The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. Paul Preston
are elections and tolerance. It’s all well and good that we used to have such things when it was all kept between ourselves, just to decide whether liberals or conservatives or so-and-so or so-and-so would be in charge. But now, when it’s about law and order or revolution, we don’t need all this drivel about parliament and democracy. The answer here is to force this rabble to submit, by whatever means, if necessary cutting off their heads before they cut off ours.
One of Díaz de Entresotos’s close friends was a landowner, Alfonso Muñoz Lozano de Sosa, who was also an infantry lieutenant serving with the Assault Guards. On election day, 16 February, he came to Puebla de Alcocer with a machine-pistol. The village was also visited on that day by Ricardo Zabalza, the secretary general of the landworkers’ union, the FNTT, who was a Socialist candidate for Badajoz. Zabalza was eating alone at the local inn, with his head down, deeply aware of the hostility of his fellow middle-class customers. Díaz de Entresotos had lunch with Lieutenant Muñoz and wrote later of his visceral hatred of Zabalza (on the basis of this one sighting and without ever actually meeting him). Zabalza, a schoolmaster, was invariably neatly and cleanly dressed. However, such was Díaz de Entresotos’s paranoid loathing of the left that he saw only an abomination:
Zabalza looked just like what he was. Unkempt and repulsive, as befitted his damaging activities. He went around the villages advising riot and plunder. It was rumoured that, during the peasants’ strike of 1934, he had put a bomb on a railway line. I had no idea if this fact [sic] was true but, looking at this grim and dirty man, it seemed perfectly likely. How many times that day did I gaze on Muñoz’s machine-pistol, dwelling on the pleasure it would give me to open fire on that disgusting flesh!
When the election results began to come in, Muñoz commented ominously, ‘This has to be settled with bullets.’31 Their desire to see Zabalza dead would be satisfied four years later when he was executed by firing squad in a Francoist prison.32
The narrowness of the left-wing electoral victory reflected the polarization of Spanish society. The working masses, especially in the countryside, were in no mood for compromise after the so-called ‘two black years’ of vindictive right-wing government from 1933 to 1935. Both the rural and urban working classes demanded reparation for the post-October repression and the swift implementation of the reform programme elaborated by the leaders of the Popular Front electoral coalition. Considerable alarm ran through the middle classes when crowds gathered at prisons in Asturias and elsewhere calling for the release of those imprisoned after October 1934 and when groups of labourers presented themselves for work at the large estates. In many rural towns, there were attacks on the casinos (landowners’ clubs). In others, churches were burned in reprisal for their priests having justified the repression and using their pulpits for right-wing propaganda during the electoral campaign.
The new Prime Minister Manuel Azaña was horrified by the violence of popular agitation and rapidly embarked on a programme of conciliation. On 20 February 1936, his first cabinet meeting approved the return of the elected town councils and decreed an amnesty for those imprisoned after October 1934. The following day, Azaña made a radio broadcast to the nation in which he undertook to ‘heal the wounds caused in recent times’ and promised that his government would not seek revenge for the injustices of the last two years. He was confident that the popular ferment was a temporary phenomenon, fruit of the euphoria that accompanied the electoral victory. With a view to calming the agitation, on 29 February his cabinet issued a decree obliging employers to readmit workers sacked because of their ideology or for participating in strikes after 1 January 1934 and to compensate them with their pay for a minimum of thirty-nine days or a maximum of six months. The immediate reaction of a huge group of employers’ organizations was to issue a statement that this constituted a ‘true economic catastrophe’. In the short term, it appeared that the right in general expected from Azaña, as the dramatist Ramón del Valle Inclán put it, ‘what the sick expect from cod-liver oil’.33
However, Azaña faced debilitating problems. Despite his broadcast, the rural agitation continued. He was deeply depressed by news of events in Yecla in the north of Murcia, where seven churches, six houses and the property registry had been set alight.34 His ability to control the situation was severely undermined by the refusal of Francisco Largo Caballero to permit Socialist participation in the cabinet. Distrustful of Republican moderation, he had been prepared to support the electoral coalition only to secure political amnesty for the victims of the repression. Embittered by right-wing obstruction of reform between 1931 and 1933, Largo Caballero believed that only an exclusively Socialist cabinet could transform Spanish society. His overconfident view was that the Left Republicans should pursue their own programme and effectively exhaust themselves in carrying out the bourgeois stage of the revolution. They would then either make way for a Socialist cabinet or be engulfed by a fascist uprising which would itself trigger a successful revolution.
On 3 April 1936, Largo Caballero was interviewed by the American journalist Louis Fischer and he told him complacently: ‘The reactionaries can come back into office only through a coup d’état.’35 He was just mouthing revolutionary platitudes, but unfortunately the counterfeit nature of his revolutionary rhetoric was not perceived as such among the middle and upper classes. While their fears of revolution were intensified by right-wing propaganda, Largo Caballero’s policy prevented both revolution and strong government. It eventually ensured instead that an ineffectual Republican government would be in power while the military conspiracy was prepared.
The tension was such that Azaña felt obliged to calm things down. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘every night the left feared a military coup aimed at preventing communism. The right feared that the Soviet was on the horizon. I’ve never seen such panic or such a stupid situation. The Socialists have organized an intelligence system based on concierges, cleaners and chauffeurs, and they get all the below-stairs gossip.’ With the stock market falling and the streets deserted, on 3 April, Azaña made the first of only two major speeches to the new Cortes. In it, he mentioned the agitations and disturbances that had taken place in the countryside, stating that his cabinet had to deal with what he called ‘a national ulcer’.
Referring to the excesses of the first six weeks of his government, he asked: ‘can the masses, provoked and ill treated, those forced to starve for two years, those coming out of prison, be asked to behave, as we try to do, without resentment for the injustices which we remember only too well? We had to expect, and the Government did expect … that the first explosion of popular anger would see excesses that would undermine political authority and damage the Government.’ While condemning violent abuses, he also denounced those who sought to make political capital from them. He recognized that the tendency of Spaniards to resolve problems by violence engendered ‘a presumption of catastrophe’. ‘Many people are going around depressed,’ he declared, ‘imagining that Spain is going to wake up having been turned into a Soviet.’ While understanding how apolitical individuals might harbour such fears, he found it intolerable that the politically aware should foment panic in such a way as to create the atmosphere necessary for a coup d’état.
Azaña put the disorder into its proper context and went on to declare that his government aimed to remedy the disequilibrium at the heart of Spanish society. He acknowledged that this could mean harming the interests of those who benefited from ‘this horrendous imbalance’, adding that ‘we come to break up any abusive concentration of wealth wherever it may be’. While he did not expect an entire social class to commit suicide, he called on the wealthy to make sacrifices rather than face the consequences of the desperation provoked by social injustice. He ended prophetically, more so than he knew at the time, declaring that this was the last chance for the Republic because, if the redistribution of wealth he was advocating was opposed as the reforms of 1931–3 had been, then there would be no legal way forward. Astonishingly, the reaction to this ultimatum was widespread relief from the Communists to the extreme right. The stock market began to rise again and Azaña was regarded as a national hero.36
Although lacking Socialist participation, Azaña’s new government was determined to proceed rapidly with meaningful agrarian change. The task was rendered all the more difficult because of a rise in unemployment by the end of February 1936 to 843,872, or 17 per cent of the working population.37