[116] As if signaling the end of an era, the fall of the National Government preceded by only five days the end of the world war. During the next three years, Spain, like the rest of Europe, was racked by conflicts that had been both stimulated by and contained during the hostilities. Essentially a revolution of rising expectations, the Spanish postwar effervescence was both political and social. Among the Republicans and the parliamentary Socialists, Wilsonian idealism renewed hopes for a democratic reorientation of Spanish political life; among regionalists in the Basque provinces and especially in Catalonia, it provoked new demands for self-determination. For the working classes, however, the Armistice set off a wave of revolutionary activity and labor militancy whose goals were primarily social and economic. As Gerald Meaker has observed, ⁽¹⁾ this postwar enthusiasm owed as much to the example of the Russian Revolution as to economic distress, although accelerating inflation certainly contributed to the intensity of activity, which by 1919 was as apparent in the countryside as in the urban centers.
 
These rising expectations were met by the intransigence of the established interests, particularly in Barcelona, Spain's most industrialized city. After 1919, optimism gave way to desperation and violence. The drive for Catalan autonomy was resisted by the Castilian centralists and the army, then abandoned by the regionalists themselves when a disciplined and self-confident working class proved its strength in the first postwar confrontation between labor and capital. Animated by the dual specters of world communism and declining profits, the industrialists of the Lliga sacrificed their political alliances -- and their political goals -- in order to preserve their class interests. Catalanism, henceforth abandoned to the radical left, was once again denied a voice [117] within the system. The revolutionary left, too, was decimated and divided in the postwar struggle: the Republicans from the Socialists over the Third International; left and right Socialists over the same issue; the UGT from the CNT, and the Syndicalists from the Anarchists and Anarchosyndicalists, over objectives and tactics. In contrast, the ruling elites, increasingly committed to an inflexible policy of resistance and repression, closed ranks.
 
In this period of conflict and confrontation, the army emerged with even greater power than it had previously possessed. On the one hand, the majority of dynastic politicians, viewing the postwar social crisis either as a breakdown of public order or as part of a worldwide "Red" conspiracy, relied completely on the army to solve the conflict, thereby compromising their independence even further. The majority of officers, viewing the crisis in similar terms, although professing to believe that the army was a national institution transcending social class, defended the established order with enthusiasm. In the process, the traditional antipathy between Catalan regionalists and the army was not overcome, but moderated, by a new alliance between the Catalan bourgeoisie and the army garrisons in Catalonia based on their mutual horror of social revolution and labor unrest.
 
The most significant result of this relationship was the growing autonomy of the army in Catalonia. Less the servant of the state than an independent agent, the army effectively prevented the regime from adjusting its response to the working-class challenge. Although governmental attempts at conciliation and pacification were admittedly few, they soon ceased altogether as it became clear that they would not be honored by the army. Moreover, the army's insistence on repressive tactics undercut the credibility of moderates on both sides of the conflict, making each new effort to find a workable compromise between labor and capital in Barcelona less likely to succeed. By confirming the governmental parties in their intransigence and forcing even the moderate opposition to conclude that only revolution could accomplish significant political or social change in Spain, the army played a critical role in the breakdown of the parliamentary monarchy.
 
The Campaign for Catalan Autonomy
 
The failure of the coalition governments of 1917-18 to renovate the parliamentary regime was followed by a four-year period in which the dynastic parties attempted, with an equal lack of success, to reconstitute the turno. This political panacea only wasted valuable energy [118] without affecting the structural imbalances in the system. Although the oligarchs were still strong enough to retain their exclusive control over the state, they were increasingly able to do so only with the aid of force and completely unable to transform their defensive strategy into constructive action. Thus, as the dynastic parties disputed power with one another while doggedly resisting change from without, the pressure of events shattered one cabinet after another.
 
The first party government to follow the National Government of 1918 -- the "Liberal concentration" government of García Prieto formed on November 9, 1918 -- prefigured the postwar pattern by collapsing over the issue of Catalan autonomy after only a month in office. ⁽²⁾ With the signing of the Armistice and the prospect of a Wilsonian peace, the Catalan campaign, dormant since the failure of the Assembly movement the previous autumn, was resurrected by Cambó, who was disillusioned by the failure of the National Government to undertake the program of national reconstruction he had envisioned. Cambó found himself allied with the left, just as he had in 1917. On November 13 Republican deputies presented a Catalan autonomy statute in the Cortes; ⁽³⁾ several days later, a newly created National Federation of Republicans issued a manifesto in favor of a federal republic. ⁽⁴⁾ The Socialists also lent their support to the movement.

As in 1917, both the regionalists and the left viewed the alliance as a temporary but necessary precondition for the achievement of very different goals. The left was less interested in Catalan autonomy than in exploiting Catalan separatism in order to topple the regime; Cambó overcame his abhorrence of revolutionary politics only to enhance his party's leverage. In a private interview on November 14, Cambó convinced Alfonso XIII to support the autonomy campaign after persuading him that moderate Catalanism could unite the propertied classes and strengthen the regime to withstand the proletarian challenge. ⁽⁵⁾ On November 25 Cambó's committee in the Mancomunitat made public its proposed statute, which granted regional legislative and executive autonomy to Catalonia. ⁽⁶⁾
 
Instead of unifying the country, the autonomy issue split it in two. ⁽⁷⁾ Catalan nationalists and Republicans carried their anticentralist convictions into the streets; crowds in Madrid and other Castilian cities, protesting the "dismemberment" of the Spanish nation, responded in like fashion. The first victim was the García Prieto government, which split on the issue on December 3. The prime minister in the new cabinet was the Conde de Romanones, whose long-standing support for the victorious Allied powers and flexibility on the autonomy issue compensated for his scant support in the Cortes. ⁽⁸⁾ Yet not even the [119] politically dexterous Romanones was able to engineer a compromise. The Castilian party, led by Antonio Maura (a Mallorcan), rejected all concessions to Catalonia, while the Catalan Republicans refused to participate in the extraparliamentary commission appointed by the government to write an autonomy statute acceptable to all parties. Remaining loyal to its current policy of "no enemies on the left," the Lliga also refused to participate in the commission. While the deadlock filled Cambó with pessimism, it exactly suited the revolutionary objectives of the Republican left in Barcelona, who encouraged the frequent clashes between regionalists and centralists. Tension in the city was compounded by the renewed activity of the CNT, although Syndicalist leaders expressly dissociated themselves from Catalan nationalism, which they dismissed as a bourgeois phenomenon. On December 22 CNT organizers initiated an extensive propaganda campaign in the regions of agrarian unrest in Andalusia and Levante.
 
With neither the government nor the Lliga in control of the situation in Barcelona, it was the army that finally insisted on action. By January military tolerance for even moderate regionalism was wearing thin. The Barcelona garrison bore the full force of anticentralist sentiment; to avoid verbal and even physical abuse, many officers removed their uniforms before walking out in public. In addition to these personal affronts, officers were scandalized by the antipatriotic street demonstrations ⁽⁹⁾ and disillusioned by Cambo's continuing alliance with the left. The final outrage was the reemergence of Benito Márquez, still searching for a cause and an audience, as a focus of Republican and separatist propaganda. ⁽¹⁰⁾ By mid-January officers in the Barcelona garrison, especially the younger ones, were ready "to begin shooting in the street." Their indignation was communicated to the rest of the peninsular officer corps through La Correspondencia Militar, whose editor, Julio Amado, was in close contact with Major Espino, a juntera activist in Barcelona. ⁽¹¹⁾
 
Alarmed as much by the state of excitement in the barracks as by the rising tide of revolutionary propaganda, Romanones suspended constitutional guarantees in Barcelona on January 16, which enabled the government to crack down on demonstrations and to arrest dozens of Syndicalist leaders. But the prime minister immediately dissipated the goodwill these measures engendered among Barcelona officers by publicly stating that he had acted under military pressure. ⁽¹²⁾ On January 18 La Correspondencia Militar vigorously denied the assertion and stiffly pointed out that, without the suspension of guarantees, the officer corps would have been obliged "to avenge with its exclusive personal effort the outrages of the miserable horde that constitutes the [120] Catalan separatists. . ." ⁽¹³⁾ On January 19 Romanones retracted his statement, but tension continued to mount throughout January. On the twenty-fourth, the Mancomunitat rejected the compromise proposals of the extraparliamentary commission, voting instead for its own statute. On January 26, fearing violence between Catalan separatists and the army, the Captain General, Joaquín Milans del Bosch, confined all officers to quarters.
 
In a situation of stress, the Juntas reemerged as the mouthpiece of general military discontent. On January 27 the branch Juntas in the Barcelona garrison informed the Captain General that if the Civil Governor did not take action against the separatists, the army would. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The next day, after consultation with the Interior Minister, General Milans del Bosch prohibited the display of colored ribbons and flags, a symbolic measure that nonetheless calmed the garrison and avoided a street confrontation. The same day, the local Infantry Junta sent the government a document urging a hard line on separatism in order to avoid a conflict between Catalonia and the army. ⁽¹⁵⁾ In an effort to remove an additional source of irritation, Romanones arranged for Benito Márquez to leave Spain immediately for a post in Cuba.
 
The outrage was not limited to officers in Barcelona. In the Cortes, traditionally antiregionalist senior officers denounced all proposals for Catalan autonomy and urged the government to defend the honor of the army in Barcelona; simultaneously, La Correspondencia Militar committed itself to arousing sentiment in the provincial garrisons. The hints of army intervention grew less and less subtle. Catalan separatism seemed about to provoke a new ¡Cu-cut! affair.
 
Unwilling to alienate the army with revolutionary tension mounting in the peninsula, Romanones backed away from the autonomy statute, which stood little chance of approval by the Cortes in any case. In response, Cambó began to consider a revolutionary break with the regime: a boycott of the Cortes by the Lliga in conjunction with mass resignations of government officials throughout Catalonia. ⁽¹⁶⁾ By late January 1919 the constitutional crisis was as acute as it had been in 1917.
 
But, just as in 1917, the attack on the regime was deflected by a general strike, initiated this time by the Anarchosyndicalist CNT in Barcelona. Once again the threat of social revolution would divide Cambó from his allies, with fatal consequences for the cause of Catalan autonomy. After 1919 the Lliga would protect its economic interests through an ad hoc alliance with the Barcelona garrison, abandoning the direction of Catalanism to the Republican left and thus insuring that Catalan autonomy would lose its legitimacy as an issue under the [121] parliamentary monarchy. During the next four years, with the aid of the army, the Catalan bourgeoisie would secure a different kind of de facto autonomy that would enable it to carry out a repressive social policy independent of government control.
 
The Canadiense Strike
 
The strike in La Canadiense, the Canadian-British company that supplied Barcelona with electric power, dramatized the growing strength of syndicalism in Barcelona, itself a manifestation of the revolutionary mood that overtook the Spanish working classes, both urban and rural, in the postwar period. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The causes for this revival, after the slump in enthusiasm that followed the defeat of the general strike in August 1917, were both ideological and economic. News of the Russian land seizures aroused the landless laborers and marginal peasants of Andalusia, who from mid-1918 on organized local syndicates and strikes in preparation for a similar upheaval in Spain. Urban workers, many of them newcomers to industrial occupations, responded with equal enthusiasm to the Bolshevik capture of the Russian state. Economic distress also contributed to the revolutionary ferment. While the postwar economic slump that left thousands unemployed by 1920 was significant only in the Asturian mines in late 1918, other kinds of economic dislocation made life difficult for large numbers of workers. Inflation continued to accelerate, making a serious impact for the first time on smaller provincial towns, where prices by September 1918 were 66 percent higher than in 1914, 84 percent higher a year later. ⁽¹⁸⁾ The problem of high prices for basic commodities was compounded by scarcities resulting from unregulated exports, which triggered frequent and often serious street riots and looting in the major urban centers during the winter months. ⁽¹⁹⁾ By late 1918 the pressure of heavy emigration from the south and southeast into Barcelona, the ravages of the influenza epidemic, and economic distress had together created a tangible state of revolutionary tension in Barcelona.
 
A major indicator of the mounting unrest was the rapid expansion of the two Spanish labor federations. The Anarchosyndicalist CNT was the chief beneficiary of this growth, particularly after July 1918, when the Regional Labor Confederation of Catalonia (the CRT) formally committed itself to industrial unionism, thereby expanding its appeal for the thousands of unskilled workers who had arrived in Barcelona during the war boom. By the end of 1918 there were 345,000 members -- about 30 percent of the Catalan labor force -- in the CRT, many of them [122] organized into the nine major Sindicatos Únicos, or vertical industrial unions. ⁽²⁰⁾ In the entire country, the CNT claimed 700,000 militants, including 25,000 in Andalusia. ⁽²¹⁾ For the Syndicalist leadership, this massive influx represented the first real possibility of establishing the right of Spanish labor to collective bargaining. For the pure Anarchists within the CNT, the postwar ferment was the foundation on which the coming revolution would be made.
 
The Socialist UGT, whose membership had declined dramatically after the abortive general strike of 1917, also saw its numbers increase in mid-1918 -- from 89,600 in June 1918 to 134,356 a year later. But it continued to lag behind its rival, largely because the Socialist leadership's commitment to electoral tactics and trade-union gradualism was less attractive to the mass of workers and peasants who believed the revolutionary hour was at hand. ⁽²²⁾

The Catalan employers, especially the smaller entrepreneurs who had made their fortunes during the war, watched the expansion of organized labor with growing alarm. Foreseeing a postwar decline in foreign demand that might endanger their high profits, the owners mobilized to break the power of the unions, preliminary to cutting wages, which had risen -- although not as rapidly as prices -- during the years of peak production. In January 1919, in preparation for their coming battle with the CRT, the Catalan bourgeoisie reconvened their Employers' Federation, which had been relatively inactive since its organization in 1914, and resolved to meet the "Bolshevik" threat in Barcelona with force. ⁽²³⁾
 
In General Milans del Bosch, the Captain General of Catalonia, the employers found a willing ally. Milans was a courtly, formal officer of the old school, "a gentleman to the tip of his fingernails," ⁽²⁴⁾ but profoundly conservative and jealous of his own and the army's honor to the point of fanaticism. Like most officers, he interpreted the social question as one of public order and was thus a willing instrument of the policy urged upon him by the Catalan employers. Furthermore, Milans himself was a Catalan, a product of the same social milieu as the diehards in the Employers' Federation. An alliance, then, was almost inevitable.
 
To subdue the CNT, Milans found it expedient to employ the services of the former Police Chief and sometime German agent, Manuel Bravo Portillo. During the last years of the war, Bravo Portillo had engaged a band of pistoleros to harass and occasionally to assassinate manufacturers supplying materiel to the Allies; in 1918 he had been fired and briefly imprisoned after the CNT paper, Solidaridad Obrera, published documents implicating him in espionage activities. ⁽²⁵⁾ Shortly [123] after Bravo's release from prison, Milans had taken him on as an undercover "attaché" of the police department, where he acted as an agent provocateur, a role for which Milans, as a gentleman and an officer, felt personally unsuited. Milans had thus resisted suggestions from the War Ministry to dispense with Bravo's services. In February 1919 this antilabor coalition was strengthened by the appointment of General Severiano Martínez Anido as Military Governor of Barcelona. Together, Milans, Bravo Portillo, and Martínez Anido -- and behind them, the army garrison in Catalonia -- would feel confident enough to defy not only the CNT, but the government in Madrid as well.
 
In January 1919 General Milans del Bosch had been momentarily distracted from his impending battle with syndicalism by the confrontation between Catalan nationalists and the Barcelona garrison. On January 16 he had pressured Romanones to suspend constitutional guarantees in the city, using the opportunity not only to suppress separatist demonstrations but also to arrest the leaders of the CNT and to close workers' centers and newspapers. ⁽²⁶⁾ At the same time, he lifted the prohibition on urban militias, which led to the rapid formation, under the auspices of the Lliga, of neighborhood Somatenes modeled on the rural militias active during the Carlist wars. ⁽²⁷⁾ Even at the height of the Catalan crisis, Milans del Bosch perceived syndicalism to be the greater danger.
 
On February 5 the CRT responded to these measures with a strike aimed at demonstrating the legitimacy and strength of organized labor in Barcelona. Although the dispute arose out of an economic issue, it became a strike with essentially political goals when the management of La Canadiense dismissed eight workers for appealing to the Sindicato Único of Water, Gas, and Electricity for support. To establish both its right and its ability to represent the working class in Barcelona, the CRT called on all its affiliates to show their solidarity with the fired workers. Although nearly all the CNT leaders were still in prison, the strike was a spectacular success. By March 7, 70 percent of Barcelona's industries were closed down, her transportation system was paralyzed, and army Engineers and troops were providing the manpower to keep the city supplied with gas, water, and light.
 
As soon as the strike became generalized, Romanones was under heavy pressure from Milans del Bosch, the Civil Governor, and the Employers' Federation to respond with force. As early as February 17, the Captain General recommended the mobilization of strikers, many of whom he insisted would welcome the excuse to return to work. ⁽²⁸⁾ The government resisted, not least because a total mobilization required a vote of the Cortes, then in session. As the strike spread, however, [124] the cabinet's resolve weakened, while pressure from Barcelona intensified. On February 27 Romanones recessed the Cortes, just as he had at a moment of stress in February 1917. Then on March 9 he ordered a partial mobilization of workers in all public service industries in Barcelona. As a conciliatory gesture, workers were allowed to substitute service in other peninsular regiments for service in the utility plants. ⁽²⁹⁾
 
Contrary to the Captain General's predictions, however, these drastic measures only stiffened the resolve of the strikers. Under instructions from the strike leaders, ⁽³⁰⁾ workers resisted mobilization, disobeyed orders, terrorized the city with bombs, and jeopardized discipline among the regular conscripts. ⁽³¹⁾ To prevent a further breakdown of authority and to pacify his own officers, who were outraged at this defiance of military discipline, the Captain General now demanded a declaration of martial law. Although he told Milans that he considered him partially responsible for the deteriorating situation, Romanones agreed that order had to be established before the unrest spread to the rest of the peninsula. Food riots had broken out in Madrid the first week in March and there were frequent outbreaks of violence in Andalusia, where the syndicalist fever was rising. On March 13 he reluctantly granted Milans's request; immediately, nearly three thousand insubordinate workers were imprisoned in Montjuich. ⁽³²⁾
 
To his credit, Romanones understood that only compromise would restore lasting peace to Barcelona, and he simultaneously began to prepare for negotiations by replacing the intransigent Police Chief and Civil Governor of Barcelona with two more liberal appointees, Gerardo Doval and Carlos E. Montañés. On March 14 they arrived, along with the prime minister's personal secretary, José Moróte, to work out a settlement. Despite warnings from Milans about army opposition, by March 17 Moróte, Doval, and Montañés had hammered out an agreement between the company and the strikers that included the immediate release of political prisoners, the rehiring of all strikers, wage increases, an eight-hour day, and half a month's indemnization for time lost during the strike. ⁽³³⁾ The next day martial law was lifted, and on March 19 twenty-five thousand strikers assembled in the bullring of Las Arenas were convinced by the moderate head of the CRT, Salvador Seguí, to accept the settlement and return to work.
 
Up to this point, the Canadiense strike was the most successful strike in Spanish labor history. Not only had it demonstrated the strength of the Syndicalist movement in Barcelona, it had obtained substantial gains for the working class -- in particular, the eight-hour day. In a sense, the conclusion of the strike also represented a victory [125] for the Romanones government, which, overcoming its initial impulse to rely exclusively on force, had discovered the benefits of compromise. Had the Canadiense strike ended on March 19 with the peaceful return of the strikers to work, the result might have been a gradual reorientation of the traditional Spanish response to labor problems that might ultimately have freed the dynastic politicians from their dependence on the army.
 
The Army and the Social Question
 
Instead, the strike was pushed into a second, less successful, phase by the army's refusal to honor the government's commitments, and the opportunity for moderates on both sides was lost. The independent course followed by the army in Barcelona nullified the government's efforts to work out a new policy more attuned to postwar realities, just as it allowed the Anarchist extremists in the CNT to repudiate the cautious tactics of the Syndicalist leadership. All at once, the implications of their repeated capitulations to military insubordination were clarified for the dynastic politicians, who had created the beast they could no longer control. After the spring of 1919, the more flexible of the politicians would find it hopeless to try to govern in opposition to the army, leaving the way clear for a suicidal continuation of the old policies of repression by the civilian and military intransigents.
 
From the army's point of view, the government's negotiations with the strikers were nothing less than a betrayal of a loyal servant. The army had restored vital services and reestablished order, exposing military discipline to great risk in the process; they resented the negotiations that allowed the "rebels" to return to work without penalty. Furthermore, the Captain General, whose authority was absolute in a region under martial law, was furious that the settlement had been worked out without his participation or consent. Forgetting that they had insisted upon a repressive policy from the beginning of the strike, officers in Barcelona now saw only that the reversal of that policy by the government made it appear that the army was solely responsible for the mobilization and arrests. For two months Catalan separatists and strikers had vilified the army in slogans, on posters, and in the press. It now seemed as if the army -- and with it, the nation -- was to be sacrificed to the forces of anarchy and disunion.
 
Officers elsewhere in the peninsula agreed with them. During February the venerable Marqués de Estella, the president of the Supreme Military Council, told the press that the only solution to the [126] social problem was the formation of a patriotic volunteer army led by career officers, regular conscripts being increasingly unreliable in confrontations with members of their own social class. Estella pointed out that he was not opposed to social justice, "but justice is one thing, and another is imposition, violence, and threats to property, home, faith, and all that is lawful or represents authority or hierarchy." ⁽³⁴⁾ Other officers shared the ancient lieutenant general's fear of subversion in the ranks. In March the Assembly of Junta Presidents in Madrid approved a plan for a "supplementary military organization," led by officers and composed of "elements of order." ⁽³⁵⁾ The project was also favored by the War Minister and, with some reservations, by Milans del Bosch, who had authorized the formation of urban Somatenes in January.
 
The peaceful resolution of the Canadiense strike, then, was interpreted by the army as both an affront and a dangerous concession to bolshevism. To register his displeasure, General Milans del Bosch submitted his resignation the day after martial law was lifted in Barcelona, on the grounds that he could not be expected to implement the government's new policy of conciliation. ⁽³⁶⁾ If the government was seriously committed to such a policy, the only possible response to this threat of insubordination was, indeed, immediate acceptance of the resignation. But Romanones, lacking parliamentary or public support, dared not risk a confrontation with the Barcelona garrison. Milans remained at his post. Within a week he had provoked a second strike by refusing to implement the government's agreement to release all imprisoned strikers, including those subject to military law. Although the Syndicalist leadership advised further compromise, extremist "action groups" within the CNT pushed the CNT masses into a revolutionary general strike on March 24.
 
During the second strike, the army made it clear that it would settle the conflict on its own terms. On March 27 Romanones received a joint declaration from the Assembly of Junta Presidents entitled "The Intervention of the Army in Social Conflicts," which outlined the conditions under which the army would break strikes and restore order. ⁽³⁷⁾ A declaration of the army's policymaking prerogatives, it represented as grave a challenge to civil supremacy as the manifesto of June 1. It also revealed the contradictory and ambivalent attitude of the military toward "the social question."
 
The first section of the document indicated that the Juntas were concerned about the army's public image, much as they had been after the August 1917 strike. In their view, the army, an impartial national institution, was being unfairly employed as an instrument of repression [127] in behalf of a single social class, the capitalists. Furthermore, the army was asked to take responsibility for the functioning of public services, a complex task for which it was naturally unprepared. In the interest of restoring the army to its original function, the Juntas proposed new guidelines for military intervention in social disturbances: henceforth, the army would support mobilization to secure national services, but not regional or local class interests. To avoid class conflict, the Juntas suggested that national and local authorities pass appropriate legislation to resolve the social problem.
 
Having expressed their reluctance to intervene in social conflicts, the Juntas then insisted that the army should be allowed to resolve such conflicts without outside interference. Once the army had been summoned into service, it would not tolerate any diminution of its authority or any instructions to "parley, compromise, or temporize." Defiance of mobilization orders by strikers seriously threatened military discipline, particularly when the rebels were subsequently treated by the government with "considerations, indulgences, respect, and forgetfulness, when not with flattery and praise." In the future, the Juntas demanded equal and unbending application of the military Code for conscripts and mobilized workers alike.
 
What angered the Juntas was the ambivalent government policy that relied on the army to maintain social order while refusing it permission to employ the tactics that would restore discipline at once. Events during the past year had accustomed the Junta leaders to think of the army as an institution independent of and even superior to the state, which they viewed as corrupt and irresolute. The Juntas now complained that the army was being victimized by the weakness and inconsistency of civilian authority; they lacked the objectivity to see that military insubordination -- most recently exemplified by Milans's refusal to release the strikers -- had contributed greatly to that weakness.
 
The document of March 1919, written largely by the Infantry Junta, also revealed vestiges of the antioligarchical impulses of 1917. The middle-class origins of most Infantrymen made them wary of great wealth and power, whether in Madrid or Barcelona; as consumers and wage earners, they were not totally out of sympathy with the plight of workers. Furthermore, their concept of the army as a national institution transcending class made them reluctant to admit that it was a tool of the oligarchy. ⁽³⁸⁾ But these conscious sentiments were in conflict with other unconscious, but deeply held, military prejudices against disorder and in favor of discipline and hierarchy. In practice, the authoritarian instinct usually prevailed, and the psychological tension [128] between conscious and unconscious disposition made officers even more prickly and resentful of government authority.
 
Above all, the document was clearly another challenge to the principle of civil supremacy and was interpreted as such by Romanones, who nevertheless postponed his resignation until order should be reestablished in Barcelona. In the meantime, the king managed to salvage some of the government's authority, as well as to enhance his own standing with the officer corps, by agreeing to receive the document in place of the War Minister. ⁽³⁹⁾ To keep news of this latest ultimatum from reaching the public, the government established prior censorship on March 29. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ The fall of the government, however, was obviously only a matter of time. Real authority in the country belonged to the army.
 
Events in Barcelona made this evident, as the general strike was quickly brought to a halt by the vigorous measures of Milans del Bosch. Martial law had once again been declared in Barcelona, followed by the suspension of guarantees throughout the peninsula on March 25. The whole country appeared to be in a state of siege. In Madrid, troops sorted and delivered the mail in the absence of striking postal workers; in Barcelona, they once again operated the city's utilities. Nearly all the CNT organizers were in jail, Syndicalist centers and newspapers in Barcelona were closed, and workers themselves were harassed by the Somatenes, whose membership had risen to eight thousand. Young men in suits and fedoras patrolled the streets with rifles and on the twenty-sixth forced the opening of shops. Among the marching militia could be found most of the Lliga, including Cambó, who abandoned the autonomy campaign and his left alliance to meet the challenge to the social order. ⁽⁴¹⁾ The only conciliatory gesture came from Madrid on April 3, when a royal decree officially established the eight-hour day. ⁽⁴²⁾

By April 3 the strike had been broken, and the power acquired by the CRT during the Canadiense strike had been lost. Many commentators have criticized the CRT for initiating the general strike, arguing that as a quixotic protest it was doomed to failure and only served to harden the Catalan bourgeoisie against the labor movement. Furthermore, the subsequent repression of Syndicalist activity left the field open to the terrorists and pistoleros who did so much to discredit the movement. While this is true enough, it minimizes the responsibility of General Milans del Bosch and the Barcelona garrison for the strike. Even if the militants had overreacted, the provocation came from the military. The real tragedy was that extremists in the CNT would now have a strong reason for opposing negotiations sponsored by the government, which could speak for itself, but not for its supposed servant, the army.
 
[129] The final proof of this -- at least for the Conde de Romanones -- came on April 14, when the Captain General forcibly ejected the government's representatives, Doval and Montañés, from Barcelona. ⁽⁴³⁾ Once again, the issue was negotiation, now more unpopular than ever with the army and the Employers' Federation. When Milans del Bosch imprisoned two Syndicalist leaders to prevent further contacts between them and the civil authorities, Doval and Montañés submitted their resignations to the government, taking the opportunity to suggest to Romanones that labor relations in Barcelona might be improved by the dismissal of Bravo Portillo. The Captain General not only refused to countenance such a possibility, he decided to anticipate Romanones's acceptance of the resignations by placing the two officials on the next train to Madrid. In effect, this represented a military veto over government appointees, and Romanones had little choice but demand Milans's resignation or submit his own. Unwilling to alienate the army, Alfonso accepted the resignation of Romanones, who vowed never to return to office while the Juntas existed. At issue, however, was not the existence of the Juntas, but the inability of civilian government to free itself from its dependence on the military.
 
As the principal victim of the army's pressure tactics, Romanones received a certain amount of sympathy; yet his own behavior was not above reproach. Like other dynastic politicians, Romanones deplored "militarism" directed against his own government, but yielded to the temptation to suspend the constitution and govern through the army when confronted with social disorder. His tentative search for a modus vivendi with organized labor was thus compromised from the beginning by his earlier concessions to the army. Behind those concessions stood the regime's years of dependency on military power. In any event, Romanones's attempt at negotiation had been made from a position of weakness. While the Canadiense strike had proven the strength of syndicalism, the will of the army had ultimately proven even stronger, not least because the government lacked significant political support for its policy of pacification. The greatest cost of the failure to broaden the base of the parliamentary monarchy in 1917 was that it denied the government a national consensus that could be used to support a program of economic and social reform. Trapped by their own weakness into immobility, the dynastic parties could only persist in their fortress mentality and lend credence to those who argued that the only route to progress lay through frontal assault.
 
With the battle lines drawn, the power of the army grew correspondingly. Calls for military dictatorship to replace the weakened civil power could be heard as early as the spring of 1919. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ The most [130] spectacular appeared on May 7, when General Aguilera, the Captain General of Madrid and the leading general in the garciaprietista wing of the Liberal party, renounced his affiliation after a slight from the party leadership. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ In a public letter, Aguilera called for the reconstruction of the turno to "place a dike against the revolutionary and anarchistic wave that may otherwise crush us all. . . ." As if certain of the failure of this remedy, the general went on to predict the emergence of another "self-sacrificing and altruistic organ" that would save the Fatherland from destruction. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Yet references to military dictatorship did not all emanate from the military, but from civilians more attached to property than legality. The inevitable consequence was the further degradation of civil supremacy and the heightened improbability of a peaceful resolution of the social and political crisis.
 
Repression and Conciliation, 1919-1921
 
As he had been in 1918, Antonio Maura was again summoned to form a government prestigious enough to withstand military pressure without alienating the army. Yet Maura's government of 1919 -- essentially a party government rather than a coalition ⁽⁴⁷⁾ -- lacked the sense of mission that had characterized the National Government of the previous year. The National Government, an optimistic, if ultimately unsuccessful attempt at "renovation," closed one era; the Maura government of 1919, a cynical, uninspired attempt at preservation, opened another. For the next three years, Conservative governments would struggle vainly to restore the old turno; the Spanish electorate, frightened by the rising tide of revolution in Europe, would return comfortable Conservative majorities in the elections of 1919 and 1921. Nevertheless, the Conservative leaders were too divided among themselves to undertake constructive political reform or a consistent social policy. Alternating instead between brief experiments with conciliation and longer periods of repression, the Conservatives pursued a vacillating course that undermined the position of the moderates in the labor movement, favored the rise of terrorism, and reduced the regime to even greater dependence on the army.
 
Ever the enemy of revolution from below, Maura carne into office on April 15, 1919, prepared to adopt a hard-line policy. He had never been inclined toward participatory democracy; now he was resolved to govern alone, with the aid of the army and with minimal regard for the constitution. In Barcelona, Milans del Bosch continued to employ the draconian measures that he believed obligatory under martial law [131 ] without significantly deterring the growth of the CNT or establishing order. On the contrary, the repression only allowed extremists on both sides to emerge as the most convincing spokesmen for their causes; it was from this period that clandestine groups of Anarchist pistoleros began to prevail over the more moderate Syndicalist leaders in the CNT. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ In addition, the obvious failure of the repression threatened to discredit the use of martial law as a method of social control, an outcome that worried officers and led Milans to request the government to lift it as soon as possible. Maura, however, lacked confidence in the ability of civil authorities to keep order. ⁽⁴⁹⁾
 
For the same reason, Maura ignored the advice of the Captain General of Seville, who had been following a policy of leniency with regard to the mounting agrarian unrest in Andalusia. Maura sent the army into Cordova province to crush the general strike that broke out in late May, and on May 29 declared martial law in the region. By June 6 the War Minister, General Luis Santiago, reported with disapproval that there were fourteen Infantry and six Cavalry companies, in addition to the Civil Guard, in the area. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ While this temporarily halted the agrarian syndicalist movement, which had been gathering force since mid-1918, it did not destroy it, but only provided further proof, if any were needed, of the charge that the army was the major prop of the capitalist order.
 
The politics of repression yielded none of the anticipated results and only destroyed the mystique of moral superiority that Maura had cultivated since the beginning of his career. In the elections of June 1919, the majority of Conservative votes went to followers of his rivals for party leadership, even though Maura (aided by La Cierva) had conducted the elections without restoring constitutional guarantees. ⁽⁵¹⁾ On July 21 a cabinet of "Conservative concentration" took office under the leadership of Joaquín Sánchez de Toca. ⁽⁵²⁾

An intelligent and fiercely independent Conservative, Sánchez de Toca rejected Maura's simpleminded approach to the social question and the excessive reliance on military power that it implied; he was determined to restore stable, constitutional government with a policy of compromise in all areas of dissent. He soon discovered, however, that compromise was elusive in the Spain of 1919. Within four months, Sánchez de Toca had fallen, the victim of two of the most uncompromising groups in Spain -- the Employers' Federation and the Juntas de Defensa. Following his resignation, another cycle of violent repression followed by timid conciliation would begin.
 
The Minister of the Interior in the new cabinet was Manuel Burgos y Mazo, a Dato supporter and a man of strong Christian Democratic [132] principles. Although a firm advocate of "social discipline," Burgos y Mazo agreed with the prime minister that the road to order lay through the satisfaction of moderate labor demands. ⁽⁵³⁾ Furthermore, he considered the Catalan bourgeoisie to be largely responsible for the chaos in Barcelona, a conclusion reinforced by his centralist prejudices. To reverse the trend toward anarchy in Barcelona, he appointed Julio Amado, the editor of La Correspondencia Militar, as Civil Governor of Barcelona on August 15.
 
At first glance, this was a startling appointment. Since 1917 Amado had been intimately connected with the Juntas; his paper was a reliable barometer of opinion among middle-ranking officers, who had largely supported Milans del Bosch in his battle against syndicalism and government negotiators during 1919. As recently as early July, Amado had referred to syndicalism as "leprosy and misery" and had denied any relationship between the "conscious" syndicalism of Western Europe and syndicalism in Spain: "I cannot compare Briand with 'el Noy del Sucre' [Seguí]." ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Yet Amado suffered from the same contradictory ideas as many officers about the domestic role of the army. Like the juntero authors of the March document on the social question, he believed that using the army to break strikes jeopardized military prestige and probably national security as well. Thus, although he sympathized with the martial attitudes of Milans del Bosch, he was willing to experiment with the conciliatory alternatives proposed by Burgos y Mazo, in the hope of rescuing the army from an uncomfortable situation. From the government's point of view, of course, Amado was the ideal appointment, for his standing with the officers in Barcelona would make it difficult for them to oppose the new policy.
 
A preliminary reconnaissance in Barcelona soon after his appointment quickly persuaded Amado that the current policies of Milans del Bosch only increased social disorder. Amado found fifteen thousand workers in jail or deported, another fifty thousand locked out of work by the Employers' Federation, and a band of criminals at the service of Bravo Portillo and the employers engaged in bloody street warfare with the gunmen of the action groups. Despite the repression, syndicalism continued to flourish in Barcelona. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ General Milans del Bosch, however, rejected Amado's proposal to negotiate and charged that the new Civil Governor's frequent contacts with CNT leaders diminished his authority as Captain General of a region under martial law. The government responded by lifting martial law on September 2, a policy that suited both Amado and Milans, who was thereby relieved of [133] responsibility for implementing a conciliatory policy that he knew would be unpopular with the Employers' Federation and much of the army.
 
For observers of the military, the interesting aspect of the quarrel between Amado and Milans del Bosch was its impact on the rest of the officer corps. Significantly, the Barcelona garrison split over the issue of conciliation along lines that reflected the old intercorps rivalries as well as the conflicting military attitudes toward labor unrest: the Infantry, following its stated policy of "neutrality" in class conflicts, sided with its old ally, Amado; the other corps, instinctively concerned with law and order, unanimously aligned themselves with Milans del Bosch. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Clearly, with the officer corps divided, the most prudent policy was one that minimized the role of the army. Milans withdrew his opposition to negotiation, convinced that Amado's policy would discredit itself while his own prestige remained intact.
 
Far from discrediting itself, the government's policy of compromise initially showed promise of ending the stalemate between the employers and the CNT. By bringing moderates on both sides together to negotiate, Amado was able to achieve rapid results. On September 9 a general amnesty was issued and the lockout ended, enabling thousands of workers to return to work. On October 1 the eight-hour day decreed by Romanones on April 3 went into effect. And on October 11 another decree created the Mixed Commission, an arbitration board composed of workers, employers, and government mediators, to resolve the remaining differences between the parties.
 
But conciliation was never given a chance to prove its worth, for just as it was beginning to show results, extremists on both sides sabotaged it. In the CNT, the Anarchist purists, who argued that compromise was a betrayal of the class struggle, continued to operate clandestinely; on September 17 CNT pistoleros assassinated Bravo Portillo. At the Second Congress of the Spanish Employers' Federation held on October 20-26, the delegates voted to renew the lockout on November 3 after declaring that they found "guarantees of order and tranquility" only in the army. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Although the new arbitration board managed to negotiate the reopening of factories, ⁽⁵⁸⁾ ultras in the Employers' Federation refused to rehire Syndicalist leaders when workers reported to their jobs on November 14. This final betrayal by the employers destroyed the credibility of the moderates within the CNT. The Anarchists now successfully insisted on a break with the arbitration board, which made the workers technically responsible for ending negotiations. The [134] blame for the rupture, however, belonged entirely to the employers, who in the deepening postwar economic crisis, were determined to destroy the labor movement altogether. On November 25 a new lockout threw nearly two hundred thousand out of work until January 26, 1920.
 
Henceforth, extremists on both sides would prevail. Its confidence shaken by the failure of its social policy, the Sánchez de Toca government resigned on December 5, after the Infantry junta threatened a sit-down strike over an unrelated issue. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Amado returned, disillusioned, from Barcelona on December 10 and was replaced as Civil Governor by José Maestre Laborde, the Conde de Salvatierra, who resumed the hard-line policy temporarily abandoned the previous August. In the CNT, the new lockout discredited the moderate Syndicalists and cleared the path for the extremists, who returned with zest to their violent war with the employers' police, now led by a shady foreign adventurer named Baron de Koenig, a protege of the chief of the Barcelona General Staff, General Manuel Tourné Esbry. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ The moderate Syndicalists, while conscious of the counterproductive effects of the terror, nevertheless tolerated the action groups, whom they were in any event powerless to control. The predictable result was the decline of theCNT as a powerful bargaining agent for organized labor in Catalonia. In late 1919 a rival union, the Sindicato Libre, was organized. Initially composed of moderate workers alienated by the tactics of the CNT extremists, it rapidly became a tool of the Employers' Federation, as adept at assassination and terrorism as the underground Anarchist groups. ⁽⁶¹⁾ By the spring of 1920 gunmen from the two syndicates had converted the streets of Barcelona into a battlefield.
 
The events of 1919 had demonstrated to the government in Madrid the difficulty of pursuing a policy independently of the Employers' Federation and the army. Lacking popular support, and themselves fearful of social revolution, the dynastic politicians were unable to resist the constant pressure from Barcelona for a hard-line policy, even when such policies clearly aggravated, rather than ameliorated, the endemic violence. At the same time, they found themselves under attack in the Cortes, where both Republicans and Socialists accused them of abandoning the principle of civil supremacy. For the Liberals, the dilemma was especially acute. Their only hope of returning to office was as a truly "liberal" party committed to civil supremacy and political reform. But their own inclinations and interests, not to mention personal rivalries, were a permanent obstacle to the revitalization of the party. Under siege from both the left and the right, the dynastic [135] politicians were not able to adhere to a consistent policy; the resulting cycle of repression followed by conciliation made it even harder for moderates in the labor movement to make themselves heard. The ultimate beneficiaries were the Catalan employers and the army, who felt vindicated in insisting on even more vigorous repressive measures.
 
The government of Manuel Allendesalazar, which took office after the resignation of Sánchez de Toca on December 5, 1919, was a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals formed to assert the authority of the government over both the Juntas de Defensa and the intransigents in Barcelona. ⁽⁶²⁾ Its task was made more difficult by new outbreaks of revolutionary violence. The most shocking was a mutiny in the Carmen barracks in Saragossa, where a solitary Anarchist zealot named Angel Chueca, accompanied by several corporals, sergeants, and soldiers, killed a second lieutenant and a sergeant before being subdued. ⁽⁶³⁾ Chueca died during the revolt; in the aftermath, a court-martial sentenced two corporals and five soldiers to death. In the Cortes, Alejandro Lerroux warned that "bolshevism has knocked heavily at the doors of the barracks" and urged social reform. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ But others saw the Carmen mutiny as justification for sterner measures of social control.
 
One of those was General Milans del Bosch, who took the opportunity to reassert his autonomy from the government. After two attempts on the lives of the Syndicalist leader, Salvador Seguí, and the president of the Employers' Federation, Felix Graupera, in early January, the Captain General declared martial law and issued a threatening edict that was followed by mass arrests and the wholesale closure of unions and newspapers. This was too great a provocation for the Liberals in the cabinet, who demanded that the Captain General retract his edict. Milans, however, refused, and as telegrams of support for the Captain General poured in from the Somatenes, the Employers' Federation, and the leading military figures in Barcelona, the cabinet backed down, lacking sufficient political support to impose its will, To emphasize his disapproval of the Liberals, Milans next released his correspondence with the government during the Canadiense strike the previous year to a Conservative senator, who read it aloud in the Cortes in order to prove that the Romanonist Liberals, both in the past and at present, had favored a policy of compromise with syndicalism. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Outraged, Romanones threatened to withdraw his representative, Amalio Gimeno, from the cabinet unless Milans were removed from his post for insubordination, a challenge Milans accepted by submitting his resignation. This time, however, the cabinet refused to capitulate. Although telegrams of support once again poured in from Barcelona, [136] the government accepted the resignation in order to keep the governing coalition together.
 
Its firmness was short-lived, however. Protests were immediately heard in the Cortes, where one Catalan leader labeled Milans's dismissal an "anarchising" act. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ More ominously, the Barcelona garrison was in a mutinous mood. The new Captain General, the ancient but still loyal General Weyler, was snubbed by officers when he arrived in the Catalan capital. The same week, the chief of the Barcelona General Staff, General Tourné, and the president of the Infantry Junta, Colonel Silverio Martínez Raposo, were received by the king in Madrid, which was by now buzzing with rumors of an ultimatum from the Juntas de Defensa. To protest the ongoing military indiscipline, the Liberal Gimeno resigned from the cabinet on February 14, a resignation that was accepted by the Conservatives with little regret, since it enabled them to distance themselves from the policy of conciliation associated with the Conde de Romanones. Although General Milans del Bosch was not reinstated, he was made head of the king's Military Household in May. Once again at peace with the army, the cabinet remained in office until passage of the new budget.
 
In spite of the army's united stand behind the former Captain General, by 1920 a few officers were beginning to advocate a more subtle approach to the problem of social conflict. Literature in the military press echoed that of the 1890s, when social unrest had first begun to trouble the calm of the Restoration. Middle-class in outlook and authoritarian by training, military authors offered advice aimed not so much at comprehension as at catechization. Most advised individual officers, especially at the lower ranks, to utilize their opportunities for close contact with the troops to lead them out of error. Once an officer had communicated his concern to the common soldier, he would find him receptive to little lessons on patriotism, religion, and social discipline. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Thus, the "social mission" of the army, a national institution, was that of reconciling and harmonizing class interests. Only occasionally did an author suggest attacking the social problem by attacking the social conditions that gave rise to it. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ In general, it was assumed that to restore class harmony one had only to deny the reality of class conflict.
 
The Conservatives briefly returned to a policy of conciliation in May 1920, when Eduardo Dato replaced Allendesalazar as prime minister. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ On May 8 a royal decree creating a Ministry of Labor finally elevated the "social question" to cabinet status. In Barcelona, the intransigent Conde de Salvatierra was replaced as Civil Governor by Federico Carlos Bas, who quickly released hundreds of imprisoned [137] Syndicalists, ended prior censorship, reopened workers' centers, and turned a deaf ear to the demands of the Employers' Federation to "give battle." ⁽⁷⁰⁾ But the tactics that had worked for Amado in 1919 were slower to produce results in 1920. Worker enthusiasm for the CNT had been blunted by the long lockout the previous winter and by the still-growing influence of the .underground terrorist groups within the organization; many workers thus failed to pay dues, while others joined the rival Sindicatos Libres. During the spring and summer of 1920, street warfare between the two labor federations was added to the usual violence between bands of Anarchist and secret police gunmen. As tension mounted, the demands of the Employers' Federation and the army for a return to an energetic policy of repression appeared increasingly justified.
 
The international situation did not portend a peaceful resolution of the social crisis, either. The foundation of the Comintern, or Third International, in March 1919 had had profound repercussions for left-wing parties all over Europe, raising the enthusiasm of the masses while frequently dividing the traditional leadership. The Spanish left, too, had been divided; the issue of Comintern membership had split the National Committee of the PSOE and had separated the party from the Socialist labor federation, the UGT, while the CNT approached the Comintern with serious reservations. To the oligarchy that ruled Spain, however, these schisms and doubts were of much less significance than the provisional adhesion of the CNT (in December 1919) and of the PSOE (in June 1920) to the revolutionary Communist International and the formation of a small Communist party in Madrid in April 1920. ⁽⁷¹⁾ During the summer, three separate Spanish delegations made pilgrimages to Moscow, while the Spanish right trembled.
 
By late summer Dato was ready to abandon his pacification policy and allow the "elements of order" to regain control over Barcelona. On July 5 he had removed General Weyler from the Captaincy General, rewarding his loyalty with a new title, the Duque de Rubí. Weyler's replacement was the colorless General Carlos Palanca y Cañas, who was completely overshadowed by the Military Governor of the city, General Severiano Martínez Anido. By September, Martínez Anido and the Employers' Federation had convinced Dato to replace the liberal Minister of the Interior, Francisco Bergamin, with the more reactionary Conde de Bugallal, an ominous sign that hastened the achievement of a defensive alliance between the UGT and the CNT on September 3. Using this pact as further proof of the need for a harsh policy, on November 5 the Catalan bourgeoisie drafted a stern note to the government demanding the resignation of the moderate Civil [138] Governor, Carlos Bas. ⁽⁷²⁾ On November 8, amidst new rumors of a coup, the Dato government removed Bas and replaced him with General Martínez Anido.
 
The appointment of Martínez Anido as Civil Governor of Barcelona marked the beginning of a reign of terror in the city and the almost total disappearance of the rule of law. A thoroughgoing military martinet, Martínez Anido was the least likely officer to fill a civil post; while he served as Civil Governor, Barcelona was effectively under martial law. Like General Milans del Bosch, under whom he had served in Barcelona from February 1919 to February 1920, he was deeply committed to the preservation of military prestige and public order, but he lacked his superior's breeding and sensitivity. Brusque and stubborn, neurotically jealous of his own authority, and insensitive to both public opinion and the long-range consequences of his acts, Martínez Anido would rule Barcelona for two years, with disastrous results, but with complete self-confidence as to the effectiveness of his policies. Like Milans del Bosch, he would be the principal ally and hero of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. ⁽⁷³⁾
 
While the government in Madrid discreetly looked the other way, Martínez Anido undertook the "definitive pacification" of Barcelona through a policy of police terrorism aimed at the total eradication of the labor movement in the city. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ The new Civil Governor wasted little time in implementing his program. On November 19 he issued an edict declaring war against the "tyrannical dominion of those few who forgot they were men" and inviting moderate workers to collaborate with him, an offer accepted by the Sindicatos Libres the same day. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ On November 20 he initiated his attack against the CNT, imprisoning and later deporting sixty-four leading Syndicalists, including all the moderates. The continuing assassinations by underground CNT gunmen were answered by the Sindicato Libre, now protected and financed by the Civil Governor. Within twenty-one days, there were twenty-two political murders, including the pro-syndicalist Republican lawyer and deputy, Francisco Layret, on November 30. In January 1921 Martínez Anido revived the notorious "Ley de Fugas" that institutionalized the assassination of workers "trying to escape."
 
Despite the energy and conviction with which it was carried out, Martínez Anido's policy did not produce the anticipated results. It merely stimulated the action groups to greater extremes of murder, robbery, and terror, which were matched, crime for crime, by the Sindicatos Libres and the police, whose chief, General Miguel Arlegui, was a faithful servant of the Civil Governor. In 1921 there were 254 [139] crimes of violence committed in Barcelona. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Since most of the victims were workers, however, Martínez Anido and the Employers' Federation considered his program to be an unqualified success. By 1922 the Civil Governor could claim victory of a sort; after the imprisonment of thousands of militants, the assassination of dozens of terrorists, and the depletion of CNT rolls by workers defecting to the Sindicatos Libres or relapsing into apathy, the CNT had ceased to make its presence felt in Barcelona.
 
On February 10, 1921, the parliamentary Socialists, led by Julián Besteiro, condemned the Dato government for tolerating the counter-terrorism that Martínez Anido himself did not deny. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ The government had no intention of dismissing the general, whose relentless persecution of the labor movement coincided with the heightened reactionary mood in the country evidenced by the Conservative victory in the elections the previous December. ⁽⁷⁸⁾ On the other hand, it was not true that the government dictated policy to General Martínez Anido, who governed Barcelona on his own terms, as he freely admitted in a press interview in 1921: "The characteristic of my command ... is that I scarcely speak with the Government. All the responsibility is mine. The Government has not tried to give me instructions, as it has been doing with former Governors." ⁽⁷⁹⁾ It was ironic, then, that Eduardo Dato was assassinated on March 8, 1921, by an Anarchist who announced that he had not fired against Dato, but against the ruler who authorized the Ley de Fugas. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Still, if Dato had not directly ordered the use of political assassination, he had appointed Martínez Anido and had refrained from moderating his excesses in order to save the interests of the ruling elites. His successor, Allendesalazar, continued to allow the Civil Governor a free hand. ⁽⁸¹⁾ In a perverse way, the employers of Catalonia had won their autonomy with the aid of the army.
 

The reign of Martínez Anido in Barcelona was an extreme example of the anarchy and disregard for law that increasingly characterized the resolution of political and social problems in Spain. Martínez Anido and the Employers' Federation may have been the worst offenders, but they were tolerated by the shortsighted oligarchy that ruled in Madrid, applauded by the military, ⁽⁸²⁾ and imitated by other would-be lawbreakers. With the constitution still suspended, the press muzzled by the Law of Jurisdictions and occasionally, by prior censorship as well, the parliament an ineffective repository of fear and obstructionism, the dynastic politicians found it increasingly difficult to invoke the principle of civic obedience or to defend the regime on its own [140] terms. Inspiring no enthusiasm on the right, which found them pusillanimous, or on the left, which thought them beyond redemption, the ruling parties were left to defend their right to rule with the only force available to them -- the army. As a consequence, the "military question" became a topic of concern for all those preoccupied with the fate of the parliamentary monarchy in Spain.

1. Gerald Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923, p. 133.

2. The government included: State, Conde de Romanones; Finance, Santiago Alba; Interior, Luis Silvela; Justice, José Roig y Bergadá; Public Instruction, Julio Burell; Provisioning, Pablo Cárnica; Navy, Admiral José-María Chacón; War, General Dámaso Berenguer.

3. Jesús Pabón, Cambó, 2 (1):20.

4. See the manifesto in Fernando Díaz-Plaja, La historia de España en sus documentos (nueva serie): El siglo XX, pp. 389-404.

5. The account of Cambó's interview with Alfonso on November 14, 1918, is in Pabón, Cambó, 2 (1):15-17.

6. In Manuel de Burgos y Mazo, El verano de 1919 en Gobernación, app., pp. 16-23.

7. The campaign for autonomy is described in Pabón, Cambó 2 (l):3-95.

8. The government included: Interior, Amalio Gimeno; Justice, Alejandro Rosselló; Finance, Fermín Calbetón; Development, Marqués de Cortina; Public Instruction, Joaquín Salvatella; Provisioning, Baldemero Argente; Navy, Admiral Chacón; and War, General Berenguer. Romanones continued in State in addition to presiding over the government. Berenguer was appointed High Commissioner in Morocco in December and was replaced by General Diego Muñoz Cobo.

9. See the telegram of the Captain General of Barcelona, General Milans del Bosch, to the War Minister, General Muñoz Cobo, on Dec. 13, 1918. RA, leg. 20, no. 5.

10. Benito Márquez-Martínez and José-María Capo, Las juntas militares de defensa, pp. I51-52.

11. The transcripts of their telephone conversations, which were apparently monitored by the government, are in RA, leg. 20, nos. 5 and 18.

12. El Liberal, Jan. 17, 1919, p. 1.

13. CM, Jan. 18, 1919, p. 1.

14. Espino to Amado, Jan. 27, 1919, RA, leg. 20, no. 18.

15. Espino to Amado, Jan. 28, 1919, ibid.

16. Pabón, Cambó, 2(1):95.

17. On the labor movement, 1918-21, see Meaker, Revolutionary Left; Manuel Tuñón de Lara, El movimiento obrero en la historia de España; Alberto Balcells, El sindicalismo en Barcelona, 1916-1923; Maximiano García Venero,Historia de las Internacionales en España, 2:233-411; Manuel Buenacasa, El movimiento obrero español, 1886-1926, pp. 64-115; F. Baratech Alfaro, Las Sindicatos Libres de España; Francisco Madrid, Ocho meses y un día en el gobierno civil de Barcelona; Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, Las clases trabajadores en España (1898-1930), pp. 143-65; Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 66-74. On agrarian unrest in Andalusia, see Juan Díaz del Moral, Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas-Córdoba, pp. 265-376.

18. Anuario estadístico (1919), pp. 358-59.

19. Between January and August 1919, 427.6 million tons of foodstuffs were exported. Fernando Soldevilla, ed.,El año politico (1920), p. 30.

20. Balcells, Sindicalismo en Barcelona, p. 65.

21. Díaz del Moral, Agitaciones campesinas, p. 309.

22. Meaker, Revolutionary Left, p. 139.

23. See Balcells, Sindicalismo en Barcelona, pp. 51-64.

24. According to Jorge Nadal, quoted in Pabón, Cambó, 2 (1):138.

25. Solidaridad Obrera, June 9, 1918, p. 1.

26. Buenacasa, Movimiento obrero español, p. 67.

27. Pabón, Cambó, 2 (l):94-95.

28. Conversation between Milans del Bosch and Muñoz Cobo, Feb. 17, 1919, RA, leg. 98, no. 131.

29. Milans del Bosch to Muñoz Cobo, Mar. 19, 1919, in ibid.

30. See the strike committee's instructions for mobilized workers in Baratech Alfaro, Sindicatos Libres, p. 54.

31. Telegraphic correspondence with General Milans del Bosch, Mar. 12, 13, and 15, 1919. RA, leg. 20, no. 5, and leg. 98, no. 131.

32. Meaker, Revolutionary Left, p. 160.

33. The proposals of the CNT and the counterproposals of the company are in Conde de Romanones, Obras completas, 3:397-98.

34. Fernando Primo de Rivera y Sobremonte, marqués de Estella, Opiniones emitidas ante un redactor del periódico "El Ejército Español" con motivo del problema de orden público en los actuales momentos, p. 30.

35. Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz, "Breves notas para la historia de las juntas de defensa y de la dictadura," p. 27.

36. RA, leg. 98, no. 131.

37. In El Liberal, Dec. 2, 1919, pp. 1-2. See app. E for the complete text.

38. See the article in CM, Mar. 18, 1919, p. 1; the speech in the military casino by General Federico Ochando (the Captain General of Madrid), reported in El Sol, Apr. 6, 1919, p. 2; and General José Marvá y Mayer, El ejército y la armada y la cultura nacional.

39. In agreeing to address the document to the king alone, the Assembly of Presidents reaffirmed "the inviolability of the principles maintained in the document, . . . which does not allow variation in either substance or form. . . " (Vigón, "Breves notas," pp. 26-27).

40. Papers were prohibited from discussing attacks on institutions, military discipline, troop movements, or strikes. EE, Mar. 29, 1919, p. 1.

41. Pabón, Cambó, 2(1): 114-15.

42. The decree is in Díaz-Plaja, Siglo XX, pp. 443-45.

43. For the Montañés and Doval affair, see principally, Romanones, Obras, 3:389-98, and the letter from Milans del Bosch in MA, leg. 263.

44. See La Tribuna, Feb. 18, 1919; El Debate, Mar. 8, 1919; and CM, Mar. 11, 1919.

45. See Thomas Granville Trice, "Spanish Liberalism in Crisis," p. 169.

46. The letter is in both CM and EE, May 12, 1919, p. 1.

47. The cabinet included one Romanonist, the Minister of State, Manuel González Hontoria. The rest were all Maurists: Interior, Antonio Goicoechea; Finance, Juan de la Cierva; Development, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo; Justice, Vizconde de Matamala; Provisioning, Tomás Maestre; Public Instruction, César Silió; Navy, Vice-Admiral Miranda; and War, General Luis Santiago Aguirrevengoa.

48. Meaker, Revolutionary Left, pp. 168-78.

49. See the correspondence between Maura and Milans del Bosch in MA, leg. 263.

50. Díaz del Moral, Agitaciones campesinas, pp. 325-27; MA, leg. 229.

51. The election is analyzed in Miguel Martínez Cuadrado, Elecciones y partidos políticos de España (1868-1931), 2:820-28. Overall, the Liberals won 32.5 percent of the vote, the Conservatives, 49.3 percent, and the left, 7.3 percent. See also the analysis of Maura's 1919 government by his own son in Gabriel Maura Gamazo and Melchor Fernández Almagro, Por qué cayó Alfonso XIII, pp. 330-32.

52. The cabinet included: State, Marqués de Lema; Interior, Manuel Burgos y Mazo; Justice, Pascual Amat; Finance, Gabino Bugallal; Development, Abilio Calderón; Public Instruction, José Prado Palacios; Provisioning, Marqués de Mochales; Navy, Admiral Manuel Flórez; and War, General Antonio Tovar Marcoleta.

53. Burgos y Mazo wrote an account of his months in the Ministry of the Interior: Verano de 1919.

54. Interview with La Veu de Catalunya, quoted in CM, July 3, 1919, p. 1.

55. Burgos y Mazo, Verano de 1919, p. 461; García Venero, Internacionales, 2:284.

56. Interview with General Milans del Bosch in CM, Sept. 4, 1919, p. 1.

57. See Gonzalo Redondo, Las empresas políticas de José Ortega y Gasset, 1:422.

58. The agreement is in Burgos y Mazo, Verano de 1919, pp. 518-20.

59. See chap. 7.

60. Burgos y Mazo, Verano de 1919, p. 597. General Tourné is identified as General Turner.

61. See Barateen Alfaro, Sindicatos Libres.

62. The Allendesalazar coalition government of December 12, 1919, included: State, Marques de Lema; Interior, Joaquín Fernández Prida; Justice, Pablo Cárnica; Finance, Gabino Bugallal; Development, Amalio Gimeno; Public Instruction, Natalio Rivas; Provisioning, Francisco Terán; Navy, Admiral Flórez; and War, General José Villalba y Riquelme.

63. See Mariano Sánchez Roca, La sublevación del cuartel del Carmen.

64. DSC (Jan. 12, 1920), 6:1715.

65. Conde de Limpias in DSS (Feb. 5, 1920), 4:1358.

66. Bertrán y Musitú in DSC (Feb. 11, 1920), 7:2404.

67. See, for example, Antonio Fernández de Rota y Tournán, ¡Salvemos a España!, and Ramón Donoso-Cortés Navarro, "El ejército y la cuestión social," Memorial de Infantería 19 (1921): 26-32.

68. For example, Rogelio Gorgojo, "Cuestiones que debe tratar el oficial en sus conversaciones con la tropa,"Memorial de Infantería 17 (1920): 290-302.

69. The government included: State, Marqués de Lema; Interior, Francisco Bergantín; Justice, Gabino Bugallal; Finance, Lorenzo Domínguez Pascual; Development, Emilio Ortuño; Public Instruction, Luis Espada; and War, Vizconde de Eza.

70. See the statement of Carlos Bas in Madrid, Ocho meses, pp. 79-93.

71. Meaker, Revolutionary Left, pp. 225-313.

72. Balcells, Sindicalismo en Barcelona, pp. 152-53.

73. For a sympathetic biography by his aide-de-camp, see Juan Oiler Pinol, Martínez Anido, su vida y su obra.

74. See Meaker, Revolutionary Left, pp. 338-45, for a relatively sympathetic appraisal of Martínez Anido's policies.

75. Baratech Alfaro, Sindicatos Libres, pp. 86-91.

76. For statistics on strikes and labor violence in this period, see Jose-Maria Farré Morego, Los atentados sociales en España.

77. DSC (1921), 2:354-415.

78. The Conservative victory was aided by caciquismo and by a 40 percent abstention rate. The Conservatives won 232 seats; the Liberals, 103; and the left, 29. Martínez Cuadrado, Elecciones, 2:829-33.

79. Soldevilla, Año politico (1921), p. 105.

80. Quoted in Pabón, Cambó, 2 (1):212.

81. The Allendesalazar government of 1921 included: State, Marqués de Lema; Interior, Gabino Bugallal; Justice, Pío Vicente de Piniés; Finance, José Agustín Arguelles; Development, Juan de la Cierva; Public Instruction, Francisco Aparicio; Labor, Eduardo Sanz Escartín; Navy, Joaquín Fernández Prida; and War, Vizconde de Eza

82. CM, Jan. 24, 1921, p. 1.