The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. Paul Preston
region (or Fourth Organic Division, as it was called). General Batet employed common sense and restraint in restoring the authority of the central government. He ordered his men to be ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ before any provocations. In so preventing a potential blood bath, he incurred the wrath of General Francisco Franco, who was directing the repression from Madrid. Franco had sent warships to bombard the city and troops of the Foreign Legion. Batet ignored Franco’s recommendation to use the Foreign Legion to impose savage punishment on the Catalans and thus kept casualties to a minimum. In avoiding the exemplary violence that Franco regarded as essential, however, Batet was paving the way to his own execution by the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War.
The only place where the protests of the left in October 1934 were not easily brushed aside was in Asturias. There, spontaneous rank-and-file militancy impelled the local PSOE leaders to go along with a revolutionary movement organized jointly by the UGT, the CNT and, belatedly, the Communists, united in the Alianza Obrera (Workers’ Alliance). The local Socialist leaders of the mineworkers knew that the strike was doomed without support from the rest of Spain but they opted to stay with their men. The Minister of War, the Radical Diego Hidalgo, had given Franco informal control of operations. He made him his ‘adviser’ and used him as an unofficial Chief of the General Staff, by dint of marginalizing his own staff and dutifully signing the orders drawn up by Franco. The Minister’s decision was entirely comprehensible. Franco had detailed knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since his marriage to an Asturian woman, Carmen Polo. What delighted the Spanish right was that Franco responded to the rebellious miners in Asturias as if he were dealing with the recalcitrant tribes of Morocco.
To this end, Franco brought in the hardened mercenaries of Spain’s colonial Army of Africa. Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made other more liberal officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem before him with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. The miners organized a revolutionary commune with transport, communications, hospital facilities and food distribution, but had few weapons. Armed largely with dynamite, they were reduced to submission by both heavy artillery attacks and bombing raids. The Spanish Foreign Legion committed atrocities, many women and children were killed and, when the principal Asturian cities, Gijón and Oviedo, fell, the army carried out summary executions of leftists. Franco commented casually to a journalist, ‘The war in Morocco, with the Regulares and the Legion, had a certain romantic air, an air of reconquest. But this war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’
The Asturian rising demonstrated to the left that it could carry out change only by legal means. It also demonstrated to the right that its best chance of preventing change lay with the instruments of violence provided by the armed forces. In that sense, it marked the end for the Republic. To Gerald Brenan, the great British writer on Spain who lived in Málaga at the time, it was ‘the first battle of the Civil War’. The conflict did not end with the defeat of the miners. As their leader, Belarmino Tomás, put it, ‘our surrender today is simply a halt on the road, where we make good our mistakes, preparing for the next battle’. There could be no going back. The October revolution had terrified the middle and upper classes; and in their terror they took a revenge which determined the left that they must reunite in order to win power electorally. The Socialist movement was, in fact, badly scarred by the events of October 1934. The repression unleashed in the aftermath of the October rising was truly brutal. In Asturias, prisoners were tortured. Thousands of workers were imprisoned. Virtually the entire UGT executive was in jail. The Socialist press was silenced.
Nothing was done in the next fifteen months to reconcile the hostilities aroused by the revolution and its repression. Despite the CEDA’s much-vaunted aim of beating the revolution by a programme of social reform, proposals for moderate land reform and for tax reforms were defeated by right-wing intransigence. Indeed, Manuel Giménez Fernández, the CEDA Minister of Agriculture, encountered embittered opposition within his own party to his mildly reformist plans. He was denounced as the ‘white Bolshevik’. There was room only for the punishment of the October rebels. Gil Robles demanded the ‘inflexible application of the law’. Companys was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. The thousands of political prisoners remained in jail. A vicious campaign was waged against Azaña in an unsuccessful attempt to prove him guilty of preparing the Catalan revolution. The Catalan autonomy statute was suspended.
Then, when the CEDA failed to secure the death penalty for two Asturian Socialist leaders, its three ministers resigned. Gil Robles thus resumed his tactic of provoking cabinet crises in order to weaken the Radicals. He hoped to move crab-like towards taking power himself. He was rewarded in early May when Lerroux’s new government contained five Cedistas, including Gil Robles himself as Minister of War. It was a period of open reaction. Landlords halved wages and order was forcibly restored in the countryside. Gil Robles purged the army of loyal Republican officers and appointed known opponents of the regime to high positions – Francisco Franco became Chief of the General Staff, Manuel Goded Inspector General and Joaquin Fanjul Under-Secretary for War. In a number of ways – regimental reorganization, motorization, equipment procurement – Gil Robles continued the reforms of Azaña and effectively prepared the army for its role in the Civil War.
In response to rightist intransigence, the left was also growing in strength, unity and belligerence. In jail, political prisoners were soaking up revolutionary literature. Outside, the economic misery of large numbers of peasants and workers, the savage persecution of the October rebels and the attacks on Manuel Azaña combined to produce an atmosphere of solidarity among all sections of the left. After his release from jail, Azaña, and Indalecio Prieto, who was in exile in Belgium, began a campaign to ensure that the disunity behind the 1933 electoral defeat would not be repeated. Azaña worked hard to reunite the various tiny Republican parties, while Prieto concentrated on countering the revolutionary extremism of the Socialist left under Largo Caballero. A series of gigantic mass meetings in Bilbao, Valencia and Madrid were addressed by Azaña in the second half of 1935. The enthusiasm for left-wing unity shown by the hundreds of thousands who came from all over Spain to attend these discursos en campo abierto (open-air speeches) helped convince Largo Caballero to abandon his opposition to what eventually became the Popular Front. At the same time, the Communists, prompted by Moscow’s desire for alliance with the democracies, frightened of being excluded, also used their influence with Largo Caballero in favour of the Popular Front. They knew that, in order to give it the more proletarian flavour that he wanted, Largo Caballero would insist on their presence. In this way, the Communists found a place in an electoral front which, contrary to rightist propaganda, was not, in Spain, a Comintern creation but the revival of the 1931 Republican–Socialist coalition. The left and centre left closed ranks on the basis of a programme of amnesty for prisoners, of basic social and educational reform and trade union freedom.
When a combination of Gil Robles’ tactic of erosion of successive cabinets and the revelation of two massive scandals involving followers of Lerroux led to the collapse of the Radicals, the CEDA leader assumed that he would be asked to form a government. Alcalá Zamora, however, had no faith in the CEDA leader’s democratic convictions. After all, only some weeks before Gil Robles’ youthful followers of the JAP had starkly revealed the aims of the legalist tactic in terms which called to mind the attitude of Joseph Goebbels to the 1933 elections in Germany: ‘with the weapons of suffrage and democracy, Spain must prepare itself to bury once and for all the rotting corpse of liberalism. The JAP does not believe in parliamentarianism, nor in democracy.’ It is indicative of Alcalá Zamora’s suspicion of Gil Robles that, throughout the subsequent political crisis, he had the Ministry of War surrounded by Civil Guards and the principal garrisons and airports placed under special vigilance. Gil Robles was outraged and, in desperation, he investigated the possibilities of staging a coup d’état. The generals whom he approached, Fanjul, Goded, Varela and Franco, felt that, in the light of the strength of working-class resistance during the Asturian events, the army was not yet ready for a coup.
Elections were announced for February. Unsurprisingly, the election