[ix] Until recently, Spanish historiography has been dominated by political history. Yet there have been surprisingly few analytical studies of the failure of parliamentary government in Spain. The same is true of Spanish praetorianism, even though military intervention in the political process has been the most obvious fact of Spanish political life for nearly two centuries. ⁽¹⁾ This book attempts to explain the relationship between these two phenomena during the critical seven years between the emergence of the military defense juntas in 1917 and the pronunciamiento of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923.
 

In general, studies of Spanish civil-military relations -- whether by historians, sociologists, or political scientists -- have been unidimensional and static, rather than multidimensional and dynamic in focus. One approach has emphasized the disposition of the army to intervene, analyzing the institutional characteristics that induced officers (perhaps inevitably) to feel isolated from and often superior to the society around them. In this view, the case of Spanish praetorianism is not unique, but merely an exaggerated form of the corporate military mentality that developed along with the professionalization of European armies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Everywhere that traditional society underwent modernization, officers responded to the growing complexity and conflicts of political life by claiming to be the sole representatives of the national will, with not only a right, but a duty to intervene when that will was in danger of perversion or neglect by the state. This interpretation has been reinforced by Spanish officers themselves, who have never exalted what they consider to be "servile" obedience in the manner of, say, the French army of the nineteenth century. In Spain, military coups have usually been the work of soldiers professing to represent the true interests of the nation. Pronunciamiento literature of the nineteenth century is rich in examples; military rhetoric in the twentieth century [x] has kept alive the image of the army as "the guardian of all the values and historical constants of the people to which it belongs."⁽²⁾
 

Studies that stress the structural or moral peculiarities of the military, however, explain only the disposition to intervene, whereas a satisfactory model of praetorianism must account for provocation and opportunity as well. As the Spanish case illustrates, civilian weakness seems to be a necessary precondition of praetorian involvement. The origins of Spanish militarism lie in the prolonged search for constitutional legitimacy after the collapse of the old regime during the Napoleonic wars. After playing a fundamental role in the creation of the liberal state in a nation socially and economically underdeveloped by European standards, the army then acted as the moderating power within this artificial political system, providing the mechanism for the rotation of political parties -- the pronunciamiento -- in the absence of a responsible Crown or an agreement on constitutional principles. A handful of military politicians successfully exploited the functional role of the military -- and the endemic factionalism of the officer corps -- to satisfy personal ambitions for political power and social status. But the majority of officers, victimized by the favoritism and professional insecurity of the pronunciamiento era, were less satisfied with the army's political role and welcomed the settlement of 1875, which eliminated the pronunciamiento as a device for maintaining the two-party system by establishing a consensus among the great political interests. Under the Restoration, the army became the instrument by which the dynastic parties maintained their supremacy over the working classes and the peripheral nationalities. In return, the army was protected from the full rigors of professionalization and was encouraged to identify with a particular set of constitutional arrangements and class interests.
 

Impressed by the absence of military intervention during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, historians have overlooked the fact that the "civilianized" parliamentary monarchy contrived by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1875 was indebted to the army for both its existence and its continuity; the professional and apolitical officer corps that he claimed to have created was a fiction maintained only by the assiduous neglect of military reform and by the relative tranquility of the Restoration era. Ironically, the policies adopted by Cánovas to insure the neutrality of the army in fact guaranteed that it would become a disruptive force in the political system. Limited military professionalization intensified factionalism and alienated many officers from the state. At the same time, after the turn of the century, the political leverage of this dissatisfied army was enhanced. As the gradual modernization [xi] of the Spanish economy enlarged both the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban working class (groups previously excluded from political power), the financial and agrarian oligarchy relied increasingly on force to retain its hegemony. By 1917 the parliamentary monarchy once again began to resemble a praetorian regime, characterized by a lack of constitutional legitimacy, the mobilization of hitherto weak or indifferent social classes, and the willingness of all civilian groups to appeal to the army -- or to one of the factions within it -- for support.
 

As even contemporary observers could perceive,⁽³⁾ 1917 marked a turning point in the history of the parliamentary monarchy. During the summer of 1917, three political groups -- junior army bureaucrats, the Catalan bourgeoisie, and the organized working-class left--attacked the regime, demanding a redistribution of political and economic power more in line with their interests. Although the parliamentary system survived this onslaught, it would never again assume its customary complacency. After 1918, Wilsonian idealism, the Russian Revolution, and economic dislocation mobilized the Spanish working classes and encouraged peripheral nationalists to challenge the political hegemony of Madrid; then in 1921, the failure of the army and of Spanish colonial policy in Morocco aroused the usually apathetic middle classes to demand an accounting for the disaster, together with constitutional reform to prevent its recurrence. Bereft of the popular indifference to politics that had eased their rule since 1875, the dynastic parties experienced a severe crisis of confidence.
 

Their initial response was to strengthen their alliance with the military. But intercorps rivalries and the conflicting interests of peninsular bureaucrats and colonial officers -- all exacerbated by the lack of military reform -- made an appeal to "the army" impossible. By 1922 the dynastic politicians had discovered that the survival of the parliamentary monarchy depended on a redefinition of civil-military relations wherein the power of the state rested on popular consent rather than military force. In 1922-23, first the Conservatives, then the Liberals, cautiously introduced measures to curb military factionalism and to impose civilian control over areas in which the army had traditionally operated autonomously -- in particular, over social policy in Barcelona and colonial policy in Morocco. Their efforts to free themselves from the yoke of military dependence and to democratize Spanish political life were cut short, however, in September 1923 by the coup of General Primo de Rivera and the negative pronunciamiento of the officer corps, which temporarily united to protect the privileged position of the army within the state. The pronunciamiento was successful because the regime lacked widespread civilian support in the country as a whole.[xii]In this sense, the politicians -- not the army -- were responsible for the collapse of parliamentary government in 1923. Spanish praetorianism was a by-product, rather than a cause, of civilian weakness.
 

In this study I have tried to emphasize the relationship between political modernization and military professionalization. The latter is a process that involves the formation of a corporate and institutionally autonomous body of military experts, selected on the basis of merit rather than birth or social class, and isolated from the rest of society, including the civilian elites, by virtue of its social function. Its relationship with political modernization is a dynamic one. Complete military professionalization seems largely to depend on the extent to which government rests on the principle of popular sovereignty -- that is, on the extent to which a government does not rely on the army to remain in power. At the same time, incomplete professionalization may encourage praetorian tendencies in the military, which may then intervene to obstruct political modernization. The result is a kind of vicious circle from which it is difficult to emerge. In the Spanish case, the development of representative government was forcefully opposed first by a ruling elite unreconciled to the democratization of Spanish political life, then later by a military establishment whose interests were bound to suffer in any alteration of the status quo. Put in the simplest terms, the parties of the parliamentary monarchy created the praetorian army that later destroyed them.
 

The purpose of this book is to analyze the role of the military in the breakdown of parliamentary government in Spain between 1917 and 1923. Nevertheless, I hope that it also deepens our understanding of the general phenomenon of military intervention in contemporary Spain. The process that led to military dictatorship in 1923 in some ways prefigured the pattern of events that led to civil war in 1936. In the first place, Spanish governments after 1923 remained weak and narrowly based. Neither the seven-year dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera nor the short-lived Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931, succeeded in forging a national consensus on the extent and pace of political and social reform. In the second place, despite a major effort at military reform in 1931-32, the process of professionalization was not yet complete in 1936. As General Francisco Franco pointed out in his last letter to the Republican government before the military rebellion of 1936, the internal conflicts and institutional defects that had plagued the army since 1917 were still unresolved. ⁽⁴⁾ When over half the officer corps supported the military conspirators against the government a month later, their professional grievances were largely those that had motivated their support for Primo de Rivera in 1923. By illuminating [xiii] the historical background of those grievances, this book should make the military origins of the Spanish civil war more intelligible.
 

It should be clear that my own view frankly favors liberal, democratic government and civilian supremacy over the military. I interpret Spanish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as essentially a search for legitimate representative government, a quest complicated by the heterogeneous and somewhat tardy modernization of Spanish economic and social life. In these circumstances, civilian government has found it difficult to provide a countervailing force to the force inherent in military institutions. The Spanish army has shown little regard for the principle of civil supremacy when it has felt its basic interests to be threatened. But Spanish praetorianism cannot be laid exclusively at the door of an ambitious and arrogant military establishment. Militarism has also been nurtured by the failure of Spain's traditional elites to accommodate themselves to social and economic change. The complex relationship between military discontent and civilian weakness is the subject of this study.

CM / La Correspondencia Militar
DSC / Diario de las sesiones de las Cortes españolas, Congreso de los Diputados
DSS / Diario de las sesiones de las Cortes españolas, Senado
EE / El Ejército Español
MA / Archive of D. Antonio Maura, Fundación Antonio Maura, Madrid
RA / Archive of the Conde de Romanones, Madrid
DNSD / Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales, Salamanca
SHM-A / Servicio Histórico Militar, Sección de Estudios Históricos, Segundo Negociado: África
SHM-GL / Servicio Histórico Militar, Sección de Estudios Históricos, Primer Negociado: Guerra de Liberación, Documentación Roja

1.The fundamental works on Spanish civil-military relations are Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain; Eric Christiansen, The Origins of Military Power in Spain, 1800-1854; and Raymond Carr, "Spain: Rule by Generals," pp. 135-48. Other useful discussions may be found in Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback; Edward Feit, "The Rule of the 'Iron Surgeons'"; Amos Perlmutter, "The Praetorian State and the Praetorian Army," and The Military and Politics in Modern Times.

2.Alfredo Kindelán y Duany, Ejército y política, pp. 148-49. See also Emilio Mola Vidal, Obras completas, p. 945; Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz, Milicia y política and Teoría del militarismo. A theoretical statement of this viewpoint may be found in Hermann Oehling, La función política del ejército.

3.See the remarks of Joaquín Sánchez de Toca in El Imparcial, Dec. 26, 1917, p. 1.

4.In Luis de Galinsoga and Francisco Franco-Salgado, Centinela de occidente, pp. 203-6.