps's traditional immunity from wartime merit promotions
and promotions from the ranks. (41) At
the local level, regimental Juntas occasionally acted as ad hoc honor courts
to enforce the renunciation of merit promotions and to punish otherwise
undesirable conduct. The reforms of the 1890s had inspired the formation
of similar Juntas in the Staff Corps and in the Engineers;
(42) eventually, impressed by the privileges and solidarity of
the Artillerists, the diplomados and the Cavalry had established Central
Juntas as [55] well. Although only the Artillerists and the Engineers
had been able to enforce the renunciation of battlefield promotions, the
various Central Juntas had often been able to act as a pressure group to
further the interests of their respective branches or to resist unwanted
"reforms."
Now, in the fall of 1916, junior Infantry officers in Barcelona began
to organize their own Junta de Defensa. (43)
The grievances common to Spanish officers after the turn of the century
were felt most keenly in the Infantry; it was they who had suffered most
from inadequate salaries, wartime merit promotions, royal and party favoritism,
amortizations, and most recently, Luque's reform bill, whose details were
made public in August 1916. (44) It was
natural that Infantry officers should find a logical connection between
their victimization and their lack of a Central Junta, equally natural
that the movement should originate not in the favored Madrid garrison,
but in Barcelona, where resentful officers were firsthand witnesses to
the activities of labor and regionalist groups.
The organizers of the movement harbored both immediate and long-range
goals: resistance to further implementation of the Luque reforms, the establishment
of a "closed scale" for the Infantry, and the elimination of favoritism.
All this was to be achieved by means of a binding and sacred pact among
all members of the Corps except the generals, who were considered to be
part of the problem. Soon the young officers had persuaded a majority of
the field-grade officers in the Barcelona regiments to support the Junta,
(45) and leadership of the movement was assumed by the colonel
in command of the Vergara regiment, Benito Márquez Martínez.
Once they had solidified their support in Barcelona, the junteros
began to promote the formation of local Infantry Juntas in garrisons throughout
Catalonia by petitioning a change of assignment for organizers from the
Barcelona units.
In December 1916 the Infantry Junta submitted its proposed statutes
to the Captain General of Barcelona, General Felipe Alfau, for approval.
The statutes were reflective of the trade-union character of the Junta,
whose organization and goals were designed to protect the job security
and professional advancement of the military middle class. The document
began with an extensive preamble that explained the formation of the "Junta
de Defensa of the Active List of the Infantry" in glowing terms: "The ardent
desire to make the Fatherland great and powerful by means of the combined
effort of all its children; the conviction that this requires a strong,
well-endowed, trained, and enthusiastic army; the consequent desire for
improvement and progress that the Infantry has felt for many years. . .
." (46) Similar high-minded language described
the aims of the Junta in the first article, but beneath [56] the
rhetoric the basically bureaucratic orientation of the Junta was clearly
visible. The ultimate goal, the "internal satisfaction" of Infantry officers,
was defined in the statutes as depending on the exclusion from the Junta
of generals and rankers, the enforcement of group solidarity, and the improvement
of economic conditions. At one level, these aims reflected a reasonable
desire for institutional autonomy from political favoritism; at another,
they represented an unhealthy impulse to remove standards of excellence
or achievement as criteria for promotions and appointments.
Most of the articles outlined the structure and operating procedures
of the Junta de Defensa, a hierarchy of local and regional committees with
a Superior Central Junta in Barcelona -- not Madrid. Local Juntas composed
of representatives from every rank were to act as the link between the
individual officer and the Corps as a whole, whose collective opinion was
to be established by a two-thirds vote of all Junta members. Once determined,
this collective or corporate opinion was to be binding upon all members,
who were also sworn to secrecy under threat of expulsion. Initially, members
would be recruited individually in the regiments, but in the future, graduating
cadets would be asked to sign a pledge as they did in the Artillery. The
"act of adhesion" obligated the individual to place the collective good
-- as defined by the Junta -- ahead of his own well-being. In return, his
colleagues promised to protect him from ministerial reprisals by supplying
any resulting loss of income. (47)
Both the statutes and the pledge were attempts to adapt the envied
traditions of the aristocratic Artillery Corps to the much larger and heterogeneous
Infantry. Inevitably, this meant the substitution of coercion for natural
solidarity and similarity of outlook. The Infantry junta, as conceived
by its founders, was to act as a pressure group not only against the government
but also against recalcitrant members who might be tempted to place personal
ambition ahead of the collective good. In the Artillery, the "opinion of
the Corps" had been a general sentiment shared by gentlemen of independent
means; in the Infantry, it was to be determined by majority rule, a "democratic"
provision that guaranteed a preponderant voice to the lower ranks and,
in effect, stood the chain of command in the regiments on its head.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the insubordinate tone of the statutes,
General Alfau received them with approval. One can only speculate about
his motives, but it is possible that he may have viewed the Juntas as potential
clients on which to build a political power base, much as Luque had done
in 1905. Alienated from Romanones and the [57] leading Liberal generals
since a brief tenure as High Commissioner in Morocco in 1913, Alfau may
have sympathized with the anti-Madrid sentiments of the younger men. He
also enjoyed a modest reputation as an intellectual and reformer, which
perhaps explains his sensitivity to their grievances. His own explanation
of his actions in 1917 focused on the injustice of prohibiting the Infantry
Junta when Juntas existed legally in the other corps. In his view, this
discriminatory policy might well lead to outright rebellion.
(48)
The statutes of the Infantry Junta, however, already contained overtones
of rebellion, or at the very least, of insubordination. The pointed exclusion
of generals, the rigid hierarchical organization, and the centralization
of the Junta in Barcelona indicated that the goals of the Infantry Junta
outstripped the limited ones of the other branches. Significantly, Alfau
unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Colonel Márquez to delete the
provisions excluding the generals. Yet apparently he offered no objections
to the other articles. It seems likely, therefore, that Alfau's sponsorship
of the Barcelona Junta was at least partly inspired by his own political
ambition.
By November 1916 the activity of the Barcelona Junta had come to the
attention of the War Minister, General Luque, whose instincts were offended
by both the goals and the methods of the Barcelona activists. Resolving
to nip the movement in the bud, he instructed all captains general to question
their colonels about the existence of Juntas in their regiments. Within
a week, he had received reassuring replies from everyone but General Alfau
in Barcelona. (49) Alfau did not respond
to Luque's November telegram until January 8, when he finally admitted
to his contacts with the Junta. Arguing that the best policy was "to use
and guide the currents of union and esprit de corps toward legitimate and
beneficial objectives," Alfau assured his superior that discipline was
not endangered by the existence of the Junta. At the same time, he enclosed
a slightly modified version of the statutes for the Ministry's approval.
(50)
Luque responded by ordering Alfau to Madrid to discuss the situation.
On January 13 Alfau was in the capital, where he conferred with both Luque
and the king. Apparently he was instructed to put an end to the Junta,
for on January 29 he informed the Ministry that it had been officially
dissolved. (51) In reality, the Barcelona
Junta de Defensa had been formally dissolved for only twenty-four hours.
(52) When it re-formed, Alfau took no further measures, although
he seems to have temporarily curbed juntera proselytizing. On February
10 Alfau returned to Madrid, where he again attempted to persuade the king
and [58] the government to authorize the junta in the name of both
equity and political expediency. Perhaps to gain time, Romanones and Luque
agreed to reconsider if the Infantry Junta adopted a form similar to the
older Juntas: they suggested abandoning the elaborate syndical organization
in favor of a looser structure entrusted primarily with honor court functions.
(53) This gave Alfau and the Junta the loophole they needed.
On February 26 Alfau wrote again to Luque, enclosing the statutes of a
theoretically new organization, christened the "Union of the Infantry"
and supposedly modeled on the other branch Juntas.
This time, Alfau's ace in the hole was the conditional support of the
king, who, he assured Luque, "believed that the moment had arrived to organize
a junta in harmony with what the other Arms and Corps had done."
(54) Aware of the existence of the Infantry Junta since the summer
of 1916, Alfonso had initially opposed the idea,
(55) since it was partially directed against the circle of royal
and ministerial favorites in Madrid. But by the winter of 1917 the king
was acutely sensitive to the need to keep army opinion on the side of the
throne. After his conversations with Alfau in January and February, he
seems to have decided to compromise.
By this time, however, General Luque had reconsidered his agreement
with Alfau on February 10. In a letter to Alfau on March 7, he vigorously
rejected the statutes of the proposed "Union of the Infantry." Luque saw
the Juntas as an institution appropriate to the smaller, more homogeneous
branches. In the Infantry, "the branch of the multitudes," they presupposed
a formal and rigid organization that posed a threat to military discipline.
Luque closed his letter by announcing that he would advise the king to
forego his support of the Union of the Infantry.
(56) Alfau tried one more time, rather peevishly complaining
of the unjust discrimination against the Infantry, when Juntas in the other
branches continued to exist. (57) But on
March 17 Luque pointedly advised Alfau that he had persuaded the king to
support his viewpoint and that he would discuss the matter no further.
(58)
The Expansion of the Juntas
As far as Luque was concerned, his letter of March 17 was his final
word on the subject, but to placate ruffled tempers, he and Romanones made
two important concessions. On March 26 a royal decree reduced the amortization
rate on vacancies to 25 percent. Then on April 3 Altau received a telegram
announcing the dissolution of the Central Juntas of [59] the Artillery
and the Engineers. (59) The government
expected this measure to put the Juntas to rest for good. Instead, the
decree galvanized the various branch Juntas to act in concert. By May 1917
the Juntas de Defensa were able to present a united front to the government.
It was intercorps rivalries, not army solidarity, however, that first
reactivated the Juntas of the technical corps in 1917. Artillery units
in the provincial garrisons were alarmed by the organization of local Infantry
Juntas, which, as the La Coruña Artillery Junta put it, "in trying
to achieve their goals, might diminish ours and invade some of the important
functions presently entrusted to the Corps." (60)
On the other hand, the local Artillery units shared the resentment of their
Infantry counterparts against the officers in Madrid, including their own
Central Junta. (61) The friction between
the provinces and the capital exploded into open conflict after April 3.
The decree dissolving the Central Artillery Junta was a political maneuver
engineered by its president, Colonel Angel Galarza, who owed the prime
minister, Romanones, a favor. In 1916 the newly created General Staff had
begun to study the elimination of the closed scale, and Galarza, a senator
affiliated with the Liberals, had persuaded Romanones to cancel the study.
In April 1917, when Romanones asked Galarza to repay the favor by dissolving
the Central Junta, Galarza acquiesced. (62)
Thus betrayed by their own leadership, local Artillery units moved to defend
themselves. On May 2 the Barcelona Artillery Junta sent a circular to all
regimental Juntas (except the perfidious Central Junta in Madrid), lamenting
the actual situation of the Corps and urging them to send delegates to
an assembly in Barcelona on May 15 in order to decide upon a unified course
of action. (63)
The emergence of the Infantry Junta also prodded Juntas in the other
corps into action. The solidarity that had eluded the Staff Corps since
the 1890s appeared quickly enough after the formation of the Infantry Junta,
many of whose members resented the privileges and even the existence of
the Staff Corps. In November 1916 the Central Junta of the Staff Corps
drew up statutes similar to those formulated by the Infantry and asked
Staff officers in each captaincy general to collect signatures to a pledge
of solidarity and mutual defense. By February, 255 -- more than two-thirds
of the Corps -- had signed, although the general distrust of the officers
stationed in Madrid had prompted Barcelona Staff officers to insist that
their Central Junta contain representatives from each military region.
(64) The dissenters who refused to sign the pledge were mainly
colonels and officers in the Madrid garrison, men with a stake in the status
quo. (65) But the desire to [60]
present a united front against any inopportune demands of the new Infantry
Junta made them reluctant to oppose actively the organization of a defense
junta for their own corps.
By late April 1917 there was an extensive network of Juntas in all
branches of the army. The ease and rapidity with which these units were
organized measured the degree of professional discontent and economic insecurity
within the officer corps. Significantly, the last to join the movement
were the Infantry regiments in Madrid and neighboring Guadalajara, and
in Melilla, where organization was slowly getting underway under the direction
of Colonel Eduardo López de Ochoa. (66)
Provincial junteros viewed these holdouts as proof of their contention
that officers in the capital and in Africa owed their comfortable posts
to intrigue and favoritism, (67) charges
angrily denied by the accused, who counterattacked with warnings against
"committees that tend to compel or diminish the prerogatives of public
power." (68) However accurate these criticisms,
they were interpreted as a desperate defense of threatened privilege by
the junteros. With opinion in the officer corps overwhelmingly against
them, the Infantry regiments in Madrid and Africa would soon fall into
line under the pressure of "compañerismo."
In the midst of this activity, which had been carefully concealed from
the public, Romanones resigned. Caught between mounting interventionist
sentiment, with which he sympathized, and the adamant neutrality of the
majority of his cabinet, Romanones found himself without support at a moment
when confrontation over the Juntas was increasingly likely and, because
of the political and social unrest provoked by the war, also increasingly
risky. It was probably somewhat with relief that Romanones resigned in
favor of García Prieto on April 19, even though the political crisis
signaled the end of his undisputed leadership of the Liberal party.
Replacing Luque in the War Ministry was General Francisco Aguilera
Egea, the leading general in the garciaprietista faction of the
Liberal party. Although his appointment marked the eclipse of Luque, the
rivalry between the two was personal and political, not ideological; Aguilera
had no sympathy for the critics of the system he had just inherited. Therefore,
when he discovered the extent of juntero activity in all the branches,
he refused to temporize. On May 9 Aguilera ordered the captains general
to prohibit all juntero meetings; in recognition of the leadership provided
by the Barcelona garrison, he wrote a personal note to Alfau labeling the
Juntas "seditious" and urging energetic action. (69)
Apparently still determined to protect the Juntas, Alfau's response [61]
on May 10 contained little more than verbal assurances from regimental
officers that all illegal activity had stopped. (70)
In fact, juntero activity in Barcelona increased after May 10. Delegates
to the assembly called by the local Artillery Junta began to arrive during
the second week in May; on May 15 they pledged their support to the Infantry
Junta, an indication that for the time being, army solidarity would prevail
over the usual rivalries. (71) Later in
the week, they formally replaced their defunct Central Junta with an organization
similar to that in the Infantry. In the meantime, the Infantrymen had resumed
their proselytizing, mailing propaganda circulars on May 24, two weeks
after they had received Aguilera's order to disband.
The Crisis of June 1
This overt defiance of the War Minister was the opening act in the
crisis that culminated a week later in the victory of the Juntas de Defensa.
During the last week in May, the government in Madrid, the king, and the
military defense committees engaged in a test of wills, a test the king
and the politicians failed because of their fear of political and social
revolution. The struggle was kept secret from the Spanish public, then
transfixed by the war, the impending general strike, and the interventionist
demonstration in Madrid on May 27. When the outlines of the confrontation
between the army and the state were revealed after June 1, the possibility
of revolution seemed nearer than ever.
The crisis began with the Infantry Junta's defiance of their military
superiors. When General Aguilera learned of the Junta's noncompliance with
his ultimatum, he directed General Alfau to take "more energetic measures,"
an order to which Alfau finally submitted. Early on the morning of May
25, Alfau asked the Superior Junta to disband within twenty-four hours.
(72) The same day, Alfau informed Aguilera of his action and
offered two alternatives for dealing with the crisis. The "most military"
was to order all officers to resign their membership in the Juntas within
forty-eight hours under pain of arrest or even death, extreme measures
that would be difficult to conceal from the public. With opinion so bitterly
divided over the war, news of division within the officer corps might prove
politically dangerous. The other alternative was to order the heads of
the local Juntas to dissolve their own organizations, a method that was
perhaps less military, but that held "without doubt less danger of violence."
(73)
[62] It was indicative of the tense political situation in the
nation that the "less military" solution was chosen. On the afternoon of
May 25, Aguilera told Alfau to order Márquez to instruct the local
Juntas to dissolve and received assurances from Alfau that Márquez
would comply. (74) The next day, bolstered
by a supportive letter from the Marqués de Estella, the president
of the Supreme Military Council, (75) Aguilera
repeated his order and added that Alfau should initiate a summary court-martial
in the event of a refusal.
But his firmness was matched by the intransigence of the junteros.
Márquez and the other members of the Superior Junta refused to comply
with Alfau's order to disband, leaving the Captain General no alternative
but to arrest them for insubordination. (76)
Early on the morning of May 28, the seven officers were imprisoned in Montjuich,
the military fortress usually reserved for strikers and terrorists.
(77)
The movement was not to be so easily quelled, however. No sooner were
Márquez and the others in the Superior Junta imprisoned than a second,
"shadow Junta," was formed. (78) More ominously,
the rest of the officer corps -- except the generals -- were lining up
behind the arrested officers. All over Spain, Junta leaders presented themselves
for arrest in the captaincies general, (79)
while officers in the Artillery and Cavalry Juntas in Barcelona awaited
orders to act. Furthermore, it appeared that Alfau was still trying to
assume the role of mediator between the Barcelona officer corps and the
government. Aguilera therefore recalled him to Madrid and relieved him
of his command, replacing him with a highly respected member of the senior
hierarchy, General José Marina. (80)
In Marina's former post as Captain General of Madrid, he placed the Conservative
General Echagüe in order to emphasize the united front presented by
senior officers in both parties. In conference with the king, the generals
agreed upon the execution of Colonel Márquez, the leader of the
rebellion. On May 30 Marina left for Barcelona.
The same day, Aguilera responded to one of the principal grievances
of junior officers with a decree establishing strict seniority for all
appointments through the rank of lieutenant colonel.
(81) To eliminate favoritism, all aspirants were to petition
the War Ministry "through regular channels" for the post they desired.
But the decree excluded the choicest positions, including those in the
General Staff, the Military Household, the War Ministry, Aviation, and
the academies -- in short, in all positions requiring more qualifications
than mere seniority. The dilemma was that it was patronage, not merit,
that had often ruled these appointments in the past, and the decree provided
no guarantee of objectivity for the future. Consequently, it did not appease
the insubordinate [63] officers, who were by now in a state of extreme
excitement. As Marina's train passed through Saragossa, local junteros
wired Barcelona to ask if they should stop it and detain him.
(82)
When he arrived in the Catalan capital, Marina found most of the garrison
united and unwilling to participate in the execution of Márquez.
On the evening of May 31, Artillerists informed Marina that if he did not
release the Superior junta immediately, they would do it themselves. The
Cavalry was equally defiant; the Engineers, slightly less so.
(83) As the new Captain General prepared for a review of the
barracks on June 1, officers braced themselves to refuse him admittance.
Undoubtedly they were encouraged to stand firm by signs that the united
front in Madrid was crumbling. Despite his agreement to support a hard
line, Alfonso was fearful of alienating the officer corps at a time when
he was under attack from the left, whose meeting in the Madrid bullring
had just taken place. To hedge his bets, he sent Cavalry Major Mariano
Foronda, the director of Barcelona's streetcar system, to negotiate with
the imprisoned officers. Foronda, however, was unsuccessful; certain of
victory and emboldened by this sign of vacillation, the Infantry Junta
remained intransigent.
At eight o'clock on the morning of June 1, before Marina could begin
his rounds, the acting Infantry Junta presented him with a manifesto announcing
that if the original Junta were not released within twelve hours, "the
army" would take matters into its own hands. (84)
The author of the manifesto, Captain Isaac Villar Moreno, had two goals
in mind: to convince Marina of the determination of the Barcelona garrison
to resist the government and to prevent Marina from touring the barracks,
where his prestige might be expected to overawe junior officers and undermine
their will to resist. (85) At the same
time, the regional Juntas were ordered to take possession of local political
and military administrative offices on June 2 and to cut off railroad lines
leading into Barcelona if the government should send troops.
(86) Clearly, the Barcelona Junta was contemplating a full-scale
coup d'etat.
The overblown renovationist rhetoric of the manifesto also supported
this view. The junteros floridly proclaimed that the crisis had arisen
exclusively out of their concern for the welfare of the nation and complained
repeatedly of the sacrifices uselessly and unilaterally imposed on the
army for the last twenty years. The language was ambiguous, but its general
tone suggested that Spain's military problems were part of the larger problem
of national regeneration. Thus the junteros appeared to be yet another
of the political forces demanding meaningful reform in 1917. Unlike the
regionalists, the Republicans, or the Socialists, however, the Juntas had
few specific political remedies [64] to propose. On the contrary,
the grievances specified in the text were strictly bureaucratic ones. Regenerationist
language notwithstanding, "internal satisfaction," or rather, the lack
of it, was the sole cause of the military rebellion of June 1. Although
willing to borrow the rhetoric of dissent, the Juntas de Defensa did not
desire a change of regime. Ironically, the manifesto of June 1 was the
first step in its destruction.
Undaunted by threats, Marina refused to release the prisoners, though
he did forego his morning inspection, thus averting a violent confrontation
in the barracks. As the day wore on and Marina showed no signs of giving
way, tension mounted in the city, and word circulated that the junteros
would be liberated by force at eight o'clock. Spotting a potentially revolutionary
situation, the Radical Republican leader Alejandro Lerroux sent word to
Márquez, placing eight hundred men at his disposal.
(87) But Lerroux received no reply. The coup contemplated by
the Superior Junta was a military one, made by and for junior officers
alone.
It was the cabinet, and especially the king, who finally lost their
nerve. Foronda, still active in the barracks, could report nothing encouraging;
at five o'clock in the afternoon, Marina received orders to release the
prisoners the following day. When Foronda returned to Montjuich to inform
the Junta that the king had intervened to secure their freedom, Márquez
loftily replied, "He does not free us; we free ourselves. He can be thankful
that we leave him in Madrid." (88) Further
proof of the self-confidence of the junteros was forthcoming an hour later,
when they agreed to ignore their ultimatum and spend the night in jail,
provided the legitimacy of their organization were immediately recognized.
(89) Having given in once, the government found it easy to do
so again. On June 2 the Barcelona Superior Junta, now officially sanctioned,
emerged from their cells; the next day, Junta leaders in La Coruña,
Vitoria, Seville, and Badajoz were set free. (90)
The Junta had triumphed because the king and his government were fearful
of losing military support at a moment of political and social crisis.
Had the king and his cabinet been as wary of militarism as they were of
political change, they might have chosen to meet the rebellion of June
1 head on. Unlike 1905, in 1917 the government had the full support of
the senior hierarchy, whose authority in the officer corps had declined
but not vanished. Most of the army outside Barcelona could be counted on
to follow their military instincts and obey orders. Nor was the Junta leadership,
either before or after June 1, genuinely revolutionary. The manifesto of
June 1 was a threat that never had to be acted upon; it would be unjustified
to assume that the government could not have called the bluff.
[65] But the Spanish state was on the defensive in the spring
of 1917, and the dynastic politicians were unwilling to test its -- and
their -- strength in an open confrontation with the army. Fresh in everyone's
mind was the March revolution in Russia, which had begun with the defection
of the army. The Spanish prime minister, Manuel García Prieto, was
a man of mediocre talents and personality, who owed his career to his marriage
(to a daughter of Montero Ríos) and to the personal rivalries within
the Liberal party. The beneficiary and symbol of a political system in
an advanced state of disintegration, he lacked the moral authority and
the political imagination to confront the military challenge energetically.
Even more responsible than the cabinet was the king, whose political
power had been enhanced since the closure of the Cortes in February. Through
Alfau, Alfonso had encouraged the formation of the Infantry Junta; through
Foronda, he had guaranteed its victory. From the beginning of his reign,
and with greater frequency after 1917, Alfonso would show more concern
for the preservation of his throne than for the constitutional regime that
legitimated it. Forced to choose between the army and his own government,
he chose the army, and the weakened government could not resist. Alfonso
and the army triumphed over García Prieto in 1917; they would do
so again in 1923.
The Full of García Prieto
With the release of the junteros, the principle of civil supremacy
had been severely compromised. Nevertheless, the government explained the
crisis to the country as a minor incident that would have no lasting effect
on the stability of the cabinet. (91) It
was clear, however, that the government was in imminent danger. The Infantry
Junta was determined to bring down García Prieto, who had now belatedly
decided to withstand further pressure. As proof of this new resolve, the
cabinet refused to accept the resignation General Aguilera submitted on
June 1. (92) Aguilera remained in office
as a symbol of resistance to further juntero demands.
But resistance was complicated by the absence of effective government
representation in Barcelona. In an abrupt about-face, General Marina had
become the spokesman for the Infantry Superior Junta, for reasons that
are not yet clear. Possibly Marina hoped to heal the breach between the
senior hierarchy and the junior officers by assuming leadership of their
movement, much as Luque had done in 1905. Whatever his reasons, like Alfau
before him, Marina allowed the [66] Barcelona Captaincy General
to become the official channel through which juntero demands reached Madrid.
Above all, the Infantry Junta wanted immediate approval of its statutes;
in addition, it demanded the abolition of wartime merit promotions, the
breakup of the king's camarilla of military favorites, a pay increase,
parity of civil and military amortizations, the dismissal of Francisco
Gómez Jordana, the High Commissioner in Morocco, whom they accused
of favoritism, and the reinstatement of General Alfau as Captain General
of Barcelona. Beginning with the recognition of the statutes, the implementation
of this program would have inverted the traditional structure of authority
within the military and severely limited the power of the government to
formulate policy and control appointments. Quite naturally, the cabinet,
and especially General Aguilera, were unwilling to meet these demands.
García Prieto was willing to approve the first article of the statutes,
which gave the Junta formal recognition without sanctioning its proposed
methods or organization, but the matter was taken out of the hands of the
cabinet on June 9, when Marina, under pressure from the Junta and without
prior cabinet approval, authorized with his signature the entire statute.
(93)
This was the equivalent of a military coup d'etat, the final blow to
the authority of an already discredited government. Upon learning the news,
the cabinet resigned, opening a political crisis of transcendent importance
for the future of the constitutional monarchy. Wartime stresses had exposed
the incapacity of the dynastic politicians for forceful leadership, the
turno was defunct, the need for political renovation widely apparent. As
in the struggle over neutrality, the Crown's constitutional powers appeared
to be the decisive factor in propelling the country out of its immobility.
The nation -- and the army -- waited expectantly for the king to call a
cabinet capable of governing, rather than of merely presiding over an unpredictable
denouement.
But the king did not rise to the historic occasion. Turning his back
on the tentative appeals to use the power of the monarchy to renovate the
political system, on June 10 Alfonso appointed the regular Conservative
party leader, Eduardo Dato, as prime minister. (94)
Alfonso elected to rely on the docility of the turno politicians and the
strength of the army rather than on a still problematic national consensus
that in 1917 could manifest itself only in negative fashion. In doing so,
he mortgaged both himself and the constitutional monarchy to the will of
the army.
From the king's perspective, Dato -- and the continued suspension of
the Liberal Cortes -- were the only reliable choices, because they were
the only predictable ones. (95) The Juntas
had vetoed the return of [67] the Liberals, who were still unwilling
in any case to recognize the statutes without reopening the Cortes to share
responsibility for it. But Alfonso was even more suspicious of the Cortes
than he was of the Juntas, fearing that the national demand for reform
might lead to its conversion into Constituent Cortes. New elections under
Conservative leadership might produce the same result, particularly if
the prime minister were Antonio Maura, the maverick Conservative leader
who had, since the turn of the century, advocated political reform directed
from above.
Among the Juntas, sentiment was strong for a Maura ministry -- rumor
reported that he had already been approached by Junta representatives.
Although Maura refused to place himself at the head of a military party,
he fully recognized the significance of the political moment and of his
own potential role, as a relative outsider, in it.
(96) But Alfonso, who had always been intimidated by Maura, had
no intention of calling on him, in spite of his desire to appease the Juntas.
If anyone were going to use the junior officers as a power base, it would
be Alfonso himself.
Undoubtedly, both Alfonso and Dato believed that the threat posed by
the Juntas de Defensa was only temporary. In a gesture of authority, the
government appointed as Minister of War the ancient Marqués de Estella,
a Conservative whose association with the Canovite system was as old as
the system itself. But venerable generals could not tame the Juntas. Perhaps
the most obvious result of the crisis of June 1917 was the eclipse of the
political generals who had dominated the army and civil-military relations
for nearly a century. The collaboration of civilian and military politicians,
traditionally believed to be the key to military reform, had finally coalesced
in 1916 under the pressure of the war. But by 1916 the generals could not
automatically guarantee the support of the rank and file. Alienated from
a system that had primarily benefited the court and party favorites, junior
officers now saw the Juntas as a means of insuring that their voices would
be heard. Confronted with an alternative power base in the army, the civilian
politicians lacked the nerve to challenge it. Their collapse sealed the
fate of the political generals, of military reform, and ultimately, of
the parliamentary regime itself.
The triumph of the Juntas was complete on June 12, when the new cabinet
approved the entire statute of the Infantry Junta de Defensa. In so doing,
it legitimated an illegitimate situation; in effect, it institutionalized
army indiscipline. The Juntas had emerged from the crisis with unexpected,
but certainly not unappreciated, political power. They had toppled one
cabinet and influenced the composition of a new [68] one, the king
was courting their favor, and public opinion expectantly awaited their
next move. For the next three months, during the revolutionary summer of
1917, the juntas would dominate the political situation and decide the
outcome of two attempts to renovate the Restoration settlement.
1. Spanish neutrality was first announced in the Gaceta de Madrid on July 30, 1914, then reconfirmed on August 7.
2. Dato to Maura, Aug. 25, 1914, in Gabriel Maura Gama/o and Melchor Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayo Alfonso XIII, pp. 470-71.
3. See "Neutralidades que matan," Diario Universal, Aug. 20, 1914, quoted in Conde de Romanones, Obras completas, 3:337.
4. Maura and Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayo Alfonso XIII, p. 471.
5. Romanones, Obras, 3:341-42.
6. An excellent description of the divisions caused by World War I can be found in the account of a longtime Madrid journalist sympathetic to the democratic left: Luis Bello, España durante la guerra. A perceptive discussion of the ideological debate is in Gerald Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923, pp. 17-61. See also Jesús Longares Alonso, "La guerra de propagandas en España, 1914-1918."
8. For references to Gibraltar, see ibid., Aug. 5, 1916; Jan. 30, Feb. 23, and Dec. 1, 1917; Jan. 29 and Apr. 5, 1918. In 1915 Germany offered Spain Tangier, Gibraltar, and a free hand in Portugal in exchange for Spanish belligerency, but the offer was refused. Romanones, Obras, 3:343.
9. Ibid., Mar. 25, 1917, p. 1.
10. Ibid., Aug. 15, 1916, p. 1.
11. España, Aug. 17, 1916, pp. 4-5.
12. See, for example, CM, Jan. 30, 1917, p. 1.
13. According to the pro-Allied daily El Liberal, Feb. 3, 1917, p. 1, the blockade had destroyed 35,000 tons of Spanish shipping between August 1914 and January 1, 1917. Five more ships had been lost in January 1917.
14. The note is in ibid., Feb. 8, 1917, p. 1. A list of all Spanish ships sunk before May 12, 1917, is in ibid., May 14, 1917, p. 1.
15. See CM, Feb. 23, 1917, p. 1, and the germanófilo circular signed by "Dos Jinetes" in MA, leg. 215.
18. For a summary of this dispute, see Joseph Harrison, "Big Business and the Failure of Right-Wing Catalan Nationalism, 1901-1923."
19. Alba's viewpoint may be found in Maximiano García Venero, Santiago Alba.
20. To compensate for the drastic reductions of imported coal, domestic coal production increased by 56 percent between 1913 and 1918, only to drop by nearly 20 percent by 1920, after the end of the war. Coal prices, however, rose by nearly 350 percent during the same years. See Santiago Roldan and José Luis García Delgado, La formación de la sociedad capitalista, 1914-1920, 2:118-19. Similarly, iron production increased only 10.3 percent and steel production remained constant, while iron prices rose by 265 percent in the same period. Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La España del siglo XX, p. 18.
21. There were 35 new banks created between 1915 and 1922, including the powerful Banco Urquijo and the Banco Central. Private bank reserves quintupled between 1915 and 1922, while their investments more than quadrupled. See Roldán and García Delgado, Sociedad capitalista, 2:222, 231.
22. Gerald Meaker rejects F. G. Bruguera's estimate of a 60 percent increase in industrial workers during the war and suggests a 20 percent increase is more plausible. Revolutionary Left, p. 32.
23. Anuario estadístico (I922-23), p. 359. See also the analysis in Alberto Balcells, El sindicalismo en Barcelona, 1916-1923, pp. 12-15, and Roldán and García Delgado, Sociedad capitalista, 1:127-87. The annual expenditure for a working-class family rose from 2,099 pesetas in 1914 to 2,941 pesetas in 1917, and 3,443 in 1919. Manuel Tuñón de Lara, El movimiento obrero en la historia de España, p. 562.
24. DSC (1916), 2:380, app. 4.
25. Cambó's speech is summarized in Jesús Pabón, Cambó, 1:460-62.
26. Taxes on profits rose by only 4 million pesetas between 1914 and 1918. Tuñón de Lara, Siglo XX, p. 19.
27. Andrés Saborit, La huelga de agosto de 1917, p. 48.
28. The manifesto of March 27 is in El Liberal, Mar. 28, 1917, p. 1.
29. See his account in Obras, 3:348-49.
31. El Liberal, Mar. 2, 1917, p. 2.
32. The PSOE
did not officially participate because the revolutionary intent of the
meeting had not been made explicit. Juan José Morato, El
Partido Socialista Obrero, p. 291.
33. The speeches
are reported in El Liberal, Supplement
of May 27, 1917, pp. 1-2.
34. DSC
(1915), 1:16, apps. 1,2, 3, 4.
35. Ibid. (1916),
9:3511, app. 6.
36. Nearly 2,400
more had no assignment whatever; they were divided into "supernumeraries"
(no pay), "substitutes" (half-pay), and "involuntary unassigned" (four-fifths
pay). See app. D for a breakdown of the officer corps by corps in 1917.
37. In the Infantry,
the percentage of officers with active, rather than bureaucratic, commands
ranged from a high of 84 percent of the first lieutenants to a low of 29.6
percent of the colonels. See the article by Augusto Vivero in El
Mundo, Jan. 18, 1918, p. 1. Similar articles appeared on Jan. 8 and
12, 1918.
39. The rise
of the Juntas is described in Benito Márquez-Martínez and
José-María Capo, Las
juntas militares de defensa, first published in Havana as J.-M. Capo, Las
juntas militares de defensa; José Buxadé, España
en crisis; Emilio Mola Vidal, Obras
Completas, pp. 997-1021; Stanley G. Payne, Politics
and the Military in Modern Spain, pp. 123-51; Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz,
"Breves notas para la historia de las juntas de defensa y de la dictadura";
Romanones,Obras, 3:366-71; and Juan
Antonio Lacomba Avellán, La
crisis española de 1917, pp.103-60.
The following discussion is principally based, however, on the documents
in SHM-GL.
40. See the account
in Mola, Obras, pp. 998-1000.
42. Alfredo Kindelán
y Duany, Ejército y política,
p. 197.
44. A summary
of Luque's reforms appeared in CM,
Aug. 19, 1916; each section was then presented and justified with supporting
data throughout the month of September.
46. For the full
text of the principal articles of the statutes, see Gabriel Martínez
de Aragón y Urbiztondo, Las
juntas militares de defensa, pp. 20-35.
47. The pledge
is in Mola, Obras, pp. I001-2.
48. El
Liberal, June 7, 1917, p. 1.
49. SHM-GL, legajo
73, carpeta 2.
50. Alfau to
Luque, Jan. 8, 1917, ibid.
52. Buxadé, España
en crisis, p. 40.
57. Alfau to
Luque, Mar. 11, 1917, in ibid.
60. Jorge Vigón
Suerodíaz, Historia de la
artillería española, 3:246.
63. The circular
is in El País, June 8,
1917, p. 2.
64. The Staff
Corps pledge stressed that the "first condition it is necessary to establish
and proclaim is the existence of the Corps as such. ..." (SHM-GL, leg.
72, carp. 12).
65. See the letter
of Colonel Carlos García Alonso in ibid.
68. Olegario
Díaz Rivero, an Infantry colonel attached to the Supreme Military
Council, to Colonel Márquez, May 24, 1917, in ibid., leg. 72, carp.
13.
72. The order
is in Mola, Obras, p. 1003.
73. SHM-GL, leg.
72, carp. 13. The letter is also reproduced in Sucesos
de agosto, pp. 24-26.
74. SHM-GL, leg.
72, carp. 13.
77. The imprisoned
members of the Superior Junta included Colonel Márquez, Lieutenant
Colonel Silverio Martínez Raposo y Real, Major Rafael Espino Pedrós,
Captains Manuel Álvarez Gilarranz and Miguel García Rodríguez,
and Lieutenants Emilio González Unzalu and Marcelino Flores. Mola, Obras,
pp. 1003-4. Flores is named Suárez in Buxadé's account, España
en crisis, p. 45.
78. The "shadow"
Superior Junta included Colonels José Hechevarría y Limonta,
José Molina Salazar, and Leoncio Moratinos; Lieutenant Colonels
Andrés Saliquet Zumeta and Mariano Bretón; and Captain Leopoldo
Pérez Pala.
79. Buxadé, España
en crisis, pp. 62-63.
80. There is
a eulogistic biography of Marina that deals with his career up to 1916:
Luis Antón del Olmet and Arturo García Carraffa, El
general Marina.
82. Márquez
and Capo, Juntas de defensa,
p. 37, n. 1.
83. SHM-GL, leg.
72, carp. 13.
84. The manifesto
is in El País, June 5,
1917, pp. 1-2, and has been reproduced in Buxadé, España
en crisis, pp. 51-53; Lacomba, Crisis
de 1917, pp. 128-30; Mola, Obras,
pp. 1005-8.
86. See Buxadé, España
en crisis, pp. 58-59.
87. Márquez
and Capo, Juntas de defensa,
pp. 38-39.
89. Their statement
is in Mola, Obras, pp. 1008-9.
91. El País,
June 3, 1917, p. 2.
93. Buxadé, España
en crisis, pp. 75-82.
94. The new government
included: Interior, José Sánchez Guerra; Finance, Conde de
Bugallal; State, Marqués de Lema; Justice, Manuel Burgos y Mazo;
Public Instruction, Rafael Andrade; Development, Vizconde de Eza; and Navy,
Vice-Admiral Manuel Flórez.
95. This account
is based on Maximiano García Venero, Eduardo
Dato, pp. 273-74; and Maura and Fernández Almagro, Por
qué cayó Alfonso XIII, pp. 300-302.
96. See the interview
in Fernando Soldevilla, Tres revoluciones, p. 36.