The question of military power in Spain, introduced by the constitutional crisis of 1917 and prolonged by the passage of the army reform law in 1918, was debated with even greater intensity between 1919 and 1921 because of the intensification of two conflicts in which the army was intimately involved: the postwar struggle with the revolutionary left and the colonial war in Morocco. Because both conflicts exposed the function of the Spanish army as the major guarantor of the political and social status quo, the "military question" led logically into a debate on the future of the regime. For the left, imperialism, capitalism, and monarchism endured only because of their alliance with militarism; for the right, the army was the last defense against bolshevism at home and barbarism in Africa. The undeniable influence of the Spanish army, then, owed as much to the obsessive preoccupation of civilians at both ends of the political spectrum with military affairs as to the aggression of a united and belligerent officer corps.
By 1921 the immobility of the dynastic parties suggested that the resolution of the national crisis would depend in some way on the army. Yet a consensus within the army did not exist; like the rest of the nation, the Spanish officer corps was badly divided by the conflicts that attacked the parliamentary monarchy from 1917 on. The superficial unity achieved in June 1917 had quickly dissipated, eroded by the usual intercorps rivalries, the absence of widely acknowledged leadership in the senior hierarchy, the controversial provisions of the 1918 reform law, and the understanding by officers themselves of the army's crucial role. In the absence of strong civilian government this disarray acquired a new resonance that contributed further to political instability. Military disunity invited exploitation by both the left and the right, which politicized the officer corps by drawing the various factions [142] closer to the center of the national crisis. By 1921 military reform and political vitality -- however defined -- were so intimately interconnected that no one could think of one without considering the other. The debate on the army had become a debate on the future of Spain itself.
The ESG Affair
The incident involving the Infantry junta de Defensa and twenty-five students from the Superior War College (the ESG) in December 1919 brought home to the country the centrality of the army in Spanish political life: a petty squabble between military bureaucrats became a major political incident because the Sánchez de Toca government dared not risk a confrontation with the army at a moment of extreme tension in Barcelona. The ESG affair dramatized the significance of military professionalization for the neutralization of the officer corps; more important, it clarified the connection between military reform and political modernization. Critics of the regime used the ESG affair to illustrate their contention that the government had abandoned control over military policy to the Juntas, to the detriment of both popular sovereignty and stable government. Because it crystallized many of the issues surrounding civil-military relations in postwar Spain, the ESG affair is worth examining in some detail.
As we have seen, one of the principal animosities that moved the clientele of the Infantry Junta was directed against the Staff Corps. This resentment, which dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, was not wholly unjustified. Staff officers had traditionally been favored for promotion by the dynastic parties; like the other technical corps, they presumed to great professional superiority over the Infantry and Cavalry. In practice, they had neglected both regimental service and strategic planning for more arcane pursuits -- chiefly mapmaking. After the French abolished their Staff Corps in 1886, Spanish military reformers had aspired to do the same thing. Ever since the creation of the "diplomados" by General López Domínguez in 1893, Staff officers had lived in fear of seeing their beloved Corps -- and its privileges -- replaced by a "service" open to certified individuals from all corps. When the Infantry Junta began to organize in the winter of 1916-17, Staff officers had organized their own Junta in self-defense.
On the other hand, juntero criticism of the Staff Corps was not based on purely professional grounds; it grew largely out of their general resentment of selective promotions of any kind. In their haste to [143] equate all nonseniority promotions with favoritism, junteros lost sight of the institutional need to reward competence and develop effective leadership, favoring instead a leveling process that would have represented no improvement over the existing system. It was this bureaucratic outlook -- not a disinterested desire for military reform -- that animated the Infantry junta's attack on the Staff Corps in 1917. Delegates to the Assembly of Regional Juntas in September 1917 had voted to require War College candidates to declare, prior to acceptance, whether they would ultimately become Staff officers or remain in the Infantry as diplomados. (1) Those choosing the former but subsequently failing the entrance examinations were to pledge to resign immediately from the Infantry. (2) The incentive was thus strong for officers to reject the Staff Corps option from the outset. In time, the Corps might be expected to wither away from lack of new personnel.
The first test of this strategy in May 1918 indicated that aspiring Staff officers would not be easily intimidated. Several Infantry lieutenants refused to sign the pledge before obtaining the examination results; moreover, local Juntas proved reluctant to prosecute these recalcitrants. (3) Despite exhortations from the Superior Junta, no action was taken anywhere except in Burgos, where the local Junta ordered garrison lieutenants to form an honor court against Lieutenant Ramón Martínez de Aragón, who was acquitted of dishonorable conduct by his peers and entered the ESG in the fall of 1918. Undaunted by this verdict of innocence, the Burgos Infantry Junta, with the cooperation of the Superior Junta in Madrid, utilized the "democratic" provisions of the original Junta statutes to solicit the nationwide "opinion of the Corps" on the question of the lieutenant's "honor." Shielded by the anonymity of the ballot, juntero officers approved a vindictive policy that they were unwilling to implement at a personal level. The Superior Junta then ordered the first-year Infantry lieutenants in the ESG to form a new honor court against their colleague, Martínez de Aragón. (4) An impasse was reached, however, when the thirty-five Infantry lieutenants in the War College refused to form the honor court, even when threatened with expulsion from the army by the Superior Junta.
The Junta's vendetta against the Staff Corps was frustrated again in July 1919, when a diplomado Cavalry captain, Arsenio Martínez Campos (the grandson of the Restoration general), introduced a proposal in the Cortes to replace the Corps with a General Staff composed of diplomados "on service" from the various corps. In the words of its sponsors, who included Reformists, Radical Republicans, and the Romanonist Liberals, the bill was to rid the General Staff of "bureaucratism and irresponsibility" and to reorganize it along the lines [144] established in other nations. (5) While this was a legitimate, and indeed, overdue reform, the sponsors were motivated largely by a desire to embarrass the new Conservative government of Sánchez de Toca. By bringing the proposal before the Cortes, they hoped to assert the constitutional prerogatives of the parliament as well as to construct a "liberal" voting block in the Cortes on the issue of military reform.
Although the proposal coincided with its own goals, the Infantry Junta was understandably wary of legislative debate that might easily be diverted to a discussion of the Juntas. Within a few days, it opened a two-front campaign against the Staff Corps and the government to achieve the dissolution of the Corps by decree before the opening of the autumn sessions of the Cortes. The first step was to intimidate the Staff Corps. In early August the Assembly of Junta Presidents in Madrid expressed support for the principle behind the legislative proposal (with the dissenting vote of the Staff Corps president, of course); on August 21 they demanded that the Staff Corps Junta present a reorganization plan by September 1, or face an Assembly vote on the dissolution of the Corps. Hoping to save some of its prerogatives, the Staff Junta submitted a plan for "limited service" that would have transferred part of the privileges and responsibilities of the Corps to the other branches. The Assembly did not want compliance, however, but the destruction of its enemy. On September 11 it issued a pamphlet stating the reasons why the Staff Corps should be abolished. (6)
At this point, the Corps recognized it must fight for its life. First it circulated a pamphlet among the officer corps justifying its existence and accusing the Assembly of Junta Presidents of betraying the principle of mutual protection that had characterized its past deliberations. (7) Then on October 17, 1919, twenty-five of the thirty-five lieutenants in the ESG resigned from their Junta, explaining their actions to the officer corps in another pamphlet that described the pressures put on them by the Superior Junta in connection with the case of Martínez de Aragón. (8)
But the Infantry Junta was just as quick to retaliate. On October 21 this pamphlet was leaked to the press, quite probably, as the students suspected, by the Superior Junta, which took advantage of the publicity given the resignations by El Sol and other papers to order the formation of an honor court against the students on the grounds that they had violated the Junta code of secrecy. At the same time, the president of the Superior Junta stepped up the campaign to secure the dissolution of the Corps by decree, contacting the king, the War Minister, and an old ally, Juan de la Cierva, whose animosity toward the prime minister, Sánchez de Toca, dated back to 1918. On October 27 an honor court composed of the remaining ten Infantry lieutenants [145] in the ESG found sixteen of the twenty-five guilty of dishonorable conduct and recommended their expulsion from the army. The validity of the sentence was doubtful, however, because the Code of Military Justice stipulated that a minimum of four-fifths of the officers at a given rank was necessary to form an honor court against a colleague. In the present case, ten lieutenants had tried twenty-five of their peers.
The dubious legality of the sentence allowed the government and the senior hierarchy to move against the Junta. Presented with an order separating the sixteen lieutenants from the Infantry, the War Minister, General Antonio Tovar, refused to sign it and instead referred the verdict of the honor court to the Supreme Military Council. On November 28 the senior generals on the Council ruled fourteen to two that the verdict was invalid. In the meantime, Sánchez de Toca had appointed an ad hoc committee of generals to study the reorganization of the Staff Corps; its chairman was the reliable General Weyler, himself a Staff officer and currently chief of the General Staff. (9)
By early November the conflict in the officer corps had been brought to the attention of the nation by the opponents of the government. Both the Liberals and the left exploited the scandal created by the Juntas to comment unfavorably on the government's tolerance for military insubordination. (10) But Sánchez de Toca, a longtime enemy of the Juntas, was not to be robbed so easily of the issue of military reform: on November 18 he borrowed the Liberals' old stratagem of introducing a bill abrogating the Law of Jurisdictions while incorporating its main provisions into the civil and military codes. (11) Rightly viewing this as a red herring, Republicans and Socialists responded on November 26 with a proposal declaring the illegality of the Juntas, whose statutes had never received the official approval required by the Law of 1918. (12)
The debates illustrated the extent to which Spaniards now associated the power of the military with the weakness of the regime. But they also demonstrated that the will to proceed beyond verbal attacks on the Juntas was lacking among all groups except the far left. Crucial to the outcome of the debates was the rising tide of revolution in the peninsula. During the last week of November 1919, the Employers' Federation declared a lockout in Barcelona, and food riots erupted in Malaga, Valencia, and Saragossa, where martial law was briefly declared. For most deputies, the distinction between "the army" and "the Juntas" was not clear enough to risk alienating the military at a moment of extreme tension. Even Santiago Alba, who prided himself on his openness to the left, felt compelled to refer to the threat of "bolshevism and dissolution" while cautioning against a rash assault [146] on the Juntas. (13) When the final vote was taken on November 28, the proposition outlawing the Juntas was defeated seventy-two to twelve.
Astutely exploiting the fear of revolution, the Infantry Superior Junta next announced that "the army" would begin a sit-down strike unless a new honor court were formed to expel the twenty-five ESG students from the army. This was a hollow threat. The officer corps was, as usual, divided over the ESG affair: the War Minister and the Supreme Military Council were resolutely antijuntero, and the technical corps were less willing than the Infantry to provoke a confrontation with the government during the social crisis. (14) Two of the younger Infantry generals -- the Captain General of Madrid, Aguilera, and General Primo de Rivera, of the First Division -- were sympathetic to the Infantry Junta and had represented their cause to the government and the king. They had also made clear their refusal, however, to lead a coup with the officer corps badly divided. (15)
Yet, faced with the collapse of its policy in Barcelona, the government lacked the self-confidence to act decisively. On December 1 General Tovar resigned, fearful of a showdown, and the government, worn out by its four turbulent months in office, agreed after some debate to follow suit. (16) With the officers' strike scheduled to begin the following day, however, Alfonso was unwilling to allow them this avenue of escape. Forced, at the king's insistence, to remain in office, the government devised an ingenious plan to allow the Infantry Junta the appearance but not the substance of victory. On December 3 General Tovar signed an order establishing special conditions for honor courts composed of fewer than four-fifths of the officers' peers, which enabled a new honor court to find twenty-three of the twenty-five ESG students guilty the same day. According to the government's strategy, Tovar was then supposed to defer the verdict to the Supreme Military Council, which was expected to rule once again in the students' favor. Instead, the War Minister, without consulting his colleagues, signed the separation order and resigned on December 5. The cabinet, too weary to insist on judicial review, yet unwilling to accept the capitulation to the Junta, resigned with him. (17) For the fourth time in thirty months, the Juntas de Defensa had brought down a government.
The significance of the ESG affair was that it clarified civilian responsibility for military power -- power conferred by a combination of political weakness, fear of revolution, and military aggressiveness. The incident also exposed the consequences of earlier failures to eliminate the structural defects in the officer corps. By avoiding military reform for forty years, governments had nurtured professional rivalries and [147] incompetence; by 1920 military affairs had acquired such political significance that these internal quarrels transcended the petty world of the War Ministry and destroyed a government supposedly committed to the principle of civil supremacy.
The Advisory Commissions
The ESC affair represented the high point of juntero power, or to put it another way, civilian government was at its weakest in December 1919. The government formed by Manuel Allendesalazar on December 12, 1919, basically a Conservative coalition fortified by the Romanonist Liberals, was not prepossessing, but it would surprisingly survive its internal upheavals and achieve its basic mission -- the approval of a new budget in May 1920. In addition, it would tentatively assert its authority by replacing the Juntas de Defensa with the "Advisory Commissions," a symbolic gesture whose chief significance lay in the inability of the Juntas to resist it. From 1920 on, weakened governments and the chastened Advisory Commissions struck an uneasy balance, while real military power took shape in Barcelona and across the Straits in Morocco.
The decree creating the Advisory Commissions was signed on December 30, 1919, after the government had been in office less than three weeks, because the military question for the moment eclipsed all others. Opinion against the Juntas was at an all-time high; somewhat histrionically, the Ateneo de Madrid had voted honorary membership for all twenty-three of the lieutenants expelled from the army. (18) The government did not wish to expose the Juntas to its enemies in the Cortes, however, because of the precarious situation in Barcelona. Bypassing the parliament, the government chose the more expedient method of royal decree. (19) On the surface, the decree appeared to abolish the old, extralegal Juntas, which were to be replaced by new commissions installed in the War Ministry under the direct supervision of the Undersecretary and the section heads. In fact, the government lacked the power to enforce its decree, which in the end changed nothing except the name of the Central Junta of each corps, which now became known officially as the "Advisory Commission," or, in the case of the Infantry, as the "Directory." Not even the personnel changed; the same officers remained in Madrid, collected dues (although at a lower rate of one peseta a month), (20) and generally ignored the nominal authority of the War Minister. Furthermore, the Infantry Junta retained [148] its organization at the regional and local levels, in violation both of the new decree and of La Cierva's decree of March 18, 1918. As it was obvious to everyone that there had been no real change in the structure or autonomy of the Juntas, only official government spokesmen -- and the junteros themselves -- took the trouble to refer to them by their new name.
All the same, the Juntas did not possess the power or the self-confidence to protest the decree as they might have done a few months earlier. They too had been damaged by the controversy over the ESG, students. The affair had exposed the pettiness of the Infantry Junta and dramatized the extent to which political stability depended upon military tranquility. Furthermore, the incident had revealed a disturbing lack of solidarity within the officer corps, not only between the senior hierarchy and the lower echelons, but among the corps. Forced to acknowledge a real erosion of support, the Superior Junta was reluctant to protest the decree creating the Advisory Commissions, particularly since it figured to lose none of its real power. The Anarchist uprising in the Carmen barracks in Saragossa on January 9, 1920, further convinced them that their power to protest was limited.
During early 1920, then, as tension continued to mount in Barcelona, both the government and the Juntas followed a policy of exquisite discretion. Further discussion of the ESG incident in the Cortes was quashed by the government, while for its part, the Infantry temporarily dropped its campaign against the Staff Corps, which had ironically benefitted from the well-publicized attack against it. During January the generals appointed to study the reorganization of the Corps recommended that it be retained unaltered, and the War Minister, General José Villalba, privately informed the Staff Corps's Central Junta that the bill introduced by Captain Martínez Campos the previous July would be allowed "to sleep the sleep of the just." (21) Thus a needed reform was once again postponed, the victim of intercorps rivalries and political expediency. A month later the Infantry Junta was still maintaining a low profile when the resignation of General Milans del Bosch as Captain General of Barcelona provoked a storm of protest in the garrisons there. Although rumors of a coup circulated, in fact the Juntas did not act. For the next year and a half, the "Advisory Commissions" would tend to internal matters, unmolested by Conservative governments, each of them unwilling to revive the "military question" for fear of provoking further attacks from the left.
[149] The 1920 Budget
Although the Juntas and the Conservatives did their best to discourage debate, national concern over the army remained high. By 1920 social revolution and colonial warfare had demonstrated the importance of military efficiency as well as military loyalty. With the future of the regime clearly in the balance, the specific character of Spain's military organization, as well as its pervasive political influence, attracted serious attention for the first time since the outbreak of the world war in 1914. In particular, the passage of the government's budget -- the first since 1914 -- which allocated one-third of total state expenditures to the army, stimulated considerable discussion before the government ended debate with the cloture rule five days later. (22)
The staggering size of the War Ministry budget, which was 150 percent higher than that of 1917, was due to two recent developments -- the reform law of 1918 and the renewal of the Moroccan war -- whose costs had been obscured by previous failures to pass a budget. The new budget made it clear that these costs would well exceed available revenues, draining resources from other vital areas. Repeated challenges from the left also made it clear that in determining the military and foreign policy reflected by the budget, the government preferred to recognize the will of the army rather than the will of the parliament.
The War Ministry budget was tailored primarily to the needs of the peninsular military bureaucracy, somewhat less to the necessities of the African army. It was immediately apparent that the reform law of 1918 had not repaired the imbalances within the budget; on the contrary, it had exacerbated the financial burden imposed by the excess of officers. Personnel expenditures comprised 50 percent of the total permanent budget of 426.5 million pesetas, nearly double the absolute amount spent for this purpose in 1917, before salaries had been raised by 20 to 25 percent. Moreover, because prices had risen by at least 40 percent since passage of the law, the new budget contained recommended increases of another 20 to 33 percent for all ranks, raising the prospect of an even larger budget in years to come. (23) Little headway had been made since 1918 in reducing the number of officers. Only a few generals had retired to the second reserve, and the amortization rate for all vacancies had been lowered to 25 percent in August 1919. Although General Villalba promised that the money for the new raises would be derived from further amortizations, he refused to agree to more drastic and rapid reductions. (24)
The other side of the personnel problem was the increase in troop strength, which was set at 216,000 men, an increase of nearly 88,000 [150] from 1917. Since higher call-up levels implied national priorities that properly fell within the jurisdiction of the parliament, the subcommittee reported in a lower figure in protest. But the government ignored the report. The larger standing army reflected the demands imposed by the creation of two new divisions in the Law of 1918 and by the escalating conflict in Morocco. Rather than arouse either the junteros or the africanistas by agreeing to a reduction in troops, the government withdrew this portion of the budget and called up the 216,000 conscripts by decree the following fall. In both the peninsular and the Moroccan budgets, large increases over the minimal sums spent in 1917 for housing, provisioning, and hospital care reflected the inflation and the growing class consciousness of conscript troops that were part of the new social and economic reality of postwar Spain.
A major item in the 1920 army budget was the provision for "temporary" or once-only expenditures totaling 80 million pesetas, another legacy of the Law of 1918. Like the law itself, this section provided only for the peninsular army; the Moroccan budget included separate, although much smaller, line items for new equipment and materiel. Significantly, however, the principal objection to these expenditures came not from the left but from a right-wing military deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Joaquín Fanjul, who complained that the new equipment would undoubtedly be transferred to Africa, leaving the peninsula defenseless. (25) As peninsular officers like Fanjul were aware, the African army was beginning to overshadow its peninsular counterpart, its success providing a welcome contrast to the bumptious trouble making of the peninsular bureaucrats. While the War Ministry budget drew attacks from across the political spectrum, the Moroccan budget of 154 million pesetas was approved after little debate.
In spite of the unusual amount of discussion -- and the enormous sums involved -- the entire budget was approved by both houses of the Cortes by April 21. Only the left had tried to raise philosophical questions about the kind of army Spain wanted or could afford. (26) The government had refused to recognize the legitimacy of their concern for parliamentary discussion of policy alternatives. Nevertheless, the dynastic parties were also acutely aware of the economic and political burden posed by the unreformed army. When Allendesalazar resigned on May 5, his successor, Eduardo Dato, appointed a civilian, the Vizconde de Eza, as Minister of War. Unlike Juan de la Cierva in 1917, Eza did not enter the War Ministry to placate the army but to put its house in order.
[151] The Juntas in Disarray
The appointment of the Vizconde de Eza was a continuation of the antijuntero policy inaugurated by the Allendesalazar government the previous December. A technician who had performed competently in the Development Ministry under Dato in 1917, Eza had no contacts or clientele within the officer corps and thus seemed a suitable choice for a government aiming to maintain its independence from military pressure. While the attention of the government was primarily focused on Barcelona, where a new attempt at conciliation was inaugurated, it was hoped that Eza could redress some of the imbalances perpetuated by the Law of 1918 without unduly alienating any faction in the army.
The moment seemed ripe for a beginning. Public opinion, alerted to the expense of the military bureaucracy by the budget discussions and captivated by the heroic advance of the army in Morocco, was unanimously against the Juntas, which had not recovered from the ESG affair of six months earlier. Furthermore, within the officer corps, support for the Advisory Commissions continued to erode. In June colonels in the Fourth Military Region, under the leadership of the Commander General of the Artillery, formed a Regional Catalan Delegation to petition for the disappearance of the Advisory Commissions. (27) There were also signs of alienation in the Staff Corps, which still carried the scars from its struggle against the other Juntas the previous winter. (28) Even within the Infantry Junta, the self-aggrandizing policies of the Directory had created dissension; especially provoking were the attempts by the Junta leadership to acquire special privileges at the expense of the bureaucratic norms they had been elected to defend. (29) Membership in the Infantry Junta had fallen from a high of nine thousand in October 1917 to five thousand in late 1919. It seemed at least possible that the Juntas might disintegrate of their own accord because of the apathy or disillusionment of the rank and file.
Yet the Juntas would not disappear while the juntero mentality prevailed in the officer corps. As long as the technical corps had privileges to protect, they would not deprive themselves of their means of self-defense; as long as Infantry officers imagined themselves abused, they would continue to support the Directory. The Juntas were the symptom, not the cause, of the malaise affecting the Spanish army. The only way to eliminate the army's praetorian tendencies was to professionalize it, eliminating both the structural defects that robbed it of efficiency and the political interference that deprived it of institutional autonomy. By mid-1920 the regime was too precarious to undertake a vigorous military reform policy. But the Dato government did [152] instruct the new War Minister to initiate an indirect and piecemeal approach to the army's problems.
The top priority seemed to be the reinstatement of merit promotions for combat officers in Morocco, a justifiable measure on which there was no consensus within the Infantry Corps. Initially, the juntero aversion to battlefield merit promotions was rooted in the obvious favoritism shown the military elites and in the conviction that most promotions awarded during the halt in operations were unearned. With the renewal of operations in early 1919, however, these abuses had become less significant, while the need to reward the hardship and risk of a difficult campaign had increased. Commanding officers in Africa found morale low and urged repeal of the 1918 ban on all merit promotions. But successive governments had turned a deaf ear, fearing to alienate the Juntas, who had not relaxed their opposition to merit promotions in any form. On the contrary, as the Moroccan campaign began to attract national attention to the Africa army, their intransigence hardened. In early 1920 junteros in the Wad-Ras regiment in Madrid suggested eliminating the exception clauses in the Law of 1918 on the grounds that they damaged "personal and collective decorum." (30)
In July 1920 the new War Minister made his obligatory inspection tour of Morocco, where a protest demonstration by officers impressed him even further with the need "to open the hand in the concession of rewards and favors to those fighting in Africa," a decision he announced to the press after his return on July 22. The reaction of the Juntas was immediate. The same day, La Correspondencia Militar warned against favoritism and prodigality and ominously closed with an exhortation to "Remember June 1, 1917!" (31) Even the threat of military rebellion was enough to frighten the Dato government in the summer of 1920. Eza was forced to back away from his proposal at once. In his official report to the cabinet, he opposed the reinstatement of wartime merit promotions, suggesting instead a triple salary increase for those stationed in hardship posts in the interior of the Protectorate. (32) Henceforth, he would not take the initiative in formulating military policy either in the peninsula or in Africa, preferring to avoid controversy by deferring to the pressure group nearest at hand.
The opportunity to enact a needed reform at the expense of the disunited Juntas was thus lost. As usual, the government believed itself even weaker than its adversaries. Appointment of a civilian War Minister was not enough to assert the authority of civilian government; it required popular support and a sense of purpose. By August 1920 both were evaporating for the Dato government, particularly in [153] Barcelona. With the specter of communism threatening Europe, Dato abandoned his policy of conciliation, while Eza in the War Ministry, fearful of alienating the peninsular army at a moment of crisis, had little choice but to let events drift. The result during the next year was continued military squabbling in the peninsula and, in Africa, the disaster at Anual.
While Eza deferred to the Directory in Madrid, in Africa the Infantry Junta became increasingly unpopular. In late 1920 officers in the elite Regular units in Larache resigned from the Junta to protest the prohibition on merit promotions, and the Directory was unable to cajole the rebels back into the fold or to coerce the rest of the Larache garrison to form an honor court against them. (33) Discontent spread to the rest of the Protectorate in 1921, particularly in the shock units, whose young officers chafed under the bureaucratic rule of the Juntas in the major garrisons. The tension finally erupted when the membership of the Infantry Junta as a whole voted on April 30, 1921, to require all officers to renounce any merit promotions voted by the parliament under the exception clauses in the Law of 1918. (34) In protest, officers from the African shock units deluged the War Ministry with transfer petitions, (35) a gesture with serious implications for the outcome of the African campaign. But the Allendesalazar government, caught between two military factions and preoccupied with the leadership crisis posed by the assassination of Eduardo Dato two months before, could offer no redress. It would take the military debacle of July 1921 to dramatize the deleterious effect of juntero dominance on africanista morale.
The Debate on the Army
Perhaps the most significant result of the noticeably declining power and prestige of the Juntas was that it clarified for some observers the distinction between the Juntas and the army. This enabled critics to discuss the army as a problem in itself, complicated by, but not limited to the problem of the Juntas, which, it was increasingly clear, had not seized their power, but had received it from civilians in 1917. For thoughtful observers interested in political change, the Juntas were only symptomatic of two larger ailments -- the failure of military reform and the instability of the parliamentary regime. The most serious writing on civil-military relations in Spain, which appeared between 1918 and 1921, focused on one or both of these problems.
The best known of the new critics was the Conde de Romanones, [154] an archetypical dynastic politician who had atypically shown signs of flexibility since the beginning of the national crisis in 1917. Perhaps for this reason, by the spring of 1920 Romanones was at the periphery of Spanish political life, isolated from the mainstream of the Liberal party by the combined efforts of his rivals, García Prieto and Alba, and also estranged from a large part of the army because of his interest in military reform, his opposition to the Juntas, and his efforts to reach an accommodation with organized labor in 1919. Since his last ministry, which had been destroyed by the Juntas de Defensa and General Milans del Bosch in April 1919, Romanones had sought to build a new "liberal" coalition on an issue with wide appeal: civil supremacy. Presenting himself as the victim of "militarism," Romanones had urged the necessity of military reform, which he correctly linked to the future of the parliamentary monarchy. On the other hand, Romanones knew that no one could govern Spain in opposition to the army. The publication of El ejército y la política in 1920 was designed to fortify his credentials as a military reformer and to establish a clientele in the faction-ridden officer corps as well.
Written after the budget debates in the spring of 1920 (from which he had been conspicuously absent), the book represented the author as a democrat and a knowledgeable technician. A loyal monarchist, Romanones evaded an extended theoretical analysis of the function of an army in a democracy. On the other hand, he argued forcibly for the democratization of the "transitional" conscription law of 1912 as the only means of reconciling the working classes to military service. For the most part, however, the book was a technical discussion of the role of the army as the instrument of national defense. The bulk of the essay was an indictment of the Spanish army measured by this standard.
Romanones leveled his criticism against the peninsular army and the politicians who had permitted it to grow top-heavy, expensive, and inefficient. With considerable skill, he identified the army's major defects: the anachronistic privileges of the technical branches, the moral isolation of the officer corps, and above all, the bureaucratic mentality exemplified by the closed scale. Although he did not mention the Juntas, he was bluntly critical of the Law of 1918. If fully implemented, Romanones's reform package would have eliminated many of the professional sources of instability in the Spanish officer corps. The beneficiary would ultimately be the civil state.
At one level, then, the book was written for civilians concerned about the excessive power of the military. At another level, however, it made a calculated appeal to the one group untouched by the count's wide-ranging criticism -- the colonial army. Since his initial investments [155] in Morocco in 1907 (which he no longer held), Romanones had been an enthusiastic colonialist; he now apparently hoped to build a Moroccan party composed of colonial-minded officers and civilians under the leadership of the king, who would then see Romanones as a logical choice to head a government. The military reorganization proposed in the book was designed to make the Spanish army effective in pacifying Spain's North African empire. Truly democratic conscription would take the edge off the unpopularity of African service, the reduction of the officer corps would free funds for modernization, and the reinstatement of battlefield promotions would encourage the ambitious young officers naturally attracted to the African campaign. Above all, a successful colonial war would restore vitality to the decaying political system, popular support to the monarchy, and political recognition to the statesman who made it all possible -- the Conde de Romanones.
In fact, the book was a personal triumph for the Liberal politician. Its proposals were sound, the pages of statistical data reinforced his image as a practical military reformer, and the timeliness of the subject singled out Romanones as one of the most capable and perceptive of the dynastic politicians. If the theoretical framework was sketchy and the subject somewhat narrowly defined, this was due more to Romanones's political discretion -- and to his authentic political conservatism -- than to a lack of intelligence. Although his motives were not wholly disinterested -- and no one who knew Romanones was deceived on this point-- his book was a significant contribution to the national debate on military reform.
One of the few adverse responses came from Manuel Azaña, a young litterateur and Reformist party regular who had made an unsuccessful run for parliament in 1918. Reviewing the book for the left-wing journal España in November 1920, Azaña dismissed Romanones's proposals as "not what he is going to do in the Government, but what he believes it convenient to say and to propose in order to return to the Government." In addition, he argued that Romanones's Moroccan interests and his fear of social disorder would override any abstract interest he might have in military reform. (36) This ad hominem attack obscured Azaña's substantive objections to Romanones's proposals for military reform, objections that were based on the count's philosophical assumptions about the nature of civil-military relations, a subject to which Azaña himself had given a great deal of thought. In 1919 he had published a lengthy essay in book form entitled La política militar, the first in a projected series of three Estudios de política francesa. (37) The other two volumes, which never appeared, were to deal with laicism and the suffrage. In other words, Azaña had undertaken a theoretical [156] investigation of the three basic institutions of the state -- concretely, the French state, by implication, the Spanish state.
Unlike Romanones, Azaña was not concerned with military organization as an end in itself and still less with its relevance to a successful colonial policy. Instead, he was interested in the subject that Romanones had skirted: the army as a reflection of society and the state. The intimate connection between civil and military organization made it imperative for political reformers to think with equal seriousness about military reform in order to avoid an incompatibility that would inevitably lead to a constitutional crisis. As an illustration, Azaña reviewed the Dreyfus case, which had arisen out of a conflict between a republican state and a monarchist army and had been resolved in 1905 by the "republicanization" of the officer corps. What Azaña proposed was a reversal of the process -- the transformation of Spain's old-regime army as a necessary prelude to the establishment of a republic: "The actual regime, in which the Crown is only that, a crown, is supported . . . exclusively by the army. Thus one may say that the suppression of the permanent army would bring freedom to Spain." (38)
Azaña acknowledged the possibility of a just war, particularly in the national defense, and thus, the necessity of a national army. But however necessary, a conscript army was tolerable only when it demanded equal obligations from all citizens and when it was integrated spiritually with the state. In a democracy, the army -- like the state -- must reflect the national will. Both colonial warfare and domestic peacekeeping -- which for Romanones had justified the existence of a modern and efficient army -- for Azaña fell outside the permissible activities of a democratic army organized for national defense.
A similar, if somewhat more radical, analysis of civil-military relations by the Socialist Luis Araquistain appeared in 1921. (39) An essayist and journalist who had initially applauded the Juntas de Defensa as "democratic and antioligarchical," (40) Araquistain had later concluded that they represented a tendency toward military syndicalization that could not be halted by appeals to older concepts of military discipline. Instead, he argued that both historical circumstances and the lessons of the world war mandated the abolition of the military profession in favor of a "citizen's army." Araquistáin advocated the replacement of unnecessary and unproductive career officers by reserve officers drawn from the universities and the professions. In this way, the army would cease to be a threat to social modernization and political stability.
Dissimilar as were their analyses, Azaña, Araquistáin, and Romanones shared a crucial perception of the political reality in which they [157] lived: military reform was the key to the past and the future of the regime. Romanones hoped to save the monarchy and the dominance of his social class by eliminating the structural defects that made the army a disruptive political force and by giving it and the country a common goal -- a Spanish empire in North Africa. In a sense, his program was designed to make real the political neutrality and professional autonomy that had existed as a fictional ideal since the days of Cánovas. Azaria and Araquistáin, on the other hand, envisioned a reformed army that would be at once the symbol of and the support for a reformed state -- the Republic. It was a reversal of the Canovite scheme -- an unprofessional army made safe by a high degree of politicization and integration with society as a whole. In 1931 Azaña would be given the chance to implement his theory.
Another pundit who perceived the fundamental relationship between the army and the Spanish state was Jose Ortega y Gasset, who published his insights in an extended essay entitled España invertebrada in May 1921. (41) Like Azaña, Ortega detected a unity between a nation and its army, "which measures with awesome exactitude the carats of national morality and vitality." But for Ortega, the Spanish army's "decadence" -- and especially, its "particularism" -- was not the principal cause, but merely a symptom of a larger national decadence attributable to "social inelasticity." Like other social classes and groups, the army had ceased to see itself as part of an organic whole and had lost faith in the capacity of public institutions to resolve conflict, preferring direct action instead. The insubordination of the Juntas de Defensa was a striking example of the modern "moral subversion of the masses against the select minority" that made resolution of the national crisis so difficult. But the army's selfishness was not unique; its resonance derived from its monopoly of the instruments of force. In conclusion, Ortega called for the revitalization of the state through the selection of minorities capable of imposing their greater talents and vision upon the rest of the nation, including the army.
The Drift toward Dictatorship
Ortega's call for a natural aristocracy of leaders to restore order and stability was a sophisticated version of a growing national conviction that only a dictatorship could solve the postwar political and social crisis. The hope of a democratic solution was now only a bitter memory for the parties of the left, which alternated between debate on the dictatorship of the proletariat and denunciation of the military dictatorship [158] that they believed imminent. On the right, cries for military dictatorship had accompanied every intensification of the social crisis, particularly after the quasi-dictatorial rule of General Martínez Anido began to erode the strength of the underground action groups in Barcelona. Parliamentary stagnation and obstructionism, simultaneously more chronic and less tolerable since 1918, aggravated the growing national impatience with the political system, producing repeated allusions to General Pavia, who had overthrown the "ungovernable" Cortes of 1874. (42) Even Ortega himself, although denying the political capacity of the military, had allowed himself in 1920 to entertain the notion that a military dictatorship might be a salutary destructive prelude to an era of national reconstruction. (43) If the army did not produce an obliging dictator, it was not for lack of agreement with the critics of the parliamentary regime, but because there was neither a charismatic figure nor a consensus in the officer corps on the nature of and remedy for the national crisis.
Symbolic of the pervasive disillusionment with parliamentary government was the king himself, who hinted in a speech in Cordova in May 1921 that he would welcome a popular mandate to bypass the Cortes and govern directly. (44) Alfonso's regard for the parliamentary system had never been high. From the beginning of his reign, he had expressed his resentment of the constitutional limitations on the authority of the Crown, occasionally circumventing or ignoring constitutional channels in order to exercise personal power. (45) Furthermore, since 1918 the Cortes had included a relatively greater number of the enemies of the throne, making it a less reliable ally than the army. Alfonso's feel for the national mood told him that his impatience with parliamentary government was shared by a large number of Spaniards. Therefore, in Cordova he suggested that "the provinces should begin a movement of support for the King and for legislation that would be beneficial," in order to remind the parliament "that it is the agent of the people. . . ." He also washed his hands of responsibility for the current political impasse.
The king's speech was a reproach to, if not an implicit repudiation of parliamentary government; significantly, it was cheered enthusiastically in Cordova. Although the government was able to arrange for an altered version of the speech to appear in the press, (46) it could not manage a national consensus in support of the parliamentary regime, whose structural deficiencies had been magnified by the postwar crisis. What Alfonso chose to label "political trivialities" were really the labor pains of a political system forcibly becoming more representative against the will of the vested political interests of the nation. To [159] compound the difficulty, there was no national consensus on social and economic issues in Spain; even had the Cortes been a representative forum, no clear-cut mandate for decisive action would have emerged. The mounting calls for military or royal dictatorship merely measured the frustration of a developing nation overwhelmed by the complexity of modern social and economic problems and tempted to rely on highly visible and authoritarian institutions to solve them.
Astonishingly, the dynastic politicians seemed unable to comprehend
the source of their isolation from the nation. Shattered by the death of
Dato the previous March, the Conservative party was unable to put forward
plausible leadership to move the country out of its stagnation. On June
20, having failed to secure passage of a badly needed railway reorganization
bill, the government recessed the Cortes that had been made to order for
Dato the previous December. It was the sixth time since 1917 that the Cortes
had been suspended or closed in a time of stress.
(47) On July 6 the cabinet split over the bill and its sponsor,
Juan de la Cierva, only to re-form two days later with no significant reorientation
of personnel. (48) Indeed, the government
seemed almost perversely determined to justify the alienation of the king,
the army, and its many critics on the left and the right. Quite possibly,
the parliamentary regime might have collapsed of its own weight in 1921,
unlamented by anyone, had not the military disaster at Anual and the ensuing
campaign for responsibilities revived hopes once again for a democratic
transformation of the system.
1. Staff officers were well aware of the danger. See the letter of Dec. 24, 1917, in SHM-GL, leg. 72, carp. 12.
2. The pledge is in Gabriel Martínez de Aragón y Urbiztondo, Las juntas militares de defensa, app. 8, p. 48, n. 1.
3. The following account is drawn primarily from Martínez de Aragón, Juntas militares, and José Luis Coello de Portugal, Las juntas de defensa. The latter was one of the 23 ESG students; the former, the father of one of them.
4. The emissary who conveyed the order to the ESG lieutenants was the head of the regional Infantry Junta in Madrid, Colonel José Sanjurjo, later a determined opponent of the Juntas and a prominent africanista.
5. DSC (July 29, 1919), 2: app. 10.
6. "Ponencia de Infantería, Caballería, Artillería e Ingenieros" by the Asamblea de Presidentes de Juntas del Ejército in MA, leg. 229.
7. "A nuestros compañeros del Ejército," in ibid.
8. The resignation is in Martínez de Aragón, Juntas militares, app. 8, p. 47; their pamphlet, "Al Arma de Infantería," dated Oct. 16, 1919, is in RA, leg. 3, no. 1.
10. DSC (Nov. 14-19, 1919), 4:1167-1203; 5:1224-31.
11. DSS (Nov. 18, 1919), l:app. 1.
12. DSC (Nov. 26, 1919), 5:1355.
13. Ibid. (Nov. 19, 1919), 5:1230-31.
14. Martínez de Aragón, Juntas militares, p. 152; Melchor Fernández Almagro, Historia del reinado de D. Alfonso XIII, p. 366; Fernando Soldevilla, ed., El año político (1919), p. 342; Esmé Howard, The Theatre of Life, 2:421-22.
15. Martínez de Aragón, Juntas militares, pp. 146-49.
16. The Minister of the Interior, Manuel de Burgos y Mazo, argued strenuously for resistance. See El verano de 1919 en Gobernación, pp. 615-21; see also his note in Soldevilla, Año político (1919), pp. 345-46.
17. Burgos y Mazo, Verano de 1919, p. 621, and Soldevilla, Año político (1919), p. 346.
18. Coello de Portugal, Juntas de defensa, p. 134.
19. In CM, Jan. 2, 1920, p. 1. The decree appeared in the Gaceta on this date.
20. Dues, which had been 1 real a month in 1917, were 2 pesetas a month by 1919. Coello de Portugal, Juntas de defensa, pp. 11, 136.
22. Discussion of the budget is in DSC (1919), 10:5156-5344. The budget as approved is in ibid., 13:6195, app. 1.
23. The new salary levels (which were enacted by royal decree on May 20, 1920) were as follows:
Colonel 12,000 pesetas Captain 6,000
Lieutenant colonel 10,000 First Lieutenant 4,000
Major 8,000 Second Lieutenant 3,000
According to length of service, subofficials would receive 1,700 to 3,110 pesetas per year; brigades, 1,600 to 2,731; and sergeants, 1,227 to 2,241.
24. DSC (Mar. 26, 1920), 10:5297-98; DSS (Apr. 15, 1920), 7:2423.
25. DSC (Mar. 22, 1920), 10:5202.
26. See, for example, Marcelino Domingo in ibid. (Mar. 24, 1920), 10:5314.
27. Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz, "Breves notas para la historia de las juntas de defensa y de la dictadura," p. 34.
28. See Cándido Pardo González, Al servicio de la verdad.
29. The Directory first attempted to secure a merit promotion for its president, Colonel Martínez Raposo; then, when this proved unsuccessful, it tried to force the government to waive the retirement age, arguing that the colonel was still at "the height of his powers." Emilio Mola Vidal, Obras completas, pp. 1016-17; CM, June 23, 1921, p. 1.
32. His report is in Dámaso Berenguer y Fuste, conde de Xauen, Campañas en el Rif y Yebala, 1919-1921, 2:99-108.
35. El Socialista, Aug. 23, 1921, p. 1.
36. Manuel Azaña Díaz, Obras completas, 1:437-41.
39. Luis Araquistáin Quevedo, España en el crisol, pp. 169- 70.
40. Luis Araquistáin Quevedo, Entre la guerra y la revolución, p. 105.
41. The essay first appeared as a serial insert in El Sol in 1920-21.
42. See, for example, El Debate, Mar. 8, 1919, p. 1; CM, Mar. 11, 1919, p. 1; the references in España, July 3, 1919, pp. 4-5; and the article by Marcelino Domingo, also in España, Jan. 29, 1921, p. 1.
43. El Sol, Feb. 20, 1920, p. 1.
44. The speech of May 23, 1921, is quoted in Gonzalo Redondo, Las empresas políticas de José Ortega y Casset, p. 362. A slightly different version is in Pedro Rodríguez de Toro y de Mesa, conde de los Villares, Estudios del reinado de Alfonso XIII, p. 52.
45. See the report of the British ambassador Howard on Alfonso's attempt to bargain directly and without the knowledge of his government for the cession of Tangier and an Anglo-Spanish defense of Gibraltar. Howard, Theatre of Life, 2:427-28. See also the recollections of Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Torres, Memorias, pp. 74-78.
46. The story on the Cordova speech in La Epoca appeared hidden in small print on p. 2 on May 24, 1921.
47. Diego Sevilla Andres, Historia política de España (1800-1967), pp. 391-92.
48. Argüelles was replaced by Mariano Ordoñez in Finance; Piniés, by Julio Wais in Justice.