1. The dictatorship had ended, but the monarchy remained, sorely tarnished by recent events. The enemies of the old order blamed Alfonso XIII, with some justice, for the advent of Primo de Rivera and called for a republic as the prerequisite of parliamentary democracy. Of all the established institutions the monarchy was the most in danger, but if it gave way to a truly democratic republic, all the other groups that the parliamentary monarchy had shielded would also come under attack. The immediate question facing Alfonso was whether the privileged groups would stick by him and try to restore the system of Cánovas, or sacrifice him in the hopes of manipulating a new order. Alfonso's first move was to replace Primo de Rivera as the head of the Directory with a docile general, Dámaso Berenguer, one of his palace intimates. Berenguer relaxed Primo's controls, permitting Unamuno to return to Salamanca and Sanchez Guerra to speak in Madrid. Such events produced scenes of great public enthusiasm, but those who rejoiced no longer saw Primo de Rivera as the public enemy. He was dead; it was the king himself.

Alfonso struggled for over a year to get out of the impasse of ruling without a constitution and having to fall back on military men to head his governments. He obtained the support of Francesc Cambo, the leader of the Catalan Lliga, who as a manufacturer was alarmed by the increasing strikes of Catalan workers, who were excited by the CNT's vision of an imminent revolution. Support also came from the Count of Romanones, former leader of the Liberal party, himself a wealthy landowner. But the king was unable to attract all former [155] monarchists. Early in 1931, the Conservative Sanchez Guerra rejected his request to head a ministry that would include parties of the opposition. The king had to make an admiral, Juan B. Aznar, the next prime minister, with Romanones as foreign secretary. Romanones conceived the project of restoring constitutional government by a series of elections, first for municipal councils, then for provincial councils, and finally for the Cortes.

The opposition, no longer forced to operate from abroad, now organized actively within the country. Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a Liberal minister in 1923, publicly declared himself in favor of a republic in April 1930 and rounded a new party, the Liberal Republican Right. On August 17, 1930 at the summer resort of San Sebastian, leading opponents of the monarchy, Alcalá Zamora, Prieto for the Socialists, the timeworn Radical Lerroux, and leaders of the Catalan left reached an agreement to establish a republic, by force if necessary, to proclaim civil and religious liberties, to call constituent cortes, and to permit the regions of Spain to draw up plans for their autonomy. Out of this meeting grew a Central Revolutionary Committee, with headquarters in Madrid and secret branches in various cities.

The spirit of revolution was stirring in all sectors. As in 1917, junior army officers became involved, and two of them revolted in northern Aragon in December. The king had them executed, thereby gaining further public opprobium. Gentlemen did not shoot their enemies; even Primo de Rivera had not. In Madrid, the Central Revolutionary Committee was discovered and arrested for plotting rebellion, only to have the king soon come begging its members to form a ministry. They refused, but were freed by the court that tried them and greeted jubilantly by crowds in the street. Student riots broke out, the universities were closed, and intellectuals and professors, led by the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset and the professor of medicine Gre-gorio Marañon, formed a "Group in the Service of the Republic." In Catalonia Francesc Macia drew various left-wing Catalan parties together into a coalition called the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia) to oppose Cambo's Lliga, which was still monarchist. The situation was hardly auspicious for the monarchy when Spaniards went to the polls for the first time in eight years.

Voting for municipal offices took place on Sunday, April 12, 1931. That evening returns were announced for the major cities. Every provincial capital except Cadiz (of all places!), voted for a majority of Republicans and Socialists. In Catalonia Macia's Esquerra won a resounding victory over the Lliga. April 13 was a day of hesitation; both monarchists and Republicans had been taken by surprise. The king's ministry resigned, convinced that the election was a national plebiscite against Alfonso. On the fourteenth the new municipal councilors took office in the major cities. In Seville, Valencia, and [156] elsewhere they proclaimed a republic. Crowds thronged to the central squares of Madrid and Barcelona. From a balcony overlooking the multitude in Barcelona, Macia proclaimed a Catalan republic to be an integral part of an Iberian federation. In Madrid the Count of Roman-ones urged the king to leave Spain and personally negotiated a transfer of the government to the Revolutionary Committee. When General Jose Sanjurjo, commander of the Civil Guard, informed the king that the guard would not fight for the monarchy, Alfonso hastily agreed to leave and before sundown drove off to Cartagena to take ship for France. Abandoned by the traditional pillars of the crown, the monarchy, which counted its origin in the ninth century, had ended with hardly a whimper.

Late on April 14, 1931 Spaniards went to bed under the Second Republic and with a provisional government headed by Alcalá Zamora. Conservatives congratulated themselves on avoiding violence and liberals and Socialists relished the victory they had awaited since 1917. In the excitement most persons failed to note that the Republican victory was marginal at best. Of over 80,000 municipal councilors elected, Republican parties won about 34,000 and the Socialists 4900, or slightly less than half between them. The others elected were monarchists or members of other parties, or were unaffiliated local candidates often running unopposed in areas controlled by caciques. Monarchists dominated rural Galicia, Andalusia, and Extremadura, all classic areas of caciquismo. Republicans and monarchists divided the smaller cities and towns of Old Castile and Aragon. The Socialist strength was mostly in the cities, except those of Catalonia, which voted for the Esquerra Republicana. Although the picture is not entirely clear, the election that brought in the Republic was a victory for urban and peripheral Spain over those groups that controlled rural central Spain, of the heirs of the Progresistas and the First Republic over the heirs of the Moderados.

The advent of the Republic was marred almost at once by a painful event. On May 6 the provisional government decreed that religious instruction would no longer be mandatory in public schools. Cardinal Pedro Segura, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, a testy defender of the monarchy and the rights of the church, replied with a pastoral letter calling upon Catholics to oppose attacks on religion. On May 10 in Madrid a street scuffle between monarchists and Republicans degenerated into an attack on churches and monasteries by a small mob. Six buildings were burned. Since lives were not evidently in danger, the government hesitated to call upon the hated Civil Guard to put down the disorders. On learning the news of Madrid, mobs also burned churches in various Andalusian cities. The disturbance lasted two days and was a shock to devout Catholics. Magnified by their press, the event gave the impression that the Republic was out to destroy [155] religion. From the very start, the Republic and the church seemed to have declared war on each other.

Liberal Spaniards were too euphoric to let the event distress them. They had at last obtained the victory that they had been denied in 1917. For them April 1931 inaugurated the springtime of a new age. The century-long search seemed over for a popularly accepted form of government that could assume the legitimacy once enjoyed by the absolute monarchy. The miraculously easy advent of the Republic, the happy surging throngs in the cities on April 14, the mute disarray of the partisans of the monarchy, all promised that Spaniards as a people now wished to live under parliamentary democracy. Republicans and Socialists who trusted the wisdom of a free people scented the fragrant air of their promised land. Enthusiasm pounded in the hearts of university students, whose strikes and violence had been instrumental in overthrowing Primo de Rivera. Anticipation gripped older intellectuals of the stamp of the Institution Libre who had long fought the sham and pettiness of the monarchy and the oppression of the dictatorship. All these men of good will would at last be able to remake Spain and give it its proper place in the world as a country of progress and intellect. They foresaw using funds that had been lost through corruption and squandered on the army and the church to rebuild the country. They had visions of minds imprisoned by obscurantist teachings of the religious orders, or illiterate and uncultivated for want of schools, being trained for citizenship and rewarding lives. In their joy and hope they seemed to have stepped out of the Enlightenment, not the twentieth century. Wordsworth's greeting to the French Revolution never applied more fittingly than to Spanish Republicans in 1931:

2. Unfortunately the dawn had come, not in 1917, when the Republic could have enjoyed a decade of prosperity, but fourteen years later, when the world depression was nearing its depths. Human problems would not be as tractable to idealism and good will as the Republicans hoped. Yet for two years they were free to apply idealism and good will, and they accomplished enough to bring Spain to world attention.

The provisional government represented the groups that had agreed to the Pact of San Sebastian. It was a coalition of Republican parties of various colorings, Socialists, and regionalists. Its president, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, was a former Liberal heading the Liberal Republican Right party; and it included Alejandro Lerroux of the old Radical party and Manuel Azana, a writer and president of the Ateneo de Madrid, for [158] the Republican Left party. The Socialists were represented by Francisco Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto, who had been rivals for control of the party since the death of Pablo Iglesias. The Catalan Esquerra sent secondary figures, for Macia preferred to remain in Barcelona. From the outset the success of the Republic depended on the ability of a coalition of Socialists and Republicans to stick together despite divergent economic and social doctrines.

The provisional government promptly called for elections to constituent cortes. Fearing caciquismo, it adopted the old Progresista tactic of making elections provincewide for a slate of candidates rather than in single member constituencies. It also provided that the party or coalition of parties that obtained a majority in a province should receive between two thirds and four fifths of its seats. It hoped to prevent the proliferation of splinter parties typical of the Third French Republic or the German Weimar Republic, and thereby to facilitate stable parliamentary government. In the process it enabled a coalition with a small popular plurality to obtain a commanding majority in the Cortes. This was not unlike the American and British systems, but it presupposed the loyalty and patience of defeated parties who saw their representation in the Cortes far below their percentage of the popular vote.

The elections, on June 28, fulfilled Republican hopes. The Left Republicans and Socialists had formed a coalition and together won 250 seats, over half, thanks to the new electoral rule. Sympathetic to them were the 30 deputies of the Catalan Esquerra and 20 Gallegan Republicans, and to a lesser extent the 100 Radical deputies who followed Lerroux. On the right but still Republican were some 30 conservative Republicans, mostly of Alcalá Zamora. Of doubtful loyalty were 14 Basque nationalists and 10 Lliga Regionalista deputies of Cambo. Scattered among the deputies were leading intellectuals who were elected with no party commitment: Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Maranon. Caciquismo had been emasculated, but the election figures were misleading. Supporters of the defunct monarchy had not had the time or the spirit to run a real campaign.

In honor of the French Revolution, the Cortes were inaugurated on Bastille Day, July 14. Their first order of business was to write a new constitution. A commission representing the various government parties presented a draft in August which the deputies discussed and finally proclaimed in December. In socialist spirit, it declared Spain to be "a democratic republic of workers of all classes."⁽¹⁾It guaranteed the standard liberal civil rights: freedom of expression, of religion, from arbitrary arrest. The suffrage was given to everyone over twenty-three, regardless of sex, a step already proposed by Primo de Rivera. It also [159] abandoned bicameralism, which even the First Republic had kept, and went back to the egalitarian pattern of 1812 of a single house. The Cortes would be elected for four-year terms and meet annually. To prevent possible abuses by an all-powerful legislature, the constitution provided for a president with more authority than in most European democracies of the twentieth century, and a Court of Constitutional Guarantees which could declare laws unconstitutional. The president would be elected for a single six-year term by the deputies of the Cortes plus an equal number of elected "commissioners." He would choose the prime minister ("president of the government"), who would then select the other ministers, all subject to approval by the Cortes. If the president judged that the Cortes were no longer functioning effectively, he could dissolve them and call for new elections. He was allowed to do this only twice, however, and after the second dissolution, the following Cortes was "to examine and decide upon the necessity of the decree of dissolution of the previous Cortes. The unfavorable vote of the Cortes shall effect the removal of the President."⁽²⁾ The Constituent Cortes thus created a strong executive but precluded a return of the system whereby Alfonso XIII had made stable government impossible by dissolving the Cortes at will.

In the tradition of the Progresistas, the constitution established municipal councils and alcaldes to be elected by local citizens. It also provided for extensive regional autonomy on the model of the First Republic. A lengthy section allowed the creation of autonomous regions with "common historical, cultural, and economic characteristics."⁽³⁾The regions could establish statutes providing for their own self-government. The central government reserved to itself matters of foreign relations, armed forces, the monetary system, interregional communications and public works, and the regulation of cults. The constitution made possible a radical decentralization of Spain. Going far beyond the provisions of the Catalan Mancomunitat of 1912, it represented the fulfillment of the Republican commitment to the Catalan nationalists made in the Pact of San Sebastian.

Meanwhile during the summer of 1931 Catalan nationalists under Macia had drawn up a statute and submitted it to a local plebiscite, which endorsed it overwhelmingly. The project gave the regional government full authority over education and made Catalan the official language of the region. After acceptance of the national constitution, the Cortes took up the Catalan project, reworking it to fit the terms of the constitution. The Cortes eliminated absolute local control of schools and insisted that Castilian remain also an official language in Catalonia. Otherwise they accepted most of what the Catalans had[160] proposed. Under the statute Catalonia got a government known as the Generalitat with a president, prime minister, and a parliament, almost like the national government. The Generalitat had authority over local finances and communications. In effect Catalonia also got its own school system with classes in Catalan, even in the University of Barcelona.

Despite the qualms of Ortega and other Castilian centralists, the Cortes ratified the statute in September 1932 by a nearly unanimous vote. Manuel Azana, who had been the prime minister since October 1931 and was largely responsible for the successful compromise, went in person to Barcelona. From the balcony where Macia had proclaimed the Catalan state eighteen months earlier, he presented the new statute to a vast throng, asking three times, "Now do you belong to the Republic?" Three times the crowd roared, "!Si!"⁽⁴⁾ Catalans were to show four years later how strongly they felt this commitment.

Other regionalist movements were encouraged to draw up their own statutes. On one occasion the Basque leaders of varying persuasions literally came to blows over the question. The strongly clerical Basque nationalists wanted to control religious questions locally; the Basque Republicans wanted to leave the matter to the central government. When the statute was proposed to the voters, Navarre rejected it, and the Basque provinces were only lukewarm. Before it could be brought to the Cortes, the Constituent Cortes had been dissolved, conservatives were in control, and the statute was buried until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Even in regions without traditions of home rule, the possibility excited local leaders. The Gallegan Republican party, under Santiago Casares Quiroga, drew up a statute, which was approved locally but unenthusiastically, but it also came to the Cortes too late for prompt action. Movements appeared in Aragon, Valencia, and Andalusia to establish autonomous regions. They did not have a serious following. Some Castilian liberals had hurt feelings, and monarchists were able to exploit the army's fear of decentralization. Nevertheless, by giving ear to the claims of the regionalists instead of trying to crush them, as the dictatorship had done, the Republicans had worked out ah apparently successful solution to the long-standing conflict between Castile and the periphery.

The Cortes also had to deal with the enemies of the Republic. The king was safely out of the way. The Cortes, for added safety, wrote into the constitution that no member of the royal family was eligible for the presidency. They also convicted Alfonso of high treason for helping Primo de Rivera to establish the dictatorship, and sentenced him to banishment for life.

The last three decades had shown that Spanish parliamentary [161] democracy had most to fear from the army. It had broken strikes by force and had opposed the nationalist movement in Catalonia. Alfonso XIII had used his authority over it to promote officers loyal to him. Ill equipped, poorly trained, the army was less a force for national defense than, like the old British Empire, an outdoor relief for the respectable classes. For many families a career as army officer had provided an honorable if not remunerative opening for a second son. Need for reform had long been recognized within the army itself, especially the need to reduce the excessive number of officers. The minister of war in the provisional government, Manuel Azana, acting before the Cortes met, drew up a new table of organization which called for only one third the existing number of officers. To eliminate the excess, he offered army officers retirement on full pay, complete with the future raises they could expect if they remained on active service. Many officers hastened to accept such a fine offer, but others, monarchists and conservatives, saw in the move an attempt to emasculate the only force capable of resisting the follies of the new regime. Within the officer corps a sullen conflict developed between supporters of the Republic, who suspected and disliked the monarchists, and the opponents of the Republic, who felt discriminated against for political reasons. Dissatisfaction within the army was to remain a running sore, as it had been in the German republic after 1918.

The provisional government also destroyed the hegemony of the Civil Guard over the maintenance of public order. The church burnings of May 1931 showed the need for men specially trained to put down urban riots. Previous governments had called in the Civil Guard and the army in such contingencies, often with unnecessary bloodshed. The workers detested both bodies so heartily that the Republicans hesitated to use them and they were doubtful of their loyalty. Nineteenth-century revolutionary regimes had established the National Militia in such a situation, but it had been overly political and undisciplined. The Republican government's answer was to create a highly trained elite corps of urban police called the Assault Guard, on whose loyalty it could count. No longer needed in the cities, the Civil Guard returned to its original role as a rural police force.

What the Republic would do about the church became the question that aroused the most violent passions. Before the Cortes met, the government proclaimed religious liberty and made plans to separate church and state. The bishops protested that the plans violated the Concordat of 1851, which declared Catholicism the official religion of Spain, supported by the state. Nevertheless the Cortes proceeded to write this legislation into the constitution. Article 3 stated, "The Spanish state has no official religion." Article 26 provided that within two years the national and local governments would cease to support the church financially, that religious orders would have to register [162] with the government and give up all property not needed to support their religious activities, and that those orders taking an oath of obedience to an authority other than the state (an indirect way of identifying the Jesuits) would be dissolved and their property nationalized. The debate on this article was bitter. Azana led its supporters, arguing on principle that Spain was no longer Catholic, since many Spaniards had ceased to be believers, and that the state should no longer be the secular arm of the church. Eventually the article passed, but many deputies abstained from the final vote.

The approval of Article 26 caused the first crisis of the Republic. Alcalá Zamora, the prime minister, a conservative Republican and a Catholic, resigned, forcing the choice of a new leader of the ministry. The choice fell on Azana, who had gained prestige for his reform of the army and eloquence against the church. As soon as the constitution was approved, in December 1931, Azana proposed and carried through the election of Alcalá Zamora as president, in a move intended to bind up the wounds of the Republican side.

Subsequent legislation of Azana's government further embittered staunch Catholics. The Cortes made marriage a civil ceremony, legalized divorce, and put cemeteries under state authority. They made plans to close religious schools. Azana's government did not deprive Spaniards of religious services, churches, or religious orders, but it deprived the church of those advantages which the Moderados had given it in the nineteenth century to reconcile it to the loss of its lands and to win it to their side. In 1932 the church cried persecution, while Republicans felt they had disarmed the major enemy of the Spanish people. The religious question had become the most heated issue in Spain and was rapidly polarizing public opinion. Symbolic of the tension were numbers of Catholic school children who wore large crucifixes around their necks as a protest against taking down crucifixes in classrooms. Some of the early support of the Republic among middle-class Catholics was evaporating, while liberal priests who had originally welcomed it were disenchanted by this legislation.

The role played by the religious issue in the history of the Second Republic makes it vital to understand why freeing the Republic from the threat of the church became the central concern of the Constituent Cortes of 1931 rather than, say, measures to improve the social structure of Spain and meet the economic crisis. Ever since the Cortes of Cadiz and earlier, reformers had looked upon the church as the strongest bulwark of reaction. It had backed Ferdinand VII, then the Carlists, then the Conservatives, and finally Primo de Rivera. The Republicans of 1931 believed it had an excessive amount of wealth invested, not as formerly in land, but in banks, industries, and public utilities. They laid many of the evils of capitalism in Spain at its door. Many people on the left magnified the church into a vast subterranean conspiracy[163] against the modernization of Spain. It did not occur to them that the clergy were few in number and that they could have little influence unless more numerous groups supported them for reasons of their own. They forgot that the Liberals in the nineteenth century had been able to despoil the church of its property and had defeated the clerical-minded Carlists.

Many of the Republican charges were partly true. The question is why the Republicans let the clerical issue blind them to more real dangers. One can see various reasons. First of all, since the nineteenth century Spaniards had been prone to explain political events by the machinations of secret societies. Thus liberals saw in the clergy, notably the Jesuits, a tightly knit group, with connections in government and high society, pulling strings to obtain their ends. On their side, conservative Catholics believed in a secret international federation of freemasons working to destroy religion. Historians of both sides explained the last hundred and fifty years of Spanish history by such myths. After 1917, conservative clericals believed a secret Communist organization had joined their enemies. To a certain extent both myths were based on truth. Spanish and French Republicans and anticlericals did become freemasons--but it was naive to blame anticlerical legislation on a secret society as it was oversimple to blame the Jesuits for opposition to left-wing policies.

Needless to say, this kind of political mentality is not uniquely Spanish. It has been common in modern democracies. Jews in Germany and France and Catholics in America have been accused of belonging to international groups bent on destroying the values of their societies. It is emotionally easier to blame one's troubles on a convenient but mysterious enemy than to try to understand the complexities of modern society, and political leaders have long known how to make capital out of this penchant.

To this general tendency must be added the strong ideological commitment that was typical of Europe between the world wars. Belief in ideologies as solutions to political problems was another feature of the emergence of democracy after 1789. Political and social doctrines like nationalism, republicanism, Carlism, anarchism, and socialism aroused the kind of devotion that religions had in an earlier age. For Spanish anticlericals, anarchists, and Socialists, the Catholic Church represented not only an organized conspiracy but the bearer of an opposing ideology. Voltaire's cry, "Ecrasez l'infame!" could well characterize their spirit.

Moreover, one of the beliefs of the Republicans was in the efficacy of education as a means to remake the country. It was a belief inherited from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century liberalism. American democrats and French republicans had felt the same way. In Spain most primary and secondary education, especially of the middle and[164] upper classes, was in the hands of the church. Since Spain was backward, the Republicans reasoned, the education given by the church schools must be at fault. As we have seen, Spanish intellectuals and historians of the Generation of '98 blamed Spain's national character for its failures. What force was responsible for this character more than the church, which inspired intolerance and perpetuated obscurantist doctrines?

Finally there was the simple fact that the clergy was conspicuous and different. Priests wore long black cassocks and round black hats. They could never be mistaken for anyone else. Neither could nuns or monks. They took vows of poverty and chastity, which their enemies found unnatural and believed they violated in secret. Like the Jews in Hitler's Germany, they could be easily identified and attacked. More, unlike the Jews, they had consciously chosen to separate themselves from other men. The anticlericals overlooked the fact that for many a younger son or unmarriageable daughter of a middle-class family the church offered a living that was honorable and secure, and that for the son of a peasant to become a priest or monk was often the only way to get an education.

All these reasons help account for the passion with which the Cortes disposed of the question of the church. Heady with joy and satisfaction at having slain the dragon that threatened their beautiful girl (the Second Republic was called affectionately "la niña bonita"), the Republican idealists could turn to constructing their new order. Their energies were concentrated in two areas, education and land reform.

3. From Jovellanos through Giner de los Ríos to the founders of the Second Republic, leading Spanish liberals saw in education the greatest hope for the future of the country. A story is told of a conversation between Giner and Joaquín Costa about the problem of Spain. Costa said, "Giner, we want a man." "Joaquín," replied Giner, "what we want is a people."⁽⁵⁾ Through the Institución Giner had hoped to help create the people Spain needed. Now his followers could use the power of the state to further his aims. In 1931 it was estimated that 30 to 50 percent of Spaniards were illiterate. First under Marcelino Domingo, a Catalan Republican and an admirer of French lay education, and later under the Socialist professor Fernando de los Ríos, nephew of Giner, the ministry of education drew up plans to provide 7000 schools to replace those of the religious orders and 20,000 more needed to give all [165] children an elementary education. Despite the depression and the desire to reduce expenses, the Cortes voted lavishly the requests of the ministers, while Republican municipal councils donated buildings to the cause. A frantic effort produced 9600 primary schools within a year, while a five-year plan was drawn up to provide the rest. The needed teachers were harder to come by. Despite salary increases and refresher courses, few persons were dedicated enough to move to isolated backward pueblos. Salvador de Madariaga, minister of education in 1934, says that he found "about 10,500 schoolmasters without a school, and about 10,500 schools without a schoolmaster."⁽⁶⁾ By then, however, political events had dampened the early ardor.

Enthusiasm for educational improvement also infected the universities, especially that of Madrid. In 1927 the monarchy had undertaken to build a new campus for the university northwest of the city. Known as the Ciudad Universitaria, it came to life under the Republic. The Faculty of Philosophy and Letters opened in the winter of 1932-33, in a modern building described scornfully by Unamuno as "the most luxurious bathhouse I've seen in my life."⁽⁷⁾ The next four years saw completed the faculties of medicine and architecture. Within this handsome shell, the faculty, under the guidance of the dean of philosophy and letters, Manuel Garcia Morente, reached the peak toward which it had been climbing for a generation.

Education could not reach all Spaniards as rapidly as the Republicans desired, and they turned to the boundless idealism of youth to fill the gap. This was the objective of the so-called pedagogical missions, a project conceived by Giner's associate Manuel Cossio. Beginning in 1933, organized groups of university and secondary-school students traveled to remote towns carrying movies, copies of works of art, and music. Meanwhile Federico Garcia Lorca directed a group of university Students, known as La Barraca ("The Hut"), who went by truck from town to town giving open-air representations of the classic theater of Cervantes, Calderón, and Lope de Vega. For many pueblos this was the first exposure to urban cultural activities, while the students saw a side of Spain that was equally unknown to them. No endeavor ever revealed more clearly the existence of two worlds in Spain, the modern cities that participated in the latest Western culture and the primitive pueblos.

The pedagogical missions were symptomatic of the enthusiasm of many artists and writers for the Republic. Some became deputies in the Cortes; others like Americo Castro consented to represent Spain abroad. Those who continued to write made the next five years a brilliant age [166] of Spanish letters. Besides directing La Barraca, Garcia Lorca composed his masterpieces for the theater, Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), Yerma (The Barren Woman), and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba). Other poets who had matured under the dictatorship, such as Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillen, Luis Cernuda, and Vicente Aleixandre, wrote some of their finest pieces, letting the excitement of their lives infect their poetry. Luis Buñuel turned from surrealist cinema to make Tierra sin Pan (Land Without Bread), which depicted in poignant realism the poverty-stricken life of the peasants of Las Hurdes in northern Extremadura. As tensions grew over the next years, Lorca expressed their common attitude: "We (I mean men of intellectual significance brought up in the atmosphere of what we can call the well-to-do classes) are called upon for sacrifice. Let us accept the call. In the world not human forces but telluric are now at grips."⁽⁸⁾

The other passion of the Republic was the reform of the countryside. The land must be made more productive and given to those who needed it. Indalecio Prieto, minister of public works, continued the projects for irrigation and reclamation conceived under the monarchy and begun by Primo. He kept Manuel Lorenzo Pardo in charge, who pushed ahead plans to dam the Guadalquivir, Guadiana, and Tajo river systems to irrigate Andalusia, Extremadura, and Valencia. Besides irrigation, the dams would provide electricity for industry and the countryside. Prieto also planned extensive reforestation of regions that had suffered from centuries of clearing and grazing to stop further erosion and keep the moisture from running off.

The Republic also tackled the problem of land tenure in arid Spain, which reform-minded governments since Charles III had wrestled with in vain. The problem seemed eternal: extensive latifundia, impoverished laborers, exploited tenant farmers. The expropriation of church lands in the nineteenth century had worsened the situation, and the current depression made it acute. Andalusia was a traditional center of anarchist strength, but under Primo the UGT's Federation Nacional de Traba-jadores de la Tierra (FNTT, National Federation of Workers of the Land) had cut into the CNT's following. It now needed successful agrarian reform to win the landless laborers away from the anarchists, for whom the Republic was only another bourgeois regime.

Unfortunately, it was easier and more satisfying to pare down the church and the army than to legislate agrarian reform, a technical question for which neither Republicans nor Socialists were well equipped. They represented the city trying to legislate for a countryside it did not know. The two groups fell back on solutions based [167] less on a study of Spain than on foreign examples. Their reading of history had convinced the Republicans that the French Revolution had guaranteed popular support by distributing land to the peasants. Like their Liberal predecessors of the previous century, they wanted to make a loyal class of yeoman farmers. The Socialists, on the other hand, were enamored of the collectivization going on in Russia. They felt Spain needed to collectivize the land, especially if it were to become socialist rather than bourgeois.

The advances in agricultural technology in modern nations depend on exploitation in large units. The Republican plan to divide the land into small holdings, even if it might have been advisable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and in arid Spain it undoubtedly was not so even then), would have condemned Spain in the twentieth century to backwardness and unnecessary rural poverty. The Socialist plan for large collectives made more sense, but the land must produce more and not simply change hands if the rural standard of living were to rise. Greatly expanded irrigation offered one solution, as Prieto saw, but it could never by itself be sufficient for the magnitude of the problem. Mechanization was another possibility, but gainful occupations would have to be devised for the countless peasants and farm laborers whom machines would throw out of work. Rather than come to grips with such economic dilemmas, the deputies of the Cortes tackled the problem with their different ideological preconceptions.

The Cortes debated at length the rival proposals and finally passed a compromise bill in September 1932 that let the municipalities decide between collectivization and individual ownership. The state was to compensate former owners for expropriated property, except grandees, who were to suffer as a class for presumably plotting to overthrow the Republic. To do the job, the Cortes created an Institute of Agrarian Reform, endowed with a budget far too small to make significant changes. A maximum was fixed for individual holdings in each town, but large owners whose properties spread through many towns would hardly lose. The law was no help at all to peasants of the center and north, who were suffering from the collapse of agricultural prices, and it provided little hope for the laborers and tenant farmers of the south. Andalusian peasants, judging the FNTT's policy of patience and legality a failure, heeded the anarchists' call for violence and set fire to harvests and country estates. Throughout the south the landed classes experienced fear. The Cortes had rashly challenged one of the strongest forces of the Moderado order without making sure of their own natural allies.

The realization that the Republic's agrarian policy was not meeting Spain's needs made the Socialists restless within the coalition government by the end of 1932. Since the proclamation of the Republic, the UGT had been organizing peasants with great success, raising the [168] membership of its Federation of Land Workers from 100,000 to nearly 450,000 in one year. Largo Caballero, who was both minister of labor and head of the UGT, feared the effect of the Republic's inactivity on the Socialist following in the countryside. "An aspirin to cure an appendicitis," he called the legislation.⁽⁹⁾ It was too easy for the anarchists to blame the Socialists for the ills of Spain and pose as uncorrupted revolutionaries.

4. The uneasiness of the Socialists was symptomatic of the difficulties in which Azana's government found itself at the end of 1932 and through 1933. One of the major problems facing it was the world depression, which hurt critical areas of the economy. International trade was stagnant; Spain's in 1932-33 was only 30 percent of the 1928 level. World agricultural prices were dropping, affecting three major Spanish products--wheat, citrus fruits, and olive oil. Wheat was the major cash crop of vast areas of Castile and Aragon, and was also important in Andalusia. Valencia depended on the export of citrus fruits and much of Andalusia on that of olive oil. The collapse of prices hit these areas, The Republic continued to protect wheat with high tariffs, but a big harvest in 1932 depressed prices. Unfriendly landowners used the chance to blame the Republic for the rural depression, and a new conservative Agrarian party posed as the champion of the small peasants, who were disappointed at the lack of serious agrarian reform. For citrus and olive growers the government, though concerned, did nothing constructive. In addition, Great Britain, the chief market for Valencia oranges, cut off Spanish imports to give preference to its colonies. The depression also hurt the industrial north, the coal mines of Asturias and the iron industry of the Basques. Unemployment grew, and manufacturers who had welcomed the Republic were becoming critical. To the local workers, mostly organized by the UGT, the Socialists ministers seemed to be cooperating with a regime that was defending capitalism at their expense.

The economic outlook was not all bad. Catalan textile factories were as active as in the twenties (but there had been stagnation in the twenties), and the school construction and public works programs were keeping the building trades active. Spain had a half million unemployed, proportionally only one quarter of the figure of Germany and the United States. But since a much smaller percentage of the total population was industrialized in Spain, the figure indicates severe suffering in certain areas.

[169] In industry, the Socialists obtained the continuation of Primo's comités paritarios, renamed jurados mixtos (mixed juries), in each industry to decide labor disputes. Each jury consisted of six representatives of labor and six of industry, who would choose a thirteenth man as president. If they could not agree, the ministry of labor would choose the president, which became the usual case. Since Largo Caballero was minister of labor, the law enabled the Socialists to dictate the settlement of labor disputes throughout Spain, and keep wages stable. Employers complained bitterly, while the anarcho-syndicalists found the Republic much more dangerous to their brand of utopianism than the recent dictatorship. If it should satisfy the peasants and workers, the Socialists would get the credit.

These conflicts gave strength to the most militant anarchists of the CNT. They had their base in the semiclandestine FAI founded under Primo de Rivera. In 1932-33 extremists discredited the moderate leaders of the CNT, who had been ready to cooperate with the new Generalitat to create a workable Catalan political system. Militants inspired a series of strikes that made these years resemble 1919-23. The most violent were in Andalusia, with Seville at their center. In 1933 ten times as many days of work were lost through strikes as in 1928, three times as many as in 1931. An analysis of the strikes shows that their purpose was political, to keep the workers in a revolutionary mood, rather than economic, for there was no relation between frequency of strikes and economic distress.⁽¹⁰⁾

When the government opposed the strikers, it gave the anarchists further ammunition. On two disastrous occasions, government action led to bloodshed. During a period of tension in Extremadura in December 1931, peasants murdered four civil guards who tried to stop a parade at Castilblanco. The government brought the peasants to trial and six were condemned to death, although never executed. The case of Casas Viejas, a small pueblo in the povince of Cadiz, was more serious. In January 1933 several towns in the area proclaimed comunismo libertario, under anarchist leadership, and began to put it into effect. Called in to restore order, the Civil Guard besieged the leaders of Casas Viejas, killing five who held out in a house, and later fourteen prisoners in cold blood. Anarchists denounced the Republic as more inhuman than the monarchy, while conservatives also used the occasion to attack Azana, whom they claimed personally responsible.

It was a shocking event. Azana could prove that no one in the ministry had given orders to shoot prisoners, but nevertheless Casas Viejas cast an indelible stain on the fair name of the Republic, particularly among the working classes. Within the Socialist leadership,[170] Largo Caballero demanded that the party leave the ministry, and he began to gain strength against the moderate Prieto. Sensing the disaffection of the largest party in his coalition, Azana resigned in June 1933, but the Socialists remained loyal and he took office again.

At the same time events strengthened the conservative enemies of the government. The first attack of the monarchists on the Republic was a fiasco. In 1932 several of their number convinced the head of the Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo, who had abandoned Alfonso XIII in April 1931, that the Republic was ruining Spain and no longer represented the wishes of the people. Sanjurjo organized a pronuncia-tniento, but it was badly planned and was betrayed in advance to the authorities. When he struck on August 10, 1932, his attempt was easily crushed everywhere except Seville, where the CNT syndicates took up the defense of the Republic by declaring a general strike. Sanjurjo rapidly lost courage, his movement collapsed, and he went to prison. The government congratulated itself on its triumph, but those opposed to it learned from the experience. Future military plotters would know better than to rely on civilian accomplices, and the workers would not forget that their organizations had been the last defense of the Republic in a crisis.

For the time being, however, opposition to the Republican government was to be much more successful on the political level. The first threat to the Republican-Socialist coalition came from the Radical party under Lerroux, which was second in size to the Socialists within the Cortes. Lerroux had been in the ministry in 1931 and his party had supported the Republican government from the outset, particularly its anticlerical legislation. But he was strongly anti-Socialist, and in December 1931 he withdrew his support from any government that included Socialists. He soon became the leader of the parliamentary opposition. By 1933 the problems facing the Cortes were economic and social rather than constituional, and Radical criticism became more militant. Their deputy Diego Martinez Barrio led the attack on Azana over the Casas Viejas affair, and Lerroux began to tone down his anticlerical statements. These tactics succeeded in winning support among urban middle-class groups, worried by the extremism of the Socialists, the violence and strikes, and the imminent closing of the Catholic schools to which their children went.

In April 1933 municipal elections, the first since those that had destroyed the monarchy, demonstrated the decline of the Republican parties. The Radicals showed great strength, electing more municipal councilors than the Socialists, while monarchist parties elected almost a third of all the councilors. Azana's government was clearly in trouble. During 1933 another party came to the fore on the right. Moderate Catholics, those who supported the church but held no particular brief for the monarchy, had been groping for leadership. In April 1933 many[171] probably voted for the Radical municipal councilors, despite that party's recent anticlericalism. They were grouped around the organization of Catholic Action, led by Angel Herrera, editor of the moderate Catholic newspaper El Debate. In 1933 Herrera gave his support to a young deputy from Salamanca, Jose Maria Gil Robles, who headed a new party called Popular Action. Both men stood for liberalizing Spanish Catholicism, furthering social legislation, and working within the framework of the Republic. In this they were following the policies recommended by the Vatican since the 1890's, but strongly opposed by most Spanish prelates, who could see only atheism and freemasonry in the Republic. Gil Robles approached other Catholic groups, including the conservative monarchists, who made up in financial support what they lacked in popular following. He drew these parties together into an alliance known as the CEDA (the initials of Confederación Española de Derechas Aut6nomas, Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Parties of the Right), so as to be able to present a united front politically. This grouping, achieved while the Socialists were losing faith in the Republican coalition, was to be decisive in the evolution of the Republic.

Azana reached the height of his popularity in the fall of 1932. The agrarian law had been approved, he had returned from his triumphal tour to Barcelona to deliver the Catalan statute, and the Republic seemed to be settling down to a successful course. All this changed in 1933, beginning with the Casas Viejas affair, and continuing with the municipal elections. During the summer, as labor violence mounted, Alcalá Zamora, president of the Republic, felt called upon to bring in a ministry more in keeping with the spirit of the country. As a good Catholic, he was troubled by the government's commitment to close Catholic secondary schools on October 1, 1933 and primary schools in 1934, according to recent legislation. When the split between the Socialists and Republicans became acute in September, President Alcalá Zamora used his constitutional authority to dismiss Azana. The Socialists' fear of anarchist gains at their expense had finally shattered the coalition of 1931, with the most serious results imaginable for the Republic.

Alcalá Zamora called on Lerroux to form a government, but without Socialist support, Lerroux was unable to find a majority in the Cortes. Alcalá Zamora thereupon dissolved the Cortes. Elections for new cortes were held in November 1933. On the right, the CEDA provided a united front of Catholic parties, and it campaigned primarily against the anticlerical legislation of the Republicans. In some districts it formed electoral alliances with the Radicals to oppose the Socialists. On the left, the Socialists and Left Republican parties went to the polls independently, split by their recent falling out. The anarchists urged their followers not to vote, not to compromise with the bourgeois[172] state. Although the percentage of votes won by each group did not change much from 1931, because of the nature of the electoral law, the right won a resounding victory. The CEDA obtained 110 seats and other right-wing parties another 102. The Radicals also won 102 seats, while the Socialists got 60 and the left-wing republican parties of Azana's stamp less than 40. The electoral law was such that a small change in percentage of voters, plus changes in electoral alliances, could cause great shifts in the Cortes. The conservative victory was the result of a return of Catholics and conservatives to active politics and a desire among many middle-class voters to slow down social reforms. It was not the result of a wave of dissatisfaction with the Republic as a form of government. But for the parties of the left, it seemed that reaction was triumphant and that the democratic Republic was in danger. They did not trust Lerroux and they feared Gil Robles.

With the election of November 1933 the halcyon days of the Republic were over; lines were drawn and fears aroused that were to fill the next years with tension and turmoil. What the Republic stood for and what it tried to accomplish must be judged on the basis of the two years of the Constituent Cortes.

1. Article 1.

2. Article 81.

3. Article 10.

4. Salvador de Madariaga, Spain (2d. ed., London, Jonathan Cape, 1942), 307.

5. J. B. Trend, The Origins of Modem Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 168.

6. Madariaga, p. 316.

7. Quoted by Rafael Lapesa Melgar, in Carlos Blanco Aguinaga et al., La Uni-versidad (Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1969), p. 33.

8. Quoted in Jose Luis Cano, Garcia Lorca (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1962), p. 110.

9. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 263.

10. Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 96-97.