[94] The coalition government came into office on November 3, 1917 to restore military discipline and lead the country toward political reform. It did but instead left constitutional monarchy and the principle of civil supremacy even weaker than it had found them. Nor would the prestige of the so-called National Government of April 1918 achieve more than the momentary salvation of the completely bankrupt dynastic parties. The problt m was that neither coalition was truly "national"; instead, each represented only the disparate elements of the fractionated turno parties, fortified by the inclusion of the Catalan Lliga. Instead of restoring the credibility of the traditional parties, the coalitions of 1918 only emphasized their lack of constructive solutions to the problems facing the nation.
Intrinsically weak, the coalition governments of 1918 would not risk a challenge to the army. Instead, they would attempt to neutralize the officer corps by passing a reform law tailored to juntero demands. The law, enacted first by royal decree, then by the Cortes, raised salaries, increased employment opportunities, and established strict seniority promotions in both peace and war. It was thus a "reform" bill that met the complaints of bureaucratic officers against favoritism and stagnant careers. Conversely, it did not attack the real defect of the Spanish army -- excessive personnel -- for fear of alienating those same officers.
The mistaken assumption underlying the reform law of 1918 was that the interests of the Juntas were those of the army as a whole. In practice, the law further divided the officer corps, since it did not speak to the professional interests of other groups in the army -- in particular, the africanistas -- and since it limited the discretionary powers of the military elites that had traditionally controlled internal military affairs.[95] As a result, the bill encouraged, rather than discouraged, the tendency of military factions toward political activism.
Most significant, the government's capitulation to juntero demands was an invitation to continued military intervention in the future. Having given in once, the dynastic parties found themselves open to blackmail by any faction with a grievance. The policy of reliance on the army, originally adopted to secure the stability of the regime, thus came to pose as great a danger to that stability as the opposition groups demanding political change.
The formation of the coalition government under García Prieto on November 3 resolved the political, but not the constitutional, crisis of 1917. The political ferment that had filled the summer and fall continued, heightened, on November 7, by news of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Eventually, the establishment of the first socialist state would preoccupy the entire Spanish labor movement, but in November 1917 its impact was most profound on the wildly enthusiastic Anarchists and the horrified bourgeoisie. Spanish Socialists were slower to react, finding the domestic crisis and the European war of more immediate interest. (1) In Madrid, a press campaign for amnesty for those arrested during the general strike was initiated by El Socialista and supported by most of the democratic left press, including the new "renovationist" paper, El Sol, founded on December 1. In the municipal elections held on November 11, the four imprisoned Socialists of the strike committee were elected to the city council in Madrid, along with nine other Republicans and Socialists, although the results were later annulled on a technicality. Thus encouraged, the parties in favor of reform hoped to use the government's promise of free elections in February to overwhelm the dynastic parties at the polls and to direct the new Cortes toward constitutional revision.
The role of the Juntas in the resolution of the cabinet crisis, together with the universal recognition that they continued to hold the political advantage, made them the subject of seemingly endless analysis. During December political figures ranging from the Socialist Pablo Iglesias to the Carlist Juan Vázquez de Mella debated the legitimacy of the juntero rebellion of June 1 in El Liberal, a "Trust" paper sympathetic to democratic reform. Most of the regime's critics, including Iglesias, Cambó, and Alvarez, agreed that the illegitimacy of the turno justified the breach of military discipline. In a burst of ill-considered enthusiasm, Ortega y Gasset wrote in El Sol that the appearance of the Juntas on June 1 was "the most glorious, healthy, original, European act that Spain has presented to the world in the last one hundred [96] years." (2) The dynastic politicians were understandably less enthusiastic, although in print they were reluctant to denounce the Juntas with vigor. The exception was Joaquin Sanchez de Toca, an independent Conservative who plainly labeled the unionization of the armed forces as a "monstrosity" incompatible with constitutional government or public order. (3)
The debate was not over the legitimacy of the juntas but the legitimacy of the regime. Thus the left thoughtlessly acquiesced in the emergence of the army as a political moderating power, failing to foresee that an army allowed to destroy one "illegitimate" regime might easily take it upon itself to repeat the action. In the crisis of 1917, the right perceived more clearly the threat to civil supremacy. Nevertheless, in the chaotic years that followed, none of the dynastic politicians would find the courage to resist the demands of an army that protected them from political revolution and social disorder.
La Cierva and the Juntas
This public discussion annoyed the new War Minister, Juan de la Cierva, because it complicated his plan for domesticating the Juntas. Unlike many politicians on both the left and the right, La Cierva shrewdly perceived that the minority of activists in the Superior Infantry Junta had led the officer corps farther into civilian politics than most of them cared to go. Because he did not object to military indiscipline on philosophical or constitutional grounds but as a threat to orderly government, La Cierva did not fear the Juntas and was able to manipulate them skilfully. After ingratiating himself with the army as a whole, he used the bureaucratic majority in the Superior Junta to eliminate Benito Márquez and the NCO Juntas. Next, he responded to the professional grievances of the military middle class with his army reform bill, assuming that this would enable him to demand the dissolution of the Juntas. What La Cierva failed to foresee was that the success of the Juntas' insubordinate tactics in 1917 would encourage them to repeat those tactics the next time a new grievance arose. Basically an unreflective instrumentalist, La Cierva overlooked the connection between means and ends and unintentionally hastened the erosion of civil supremacy.
La Cierva's hubris also led him to believe that he could use the Juntas as a political power base. He sympathized with army officers, whose views on order and authority were similar to his own, and they returned his admiration. With the Conservative leadership divided, he [97] hoped to profit from his military clientele, posing as a bulwark against revolution and as the tamer of the army. This, however, was a miscalculation. In the confrontation between the military and the government in March 1918, his own career would be sacrificed. The Juntas would lose their voice in the cabinet, but their real power would remain intact. La Cierva in effect created the force that destroyed him.
From the first, La Cierva made it clear to the officer corps that he was sensitive to their professional problems. To avoid charges of favoritism, his aides were chosen at the recommendation of the various Superior Juntas. On November 28 the government granted an extraordinary bonus to all civil and military employees earning sixty-five hundred pesetas or less, which included all officers below the rank of colonel. Meanwhile, the War Minister flaunted his concern for military honor by authorizing a liberal use of the Law of Jurisdictions (4 )and by making personal appearances in the provincial garrisons. In his most publicized speech, delivered at the Cavalry Academy in Valladolid on December 13, he praised the "potent and providential voice" of the Juntas and promised to consider their interests his own. (5) These tactics soon produced their calculated effect. On December 18 La Correspondencia Militar praised the War Minister as "one of the most serious, sensible, and prestigious figures in Spanish public life." (6)
At the same time that he built up his own prestige, La Cierva undermined the authority of Benito Márquez, whose political ambitions had not diminished since the resolution of the cabinet crisis (in which he had played no part). Indeed, Márquez now seemed ready to launch a political career on the strength of his following in the military and civilian Juntas. The Junta of the Corps of Postal and Telegraph Workers elected him honorary president in November, and it was rumored that he would stand for election from Madrid in February. (7) Furthermore, Márquez, whose idealism was sincere, if naive, was less enthusiastic than others in the Superior Junta about the new War Minister. Undoubtedly, his jealousy of La Cierva's popularity played a role. In any event, he had resisted sending a letter of support to the Minister when the rest of the Superior Junta had voted to do so. Márquez thus posed a double threat -- to the end of military political activism and to the cultivation of a Junta leadership committed exclusively to La Cierva.
Accordingly, La Cierva set about provoking a confrontation with Márquez, correctly calculating that the colonel would be betrayed by the juntero rank and file. On November 30 he wrote directly to the peninsular regiments, asking for their opinions on professional questions, which he promised to consider when preparing his military reform [98] bill. (8) Because this procedure deliberately bypassed the juntero hierarchy, and in particular, the Superior Junta, it infuriated Márquez, who sent three members of the Superior Junta to Madrid to remonstrate with the War Minister. (9) It was a measure of Márquez's political innocence that his chosen emissaries were the three junteros who had intrigued with La Cierva during the recent cabinet crisis -- Major Espino and Captains Pérez Pala and García Rodríguez. On December 23 the three returned to Barcelona, where they informed Márquez and his one remaining ally, Captain Herrero, that they had sworn allegiance to La Cierva and were removing Márquez from the Junta presidency. Angry but incredulous, Márquez retorted he would resign first. To his chagrin, the resignation was immediately accepted and announced to the press on December 26. As La Cierva had anticipated, the remaining junteros, except for Herrero, quickly closed ranks against Márquez, whose petition for reinstatement before the assembly of regional representatives was politely and firmly rejected on January 7. A month later, a new Superior Junta oriented toward purely professional objectives was elected in Barcelona. (10)
The Suppression of the Union of Noncommissioned Officers
With Márquez successfully eliminated from the Superior Junta, La Cierva's goal of muting its political proclivities seemed a step closer. His task was made easier still by the reactivation of the NCO Junta, which decided in December to test the receptivity of the new War Minister to its demands. Since the rebuff from the officers' Junta the previous June, leadership of the NCO Junta had passed to Madrid, where organizers, in strictest secrecy, had established a network of provincial Juntas based in Valencia. At the end of December the Madrid Junta drafted a letter to the War Minister, which was transmitted to Valencia for approval. (11) In style and content, this manifesto resembled those of the previous summer: the NCOS wanted "dignity," promotion into the reserve list, and the right to express their grievances collectively. In deference to the influence of the officers' Juntas, the NCOS eliminated the earlier hostile references to their superiors. But the officers were not mollified by the obsequious tone of this document, which was leaked to the War Ministry before it could be officially presented. As quick to recognize the danger of syndicalization among the lower ranks as they were slow to recognize it among themselves, the Infantry Superior Junta insisted that La Cierva dissolve the "Union of Noncommissioned Officers" and cashier the organizers.
[99] Several members of the senior hierarchy, including Generals Luque and Weyler, vigorously opposed the dissolution of the NCO Junta, which they supported as a counterweight to the officers' Juntas. (12) But La Cierva saw his chance to indebt the officers' Juntas to himself; the dissolution of one Junta could be potent leverage to use against the others. Furthermore, he was opposed to the NCO Junta because it was much more likely, in his view, to slide into radical politics. (13) On January 4, 1918, La Cierva acted decisively. With the aid of telegraph workers, who worked all night to code the lengthy instructions to regional military authorities, he ordered the immediate dissolution of the NCO Juntas and cashiered over two hundred sergeants and troops in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia who refused to sign a pledge not to organize further. (14) The official note from the War Ministry justified the action to the country by stressing the unauthorized traveling of the NCO organizers, their coded communications, and the intervention of "outside elements" that would have led the movement into military insubordination and political subversion, a line echoed that evening in La Correspondencia Militar. (15)
But there was little evidence that the NCOS were pursuing revolutionary political goals; in any case, their procedures were no more revolutionary than those employed by the officers' Juntas the year before. The real motive for the suppression of the NCO Junta was the professional jealousy of their immediate superiors, who had single-handedly carried out La Cierva's orders. All the generals stationed in the capital, including the Captain General, had manufactured official business to keep them elsewhere. (16) As the partisan nature of the repression became known, even those who had taken a tolerant view of the officers' Juntas a month earlier now criticized the government for missing an opportunity to dissolve them. (17)
In La Cierva's view, a dissolution was premature. He intended to remind the Juntas of their opposition to the NCO Junta after their grievances had been met and they had been reconciled with the senior hierarchy. In the aftermath of the NCO conflict, a solution to the latter problem seemed as urgent as it was difficult. On February 20 La Cierva achieved partial success with an anniversary celebration of the General Military Academy (AGM). The younger generals and many of the middle-ranking officers who formed the backbone of the Juntas in 1918 had graduated from the AGM during the ten years of its existence, 1883-93. Moreover, as a temporary antidote to the exclusivity of the technical corps, the AGM was particularly cherished in the Infantry. Thus while Artillery officers were somewhat miffed, the AGM banquet gratified Infantry junteros at the same time that it reunited them with [100] the youngest and most vigorous generals in a fraternal celebration of collegiality from which only the senior Restoration generals were excluded. The AGM banquet also reaffirmed the loyalty of the officer corps to the king, who stressed his own commitment to the military in a speech that provoked great enthusiasm and emotion. (18) The obvious harmony between junteros and young generals received much favorable comment in the press and marked La Cierva as the most effective figure in the García Prieto cabinet.
The Cortes Elections of 1918
After the flurry of interest generated by the banquet, attention reverted to the most absorbing political event of the winter of 1918 -- the election of deputies on February 24. As the government had promised, the Minister of the Interior provided no guidance to local election boards, giving reformers hope that the electorate would return a majority committed to constitutional revision. The outcome of the first "free" elections of the parliamentary monarchy, however, merely dramatized how deeply rooted were caciquismo and voter apathy. (19) To be sure, in the urban areas, where caciquismo was less effective, the two principal protest movements of 1917 achieved substantial victories.Vast expenditures by the Lliga insured them a large majority in Catalonia, while the Socialists, who had campaigned on a platform of amnesty, won a moral victory against the government and the army by electing the four imprisoned members of the strike committee. With Pablo Iglesias and Indalecio Prieto, a young journalist from Bilbao, the Socialist representation in the Cortes now formed a recognizable voting bloc of six. The only protest parties to be repudiated at the polls were the Reformists and the Republicans, whose vacillating policies the previous August had won them no friends in either camp.
Yet despite these gains, the dynastic parties continued to dominate the elections. The absence of centralized electoral manipulation did not destroy rural caciquismo, which continued to operate effectively at the local level, using its traditional tools of patronage and influence. Instead, it merely destroyed the Canovite mechanism for achieving a workable majority, leaving the Cortes of 1918 divided almost evenly between the Liberals and the Conservatives, who in turn were divided into three rival subgroups each (followers of García Prieto, Romanones, and Alba, for the Liberals, and of Dato, Maura, and La Cierva, for the Conservatives). (20) "Free" elections in a country that was still largely rural, illiterate, and politically apathetic (34 percent of the electorate [101] abstained from voting) produced a parliament with no internal cohesion and no mandate for reform. Although a slight Liberal majority allowed the García Prieto coalition government to stay in office, it seemed unlikely to survive the antagonisms that had been deprived of parliamentary expression for over a year.
La Cierva's Army Reform Bill
In anticipation of this, La Cierva resolved to enact his army reform bill by decree before it could fall victim to political partisanship in the Cortes, scheduled to reopen on March 18. Because the Cortes had been closed since the previous February, there had been no debate on the Juntas de Defensa or on the army's role in the August general strike, making rapid passage of a military reform bill problematic. Yet without the bill, La Cierva doubted he could keep the Juntas under control. His plan was to secure enactment of the bill by decree and then to submit the decree, in toto, to the Cortes for legislative approval. In this manner, the decree would acquire force of law with less risk of alterations in its provisions.
La Cierva's insistence on a decree -- essentially a repudiation of the legislative power -- completely disrupted the García Prieto government, which was supposedly committed to democratic reform. His announcement of his intentions on February 27 provoked the departure of the two Catalans from the cabinet and opened an ongoing political crisis that the hapless García Prieto was powerless to resolve. In a cabinet meeting on March 6, La Cierva read his bill and insisted on its immediate enactment by decree. García Prieto offered to resign in his favor, but La Cierva refused to assume responsibility for his actions by forming a government himself. Faced with an impasse, the prime minister and the rest of his cabinet, with the exception of the Romanonist, Amalio Gimeno, finally surrendered. (21) The king signed the decree on March 7.
The cabinet was immediately plunged into another crisis when La Cierva released to the press a scathing attack on Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, whose pointed criticism of the War Minister and the Juntas (22) had driven officers in the Madrid garrison to the brink of direct action. (23) García Prieto submitted the resignation of the entire cabinet in protest, but La Cierva refused to comply. Moreover, the Juntas had already made it known that they would not tolerate the replacement of La Cierva in the War Ministry. The public reaction to La Cierva's highhandedness transcended the usual political boundaries. Headlines in [102] the liberal press screamed "dictatorship," Sánchez de Toca labeled La Cierva a "dictated-to dictator," (24) and the Madrid Socialist Group denounced the breach of parliamentary rights and the threat of military dictatorship in a protest declaration on March 8. (25) La Cierva, however, refused to confirm these predictions by forming a government of his own. Once again, Garcia Prieto ended the stalemate by resuming office with the same cabinet on March 10. How long it would last clearly depended on the benevolence of La Cierva and the Juntas de Defensa.
The same day that García Prieto resumed office, the royal decree on army reform appeared in the Gaceta. (26) Coming less than two weeks before the opening of the Cortes, the decree, which carried appropriations provisions, was a slap in the face to parliamentary government, and, together with the recent cabinet crisis, was the clearest proof to date that the army was the most decisive political institution in Spain.
La Cierva's reform bill reformed nothing, but rather reconfirmed the defects that had incapacitated the Spanish army for at least a century. Written to juntero specifications, with benefits for generals and NCOS as well, it sacrificed efficiency and modernization in order to protect and advance the interests of the swollen military bureaucracy that formed the core of the juntero movement. Unlike General Luque's reform bill of 1916, the 1918 decree did not make even a compromising attempt to alleviate the overcrowded lists and, thus, the strain on the budget. On the contrary, by expanding the number of divisions from fourteen to an unnecessary sixteen, tripling the number of Cavalry brigades, and setting the troop strength at 180,000, La Cierva actually increased the number of active posts by 1,714. Even this generous allowance left nearly 4,000 existing personnel without employment, but the decree did not introduce significant measures to reduce their numbers. Although the decree contained inducements to early retirement, only half of the vacancies so obtained were to be amortized, thus perpetuating the excess of officers at the higher ranks. In addition, the 25 percent amortizations at all ranks established by General Luque in 1916 were apparently to be abandoned. (27)
The benefits of the lower retirement ages prescribed by the decree were also vitiated by the creation of a two-year "reserve" situation in which officers would continue to be eligible for active posts at a slightly lower salary, an ingenious scheme borrowed from General Luque that softened the blow for retiring officers while speeding up promotions for those below. (28) With the memory of the NCO Junta still fresh, La Cierva opened the reserve list to noncommissioned officers and even provided for the incorporation of academy-trained NCOS into the active list, a highly unlikely contingency that posed no real threat [103] to regular officers. Since there was currently no deficit of subalterns, these provisions were justifiable only in terms of social justice, or political pragmatism, not economy, efficiency, or need.
This inflated bureaucracy was given a pay increase, as follows:
| Division general | 20,000 pesetas | Major | 6.500 |
| Brigadier | 15,000 | Captain | 4,500 |
| Colonel | 10,000 | First lietenant | 3,000 |
| Lieutenant colonel | 8,000 | Second lieutenant | 2,500 |
The pay of corporals and soldiers was raised by 25 céntimos daily, while sergeants and subofficials received a 30 percent increase (the rank of brigade was abolished).
Inflation had made a cost-of-living increase necessary, but the proposed pay scale increased salaries proportionately at all ranks, rewarding the already comfortable senior officers more than the truly impoverished lower ranks. Thus the pressure for rapid promotion would continue, only partly alleviated by the introduction of a five- hundred-peseta annual bonus for each five years in grade. The upshot of all these provisions was to guarantee that the War Ministry budget would continue to be consumed by salaries.
The other major sections of La Cierva's bill dealt with juntero grievances concerning favoritism in promotions and appointments; it was here that the reform bill of 1918 differed most markedly from that proposed by General Luque in 1916. Generally speaking, all promotions in peace and war were to be made on the basis of strict seniority. At the ranks of captain and colonel, a "Classifying Junta" composed of five lieutenant generals was to rule on individual eligibility for promotion to the next rank. Promotions to general would be made from the top one-third of the lists, proportional to the percentage of each corps within the army as a whole, in order to combat the traditional favoritism shown officers from the technical branches. (29) Most important, all battlefield decorations would be purely honorific, pensions and merit promotions having been eliminated. For special cases, the bill allowed merit promotions to be voted by law in the Cortes after an investigation and recommendation by the Supreme Military Council.
In general, the decree deprived the War Ministry of many of its discretionary powers in the hope of undermining the patronage system. Unfortunately, by guaranteeing equal rewards to the Moroccan field officer and the mediocre peninsular bureaucrat, it undermined excellence as well. Predictably, the decree would have a disastrous impact on the morale of the African army, particularly after operations were resumed in 1919. For peninsular junteros, however, the establishment [104] of the closed scale was the crowning achievement of the reform bill of 1918.
Other sections of the bill provided for the creation of an Aeronautics service and for the expansion and modernization of the army's equipment on a grand scale. The details of where the 1.3 billion pesetas itemized in the decree were to be found were left to the discretion of the Cortes. Given the limitations of the Spanish treasury, particularly in light of the salary increases, it seemed unlikely that this part of the decree would ever be realized, with or without legislative approval. These sections of the reform bill were largely for display. The goal of the bill was not a strong, well-trained, and well-equipped standing army, but a return to the "neutral" officer corps of the Restoration.
But neither La Cierva nor his reform bill could completely restore the tranquility of the Canovite years, for the political weight of the officer corps had grown in direct proportion to the strength of the forces demanding political and social change. Lower-ranking officers had discovered that they could achieve their goals without the intervention of the political generals, whose ability to maintain military discipline had evaporated. Most significant, the officer corps, always disunited, was divided even further by the promotions provisions in the reform bill. The coincidence of growing military power with growing military disunity would ultimately have fatal consequences for the regime.
The Expulsion of Márquez
With the enactment of the reform bill by decree on March 7, La Cierva was nearing the end of his program. He was now convinced that he could persuade the Juntas to dissolve, on the grounds that all their grievances had been satisfied. He also intended to remind them of his dissolution of the NCO Junta. On March 8, during the cabinet crisis, he quietly but officially requested all the Juntas to disband. Once they were gone and forgotten, he believed he could use his considerable political power to form a government without running the risk, as surely would have been the case at that moment, of being accused of aspiring to a military dictatorship.
But on March 10, as the García Prieto cabinet dutifully returned to office, La Cierva's carefully laid plans were upset by two unforeseen events: the reemergence of Benito Márquez and the refusal of three of the Juntas to dissolve. Since his removal from the presidency of the Infantry Junta in December, Márquez had not fallen into oblivion but [105] had kept the problem of the Juntas alive by taking his case to the country in a letter of denunciation and revelation published in El Mundo on January 30. In addition, as honorary president of the Junta de Defensa of postal and telegraph workers, he had supported the slow-down strike they had begun on January 21. The publicity surrounding Márquez had attracted unfavorable attention to the Juntas, making La Cierva's attempts to lull them into quiescence much more difficult. The War Minister had been encouraged, then, when in late February the newly elected Infantry Superior Junta appointed an honor court to try the colonel for violating his oath of secrecy. (30) La Cierva had expected Márquez to be quietly out of the way by March 7.
Instead of resigning gracefully, Márquez once again appealed to the public for justice. In a manifesto published on March 10, he denounced the new Superior Junta and their ally, the War Minister, and warned that the "Juntas, which might have been the leaven that altered the life of the State, may be the shroud of this unfortunate Nation" instead. (31) Coming on top of the cabinet crisis, Márquez's accusations threatened to ruin La Cierva's political prospects. The War Minister immediately ordered the formation of another honor court, which expelled Márquez from the army on March 12. To isolate Márquez further, officers and soldiers were forbidden to associate with him under pain of expulsion. (32) On March 20 La Cierva abrogated Article 34 of the Junta statutes, which provided for an appeal from an honor court to the Supreme Military Council, in order to prevent the antijuntero generals on the Council from striking a blow against La Cierva and the Junta by reinstating Márquez. The ambitious colonel had been totally outmaneuvered.
For a short time, Márquez remained in the public eye, as opposition groups made a halfhearted attempt to turn him into the Spanish Dreyfus. During the next few months, the former colonel was approached by the Socialists, the Republicans, and some of the sergeants expelled from the army on January 4. (33) Márquez returned their interest, but as his notoriety -- and his political potential -- waned, so did the contacts with the left. Part of the problem was that Márquez, unlike Dreyfus, was not an innocent victim of "militarism," but a military politician who had been bested by others cleverer than himself. As the left recovered more completely from their infatuation with the Juntas, they found Colonel Márquez, and the concept of military insubordination, ever less defensible. After a final attempt at finding an audience among radical Catalan nationalists in early 1919, Márquez accepted an offer of a job in Cuba from the Conde de Romanones in February of that year and devoted the rest of his life to self-justification. By [106] the time he died in exile in 1923, his megalomania was of unlimited proportions. (34)
The Fall of La Cierva
La Cierva had tamed Márquez, but he had not tamed the Juntas. The weakness in his scheme to destroy them was revealed on March 10, when he received their response to the request made two days earlier that they dissolve. The Juntas of the Engineers and the Staff Corps promised to comply, but those of the Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry firmly refused. (35) The division showed that the occasional unity of the officer corps was superficial; it also demonstrated the futility -- and the danger -- of trying to bribe the army into obedience. Moreover, the refusal gave the lie to the abundant rumors that La Cierva was plotting a military coup. Had he contemplated such a move, he would never have risked alienating the Juntas by requesting their dissolution.
La Cierva was not to be thwarted. Realizing that he could not use force against the Juntas, he resorted to less direct tactics, seeking to create a situation that would leave them no alternative but to disband. He found it in the slowdown strike in the Post Office, which had begun on January 21 and showed no signs of resolution. The strike was a response, like the Juntas de Defensa themselves, to the economic crisis; poorly paid and professionally frustrated, state employees had eagerly followed the lead of the military bureaucrats in the summer of 1917. But unionization did not automatically produce the anticipated relief. Lacking the threat of force possessed by the military, the civilian Juntas were unable to secure formal approval of their statutes, let alone consideration of a reform bill to ameliorate their professional status. January 1918 brought harsh temperatures and severe scarcities of food and fuel in Madrid and other cities, leading to riots and outbreaks of violence that caused several deaths. On January 21 the Corps of Postal and Telegraph Workers decided to adopt working-class tactics and began their slowdown strike.
The unionization of civil servants was as abhorrent to the dynastic politicians as the unionization of the officer corps, and the civilian Juntas were much more vulnerable. On March 13 La Cierva persuaded the cabinet to authorize militarization of the postal and telegraph workers and to order the dissolution of the extralegal civilian Juntas in all the ministries. (36) As La Cierva had anticipated, the response of the officer corps was ambivalent. While they disapproved of the [107] "seditious" strike tactics of the civil employees, (37) they immediately understood the implications of the government's disciplinary measures for their own organizations. The military press on the evening of March 14 attempted to distinguish between the military and civilian Juntas ("the first forgot its class character, the second based itself exclusively on it"), (38) but it was clear that public opinion would soon demand equal treatment for both.
Thus, when La Cierva again asked the Juntas to dissolve, they felt compelled to compromise. On March 15 the War Ministry announced that henceforth the Juntas would consist of only one Central Junta per branch, modeled on the Artillery Junta prior to 1917 and concerned only with internal matters. (39) The hierarchy of Juntas, and their political pretensions, would be abandoned. La Cierva believed he had successfully rid the officer corps of both its syndicalist and its praetorian tendencies.
Having apparently outmaneuvered the military Juntas, La Cierva now prepared to crush the civil servants, who had not been cowed by the militarization decree of the fourteenth. Fortified by declarations of solidarity from the other ministries, postal and telegraph employees walked off the job on March 16. As temporary head of the postal service, La Cierva was empowered to act unilaterally; with his usual vigor, he mobilized the reserves to replace the absent employees and dissolved the Corps of Postal and Telegraph Workers, while the rest of the government looked on apprehensively. Public opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of the civil servants, the Cortes was scheduled to open on March 18, and the military reform decree made it difficult to justify the harsh tactics being employed by La Cierva against the postal workers. Less confident than La Cierva of his government's right to rule in defiance of popular opinion, García Prieto opened negotiations with the strikers behind the War Minister's back.
Outraged at what he considered to be a betrayal, La Cierva resigned in protest on March 19, and the rest of the cabinet, bereft of its strongest member, followed suit, opening up a crisis as severe as that of the previous autumn. With the state employees still out on strike and the Cortes temporarily suspended, a rapid solution was necessary, but elusive. The divided Cortes offered no obvious solution; the turno, in any event, was dead. The most likely leader of a new coalition, Antonio Maura, was vetoed by the Catalans. Another problem was La Cierva, who refused to accept any ministry but War, but whose presence in any future government seemed to guarantee continuing military pressure. Finally, on the night of March 21, Alfonso summoned the leaders of the principal governing parties and threatened abdication. [108] The result was the so-called National Government of Antonio Maura, which took office on March 22, 1918. (40)
The National Government contained representatives of every principal dynastic faction, including the Lliga, but excluding Juan de la Cierva, who had been denied the War Ministry by Maura. His plan to use his power over the Juntas to make himself indispensable to any political situation had failed because he had been content to settle for the restoration of order at the expense of a truly independent civil power. Others, like Maura, saw more clearly that La Cierva had unintentionally indebted himself and the state to the Juntas. They saw just as clearly that La Cierva must go.
A bitter La Cierva left the War Ministry with his political reputation shattered but his personal standing in the officer corps still intact. During the cabinet crisis, he had refused the king's request to order the total dissolution of the military Juntas, accepting with satisfaction the Juntas' argument that they might be needed to protect the army from a new War Minister less sympathetic than La Cierva to military needs. (41) As he left for Murcia on March 23, a large number of officers gathered at the train station to see him off, a common method for officers to make their political views public. (42)
The National Government of 1918
After nine years at the periphery of Spanish political life, Antonio Maura assumed office on March 22, 1918, with little enthusiasm. (43) The dynastic parties, the army, and much of the normally apathetic middle class nevertheless viewed his return to public office almost messianically. The National Government seemed to be the "renovationist" government hoped for in 1917; (44) when it broke down only eight months later, the country, victimized by its own ill-founded illusions, was more than usually disappointed. Although the government accomplished most of the modest goals set for it by Maura, it contained no representatives of the left and thus could offer no durable solution to the constitutional crisis. Once the political crisis of March had faded, the bond that held the coalition together loosened, and the divergent political and personal tensions represented in the cabinet reemerged. By November internal dissension outweighed external threats, and the cabinet collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and limitations.
The confidence that the government enjoyed facilitated some early [109] achievements. On March 23 the decrees dissolving and militarizing the Corps of Postal and Telegraph Workers were abrogated, and workers returned to their jobs. Shortly thereafter, a reform bill for the civil administration was introduced in the Cortes. The rules of the Cortes were modified by the introduction of the cloture rule (guillotina), and an amnesty law was passed, enabling the four imprisoned members of the strike committee to take their seats in the Congress the second week in May. Meanwhile, two of the most dynamic cabinet members, Francisco Cambó, in Finance, and Santiago Alba, in Public Instruction, were preparing reform legislation for submission to the parliament.
The top priority of the government, however, was the preparation of a bill giving force of law and providing the credits for La Cierva's military reform decree of March 7. Maura, uncomfortable with the excessive military influence tolerated by La Cierva, hoped that legislative approval of the decree would partially erase the memory of the affront to parliamentary rights and shore up the somewhat shaky principle of civil supremacy. At the same time, he hoped that passage of the bill before the beginning of the new fiscal year July 7 would be interpreted by the army as a gesture of goodwill. Preparation of the bill was entrusted to the new War Minister, General Marina, whose good standing among both generals and junteros was supposed to heal further the wounds in the officer corps and to restore military discipline.
The priority given the bill was a sign that the National Government was as dependent on the military as its predecessors. Even before the introduction of the reform bill on May 1, the "military question" dominated the Cortes. Since it had been suspended for a year, this was the first time the Juntas had been discussed in parliamentary debate. The left, represented in early April by Indalecio Prieto and Marcelino Domingo, quickly discovered that the Juntas were a more specific and convenient target than the "militarism" that they had denounced since 1910. The Juntas not only embodied "militarism" -- that is, military influence in political decisions of every variety -- they had also exerted that pressure publicly and in defiance of the constitution. From April 1918 on, leftist attacks on the army would often take the form of attacks on the Juntas, even though the equation was a specious one. (45)
At the same time, the Juntas gave the left the chance to make an occasional nice distinction between "the army" -- a national institution not necessarily incompatible with democracy and social justice -- and the bureaucratic, egotistical, and antidemocratic members of the Spanish officer corps, who were perverting "the army's" true function. [110] Junteros and the Juntas thus allowed the left to attack selectively, in the hope of not alienating the more moderate or progressive officers. This, of course, proved to be a naive miscalculation.
In late April Prieto and Domingo particularly hammered away at the erosion of civil supremacy, a process that had begun with the Law of Jurisdictions in 1906 and had reached its culmination with the capitulation to the Juntas de Defensa the previous June. In tracing this process, the two deputies located its origins in the defensive posture of the dynastic parties, which had neither the will nor the popular support to solve Spain's economic and political problems. Dismissing the euphoria surrounding the formation of the National Government, Domingo accurately described it as "not a national Government, but a Government of monarchical concentration against the forces of the left. . . ," (46) Thus, the debate on the military question became a debate on the legitimacy of the regime.
The introduction of the reform bill and the arrival of the four amnestied Socialists in mid-May only intensified the debate on the army. At first, discussion focused on the military repression of the general strike in August. Once again, the left extended its criticism of the army to include a general critique of the monarchy and the ruling classes. (47) The provisions of the reform bill also illustrated the inherent weaknesses of the regime, especially Article 2, which allowed the War Minister to add credits to his annual budget to pay for the reforms in years when the Cortes refused or neglected to vote funding. As several deputies pointed out, this provision effectively deprived the Cortes of the power of the purse. (48)
Although the Socialists used their platform in the Cortes to denounce the reform bill and the political decadence that it symbolized, the parliamentary sessions of 1918 indicated that the regime was in fact capable of transformation. Whatever the inclinations of the dynastic parties, the economic and social changes effected by the war were leading inexorably, if slowly, toward political change. The outcome of the February elections revealed that caciquismo had lost its effectiveness in the larger cities and indeed could be expected to lose ground wherever the opposition possessed sufficient strength and energy to mobilize the electorate. Furthermore, the debates illustrated the potency of the parliament as an instrument for mobilizing opinion, for it provided the only existing guarantee of free speech, the press being permanently subject to partial censorship through the Law of Jurisdictions.
While the reopening of the Cortes represented a democratic advance for some, it appeared to many officers as a step toward anarchy and national self-destruction. The army reacted angrily to the debates, [111] which seemed little more than subversive rabble-rousing protected by parliamentary immunity. (49) The hero's welcome given the amnestied Socialists upon their return to Madrid also worried a few officers, who feared the consequences of a divorce between the army and the nation. (50) Moreover, the attacks by the left on both the army and the politicians drew them closer together; on May 25 El Ejército Español warned "agitators" that they would find the army a "firm and insuperable obstacle." (51) The dynastic politicians received this news gratefully and repaid the favor with rapid consideration of the military reform bill.
Thus, although the left was able to keep the military question alive, they were unable to hinder passage of the bill, which was sponsored, with more obstinacy than enthusiasm, by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, the Liberal president of the parliamentary committee on military affairs. Alcalá-Zamora conceded that the bill was less than perfect. Acknowledging the defects of the seniority principle, he defended its inclusion in the law on the grounds that a large majority of officers preferred "the certain, inevitable, but mechanical injustice of the law to the lesser, but partial and arbitrary injustice of favoritism." To the critics of the March 7 decree, Alcalá-Zamora replied that it had to be seen as the only solution to an otherwise insoluble conflict between "the zealous custodian of parliamentary rights" and "the yearning for progress in behalf of the armed forces." (52) This unprincipled approach made constructive debate almost impossible; in despair or resignation, the opponents of the bill bowed to the inevitable and allowed the bill to emerge from the Congress on June 24 with only one amendment -- a stipulation, clearly aimed at the Juntas, that any "association, group, or collective representation" of employees of the War Ministry obtain the "express approval" of the Minister.
If debate in the Congress had produced few results, it had at least been extensive; in the Senate, the bill was approved in four days. While General Marina watched impassively, (53) a few of the senior generals debated the technical sections, and General Luque criticized the closed scale and the bloated personnel provisions. The other political generals, including Aguilera and the Marqués de Estella, recognized that the bill was detrimental to army interests, but discreetly refrained from criticizing either the bill or the Juntas on the Senate floor. On June 29,1918, the day La Cierva's reform bill became law, the "disillusioned" General Marina submitted his resignation to Maura because he did not "agree with the essence nor with the structure of the reforms. . . ." (54) Marina insisted that his continuation in the War Ministry would be both "ineffective and prejudicial," but he was ultimately persuaded by [112] Maura to remain in the cabinet in the interest of national unity. It was clear, however, that the military reform law of 1918 had intensified the serious divisions between junior and senior officers.
Equally serious was the response in the African army, where the law
was greeted with resentment and concern. (55)
The first great army reform of the twentieth century did not even mention
the only area in which that army was engaged in operations -- Morocco --
because it had been written to meet the interests and grievances of peninsular
bureaucrats. While the European war kept colonial operations at a standstill,
this defect was relatively easy to ignore. But with the end of the war
a few months later, the African theater would become active again under
French initiatives, and the African army would be forced to deal with an
institution that had not improved with the passage of the reform law. Then
the recriminations would begin.
The Revival of the Juntas
The euphoria of the junteros over the new law lasted nearly a week; then it was transformed into rage. The upshot was the reemergence of the juntas to protest the implementation of the reform law that had been passed to insure their disappearance. This time they did not bother to disguise their professional grievances in regenerationist rhetoric, but frankly began to function as a powerful, if illegal, pressure group.
The problem was that the military bureaucrats were not willing to tolerate any governmental efforts to reduce the officer corps. They applauded a decree of July 3, implementing the retirement provisions of the new law, because it meant vacancies at the higher ranks. (56) But they were outraged by other decrees emanating from the War Ministry in the month of July that indicated that Marina and Maura were determined to ignore the more extravagant provisions in the law. On July 4, 20 percent of the troops were released early because of a lack of funds to pay for them, making the goal of a standing army of 180,000 even more remote. (57) The next week Marina announced a new round of 50 percent amortizations to reduce the officer corps to the number prescribed in the reform law. (58) Two other dispositions eliminated a number of pay supplements, including the five-year bonuses, in order to bring the military law into conformance with the reform bill for the civil administration, then being discussed in the Cortes. The civil service reform was a response to the bureaucratic grievances aired so dramatically in March. Like the military reform, it dealt primarily with pay [113] scales and promotions. (59) But peninsular officers were unwilling to admit their similarity to other civil servants and continued to insist on the maintenance of their extra privileges until the two dispositions were rescinded. (60)
Even more exasperating was the continuing authority of the War Minister over top-level appointments and promotions. General Luque, the bête noire of the Infantry Junta, had been appointed to the Classifying Junta, or promotion review board, in April. In promoting colonels and generals to fill the vacancies left by the new retirement provisions in the reform law, the Classifying Junta had not observed the principle of strict seniority, as the Juntas desired, but had exercised its prerogative to select candidates from the top one-third of the promotions lists, as the law allowed. (61) As a final provocation, a protégé of Luque's, General Dámaso Berenguer, was promoted to division general and appointed Undersecretary of the War Ministry in mid-July. (62) On July 12 La Correspondencia Militar warned that the return of the old abuses would probably mean a return of the Juntas. (63)
As predicted, the Juntas began to organize during the month of July. Since their capitulation to La Cierva in March, they had been without the official statutes that were mandated by the reform law passed in June. In late August the new proposed statutes of the Infantry Junta were leaked to the press. (64) In conformance with the agreement with La Cierva, the statutes provided for a single Superior Junta located in Madrid, which would speak officially for the collective opinion of the Corps and serve as a permanent honor court. The other corps also reorganized their Central Juntas and put pressure on the government to interpret the reform law in their favor.
The National Government had secured passage of the reform law to lay the Infantry Junta to rest; it was not prepared now to grant it legal status by approving the new statutes. As a result, the Junta reverted to its former complex organization of local and regional Juntas led by a Superior Junta in Madrid, whose members drew handsome salaries paid by membership dues. Although entirely illegal, it continued to act as a pressure group in the War Ministry, its power enhanced by the social crisis that accompanied the end of the world war. By late 1918 the presidents of each of the branch Juntas had developed the habit of meeting in a joint Assembly in order to minimize intercorps conflicts and to coordinate policy. La Cierva's careful scheming the previous winter had not eliminated the Juntas; its only lasting result was the military reform law that would compound the military problem in the years ahead.
[114] The Fall of the National Government
The collapse of Maura's National Government on November 6, 1918, marked the failure of the only serious attempt to save the regime with a coalition government representing all the dynastic parties. (65) Its difficulties lay in the inherent contradiction between a coalition government and a parliamentary system dependent on party politics. In April 1918 the political crisis had provided a short-term bond for the disparate interests represented in the cabinet. Once the aura of crisis had dissipated, the consensus disappeared as well. The political urge could not be stifled forever by appeals to patriotism and loyalty.
By common agreement, the responsibility for the fall of the National Government was settled on Santiago Alba, the Minister of Public Instruction. (66) Alba undoubtedly deliberately provoked the crisis over teachers' salaries in an attempt to disengage himself grandiosely from a situation he found increasingly untenable. (67) The subsequent parliamentary debate, in which Alba was routed, made him a convenient scapegoat for the collapse of the government a month later. He was henceforth discredited among all those who had hoped for salvation from the National Government, which was much of the country, including the army.
But Alba's defection was only the precipitant of a collapse that was inevitable. That the fall of the National Government was interpreted as a turning point for the regime was due to the extra burden assigned to it by some of its members, particularly Francisco Cambó, who believed, mistakenly, that a coalition of the dynastic parties could permanently resolve Spain's postwar problems. In his view, only a coalition could take the decisive action necessary to restructure the national economy and to defend the social order against the importunate demands of the working classes. For Cambó, the dynastic parties represented not only a political but also a social class with common interests transcending political differences. For this reason, Alba's refusal to cooperate any longer made him a traitor to the regime and to his class.
Alba, however, interpreted Spain's political dilemma differently from his colleagues, especially Maura and Cambó. For Alba, the future depended on the regime's ability to incorporate the left, which had been boycotting the Cortes since the discussion of the Espionage Law in July. Alba recognized that only a revitalized turno, based on a genuine left and right, could provide the dynamic needed to deal positively with Spain's economic and social problems. Furthermore, unlike Cambó, he realized that without the incorporation of the left, the [115] dynastic parties would be unable to overcome their defensive posture and would allow petty differences to impede constructive action.
The tragedy was that in 1918 there was no simple political solution to Spain's problems. If Cambó refused to recognize that the task of national reconstruction could not be undertaken without the incorporation of the bourgeois left and the working classes, Alba overestimated the potential of a revitalized turno as an efficient response to the national crisis. Like the right, the Spanish left was not monolithic, but composed of three factions -- the working-class parties, the bourgeois Republicans, and the dynastic left represented by Alba -- all of whom might be expected to disagree on specific economic and social issues. As the elections of February 1918 had portended, truly representative government in Spain could also lead to stalemate and inaction.
Given the political differences that divided the National Government
in 1918, the only sort of continuing success open to it was the defense
of the status quo, a dismal fate precluded by the political crisis of November.
Its failure did not have to mean the failure of parliamentary government.
The possibility of a reconstitution of the regime would remain open until
1923, when the army would abruptly halt the slow and agonizing birth of
political democracy and civil supremacy in Spain.
1. Gerald Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923, pp. 99-116.
2. El Sol, Dec. 9, 1917, p. 1.
3. El Imparcial, Dec. 26 and 27, 1917, p. 1.
4. SHM-GL, leg. 73, carp. 2. Examination of the indexes to the Cortes debates gives a general idea of the frequency with which military courts presented petitions for removal of parliamentary immunity.
6. Ibid., Dec. 18, 1917, p. 1.
7. EE, Nov. 27, 1917, p. 2; El Liberal, Dec. 5, 1917, p. 1.
8. In Benito Márquez-Martínez and Jose-Maria Capo, Las juntas militares de defensa, pp. 223-25.
9. This and what follows is based on Márquez's letter of self-justification in El Mundo, Jan. 30, 1918, pp. 1-2.
10. The composition of the new Infantry Superior Junta is in EE, Feb. 7, 1918, p. 1.
11. The manifesto is in El Liberal, Jan. 5, 1918, p. 1.
12. Márquez and Capo, Juntas de defensa, p. 93; Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, Notas de mi vida, p. 195.
13. La Cierva, Notas, pp. 194-96, and CM, Jan. 5, 1918, p. 1.
14. The account is in El Liberal, Jan. 5, 1918, pp. 1-2.
16. Ibid., Jan. 5, 1918, p. 1.
17. For example, Ortega y Gasset in El Sol, Jan. 6, 1918, p. 1.
18. On the AGM banquet, see La Cierva, Notas, pp. 197-99, and the Spanish press on Feb. 20 and 21, 1918, which gave ample coverage to the banquet.
19. See the analysis in Miguel Martínez Cuadrado, Elecciones y partidos políticos de España (1868-1931), 2:807-11.
20. The figures in La Época, Feb. 24, 1918, indicated that the combined Conservative factions had won 154 seats, the Liberal factions, 161. The left had won 30 seats; the regionalists, 29; and the far right, 12.
21. Romanones had written Garcia Prieto on March 1 to warn him that he would withdraw his support for the government if the bill were not submitted to the Cortes. RA, leg. 5, no. 4.
22. El Liberal, Mar. 3, 4, and 8, 1918, p. 1.
24. El Liberal, Mar. 9, 1918, p. 1.
25. The declaration of the Madrid Socialist Group was as follows:
1. Its most energetic protest against the abuse of parliamentary rights and constitutional precepts that the resigning Government carried out upon approving the military reforms by decree.
2. Its intention to combat energetically the militaristic policies represented by La Cierva, and La Cierva himself.
3. Its readiness to fight with the necessary determination the military dictatorship it glimpses.
4. Its desire that the Socialist deputies in the Parliament struggle ceaselessly to restore to its position the indispensable sovereignty of the civil Power and the necessary dissolution of the Juntas de Defensa, rebellious and irresponsible organisms that the Constitution and the civilian spirit together reject. [El Liberal, Mar. 9, 1918, p. 2]
26. The reform bill of Mar. 7, 1918, is summarized in CM, Mar. 9, 1918, pp. 1-2. It is complete in DSC (1918), 3:785, app. 1.
27. A critique of the reform bill by Augusto Vivero appeared in El Mundo on Mar. 24, 1918, p. 1.
28. Retirement ages were as follows: lieutenant generals, 70; division generals, 66; brigadiers, 64; colonels, 62; lieutenant colonels and majors, 60; captains, 56; lieutenants, 51.
29. The number of brigadier generals was fixed at 102, in the following proportions: Infantry, 51; Artillery, 18; Cavalry, 13; Engineers, 10; Staff Corps, 10.
30. See CM, Mar. 14, 1918, p. 1; the telegram from General Barraquer, Captain General of the Fourth Region, to La Cierva, Mar. 4, 1918, in SHM-GL, leg. 73, carp. 6; and Márquez and Capo, Juntas de defensa, pp. 104-8.
31. Márquez and Capo, Juntas de defensa, pp. 133-34, n. 1.
34. See the letter from Márquez to the Spanish press in 1920 in Fernando Soldevilla, ed., El año político (1920), pp. 26-27.
35. Soldevilla, Año político (1918), p. 70; Jose Luis Coello de Portugal, Las juntas de defensa, p. 58.
36. The events can be followed in Fernando Díaz-Plaja, La historia de España en sus documentos (nueva serie): El siglo XX, pp. 385-95.
39. In CM and EE, Mar. 18, 1918.
40. Conde de Romanones, Obras completas, 3:374-75; Gabriel Maura Gamazo and Melchor Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayó Alfonso XIII, p. 312.
41. La Cierva, Notas, pp. 206-7.
42. See EE, Mar. 23, 1918, p. 1, and La Cierva, Notas, pp. 207-8.
43. Maura and Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayó Alfonso XIII, p. 311.
44. The cabinet included: State, Eduardo Dato; Interior, Manuel García Prieto; Justice, Conde de Romanones; Finance, Augusto González Besada; Development, Francisco Cambó; Public Instruction, Santiago Alba; Navy, Admiral José Pidal y Rebollo; and War, General José Marina.
45. See the speech of Marcelino Domingo in DSC (Apr. 22, 1918), 2:564.
46. See ibid., p. 567, and Indalecio Prieto, ibid. (Apr. 23, 1918), 2:596-603.
47. See the speeches in Los sucesos de agosto ante el parlamento, especially the speech of Julián Besteiro on May 28.
48. Indalecio Prieto in DSC (June 6, 1918), 4:1509; Joaquín Llorens, ibid., p. 1512.
49. See CM, May 27, 1918, p. 1.
50. Ibid., May 24, 1918, p. 1.
52. DSC (1918), 5:1582. The complete speech by Alcala-Zamora is reproduced in Las reformas militares.
53. See the humorous view of the debates on the military reform bill in Wenceslao Fernández-Flórez, Acotaciones de un oyente, pp. 291-92.
54. In Maura and Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayó Alfonso XIII, p. 313.
56. Ibid., July 9, 1918, p. 1.
57. See the disapproving article in ibid., July 4, 1918, p. 1.
58. R.D. of July 12, 1918. See CM, July 16 and 18, 1918, p. I.
59. See Alejandro Nieto, La retributión de los funcionarios de España, pp. 212-14.
60. See the letters from Gustavo Peyra to Maura's secretary, Pedro Rovira, on July 16, 21, and 27, 1918, in MA, leg. 82; the undated notes in leg. 215; and CM, July 13, 1918, p. 1.
61. Particularly galling were the promotions of Luis Bermúdez de Castro, Ricardo Burguete, Manuel Fernández-Silvestre, and Manuel Montero Navarro. Bermúdez de Castro and Burguete had incurred the wrath of the Juntas the previous summer. Silvestre was a part of the king's camarilla and had been Alfonso's personal aide since 1915. Montero was the brother-in-law of the High Commissioner in Africa, General Gómez Jordana.
62. Peyra wrote Rovira on July 27, 1918: "General Berenguer, whatever his merits might be, is the genuine representative of the policy of favoritism that the Juntas, and with them, the Army, repudiate" (MA, leg. 82).
65. For the fall of the National Government, see Jesús Pabón, Cambó, 1:647-78; Maura and Fernández Almagro,Por qué cayó Alfonso XIII, pp. 316-17; Romanones, Obras, 3:379-82; and Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808-1939, pp. 506-7.
66. This is insisted upon by the principal historian of the period, Pabón, Cambó, 1:647-78.
67. Alba was criticized for resigning over an issue of secondary importance. Yet the situation of schoolteachers was pathetic. Salaries for the 10 ranks ranged from 1,000 to 4,000 pesetas a year. Eighty-five percent of the personnel received 1,375 pesetas or less a year. El Liberal, July 17, 1917, p. 1.