The belief that the Spanish Civil War can essentially be reduced to a struggle between democracy and fascism, or fascism and communism, receives a salutary corrective as early as page two of Julián Casanova’s excellent new history of 1930s Spain. While internationally it may be seen as yet one more conflict in a decades-long ‘European civil war’ that ended in 1945, the author correctly insists that the Spanish war, initiated by a military coup against a democratically elected government, was a war of many wars, some of them with long histories: a war to settle deep social conflicts, precipitated from the complex chemistry of the first truly democratic regime in Spanish history; a war of class struggle; a war of religion, between obscurantism and modernization; an ideological war around the concepts of the nation and fatherland; between antagonistic political beliefs, waged in an ‘international context that had been thrown out of balance by crises of democracies and the onslaught of communism and fascism.’ As Casanova observes, Spain’s fate was little different from that of more than half of the twenty-eight European parliamentary or quasi-parliamentary democracies of the interwar years which, by the beginning of 1939, had succumbed to dictatorial regimes.
In 1930, Spain was still a predominantly agrarian country, although the industrial working class had doubled in size since the turn of the century, largely due to the economic advantages provided by Spain’s neutrality in the First World War and the boom of the 1920s. But the country was marked by a highly uneven socio-economic development. Industry was almost exclusively confined to the north and northeast, the Basque Country and Catalonia; in the south, a few thousand landowners held over two-thirds of the land while 750,000 landless day labourers eked out a living on near-starvation wages. These southern estates contrasted in turn with the small farmers of the north and northwest, working on plots too small to provide more than the means of subsistence. A combative working class was split between anarchists and socialists, divided by the question of the state and the working-class movement’s participation in politics. Both of these, alongside republicanism, were products of the second half of the nineteenth century, with anarchism predating socialism. It was especially strong among the industrial workers of Barcelona, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, cnt (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) claiming 400,000 members nationally in 1931; and, at the other geographical extreme, among the Andalusian rural proletariat. Even the cultural level demonstrated Spain’s uneven development: on the one hand, an illiteracy rate of nearly half of all those over ten years old; on the other, a group of dazzling poets, novelists and playwrights leading the country into a literary renaissance.
The Republic was inaugurated virtually without bloodshed on April 14, 1931, two days after the Monarchy’s overnight collapse as a result of republican victories in the major cities’ municipal elections. The King paid the price for having supported the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, from 1923—when, under the spell of the Bolshevik revolution, Spanish industrial and agrarian working-class mobilizations frightened the Monarchy’s dominant classes—until its collapse in 1930. The elections had been intended as no more than a straw in the wind to test public sentiment on the return to the Monarchy’s previous manipulated parliamentary regime; to the surprise of almost all, the resulting gale blew the King and the pseudo-democratic order away. Popular anti-monarchical sentiment had been mobilized, at the most, by a ‘revolutionary committee’ created by all shades of republican parties’ leaders in San Sebastián the previous summer which, after initial hesitation, the Socialist Party (psoe) had joined. The immediate execution of two middle-ranking republican army officers who had jumped the gun no doubt increased anti-monarchical sentiment. Nonetheless, the Republic came, as it were, as a bolt from the blue, without mass struggles and the formation of a solid republican base; nonplussed, not knowing what to play, some local bands struck up the Marseillaise in celebration of the Republic’s advent.
The Republic’s five years of pre-war existence divides naturally into three periods: the Republican-Socialist biennium of 1931–33 which legislated sweeping reforms; a second biennium of centre-right government and counter-reform (1933–35); and the final period, five months of solely Left Republican government, which lasted until the military rising in mid-July 1936. It is to Casanova’s great credit that he studies the Republic in detail—it takes up one-third of the book—rather than treating it as a mere preliminary to the Civil War, while keeping a keen weather-eye on comparative events in other interwar European powers. Nothing in the Republic’s origins preordained its fatal outcome, he writes, since the necessary criterion of stability, that a ‘large majority of the population accepted, or at least tolerated, the democracy introduced so swiftly’, seemed initially to hold, whether sustained by hope or stunned by the whirlwind of events. The Constituent Cortes which, after the general elections of June 1931, enjoyed a massive Republican majority, demonstrated no radicalization of Spanish political life; no fascists, no communists, no anarcho-syndicalists. The non-Republican right was so miniscule an opposition, however, that it could play little or no part in shaping the Constitution, let alone represent ‘the views of large sectors of Spanish society’ who Casanova stresses, possessed ‘strong economic, social and cultural power’. Following a tradition harking back to the first modern Spanish Constitution of 1812, the coalition fashioned the Constitution as ‘a programmatic charter of what the Republicans already in power believed necessary to modernize Spain’, rather than to provide a level parliamentary playing field for peaceful contention for power.
Alongside genuine universal suffrage and a cabinet responsible to a single-chamber parliament went the Constitution’s ‘highly anticlerical’ religious reforms: freedom of religion; separation of Church and state; the end of Church-run schools and the secularization of all education; abolition of state stipends for priests; the dissolution of the Jesuits and the introduction of civil marriage, divorce and burial. Some of these were controversial matters even for Republicans: the Prime Minister and Interior Minister, both practising Catholics, registered their ‘No’ votes and promptly resigned. As Casanova notes, the struggle between clericalism and anticlericalism ‘was sharper in Spain than in any other European country of the time’.
By the 1930s, the public demonstration of Spanish anticlericalism and the popular violence which on notorious occasions accompanied it were already a century old. This was, on the one hand, a socio-cultural phenomenon irreducible to a simplistic causality, although its roots undoubtedly lay deep in the past, in the Church’s ideological and economic power under the ancien régime and its unremitting defence of the true faith when it—or more correctly, the Inquisition—raised intolerance and intransigence to the altar of sanctity. On the other hand, Spanish anticlericalism’s political aspect can be more precisely dated, for it coincided with the early-nineteenth century’s liberal revolutions, which attempted to sweep aside all vestiges of the Old Order and with them, in particular, clerical power over society. The first massacre of clergy and church burnings occurred in 1835 in Madrid on rumours that monks had started a cholera epidemic by poisoning drinking water. A century later, the Church had still not come to terms with modernity and secularization; it was accustomed to educating the children of the privileged and ignoring those of the popular classes; to providing welfare for the underprivileged meek; to fostering scab unions and to siding with employers against ‘rebellious’ workers, and to offering consolation to the poor in the next world, not this one. The increasingly unionized working class confronted the Church with the enmity it reserved for the class enemy, while the progressive—essentially metropolitan—middle-class professionals envisaged it as a power hostile to the country’s modernization and hoped to legislate it into submission. Both overlooked the fact that the dominant classes had for centuries purveyed a shared religion to enforce their ideological hegemony and were not likely to surrender it easily. There were thus, as Casanova observes, three Spains: one that was extremely Catholic, anti-socialist and law-abiding, another moderately Catholic and a third highly anticlerical, with ‘more Catholicism in the north than in the south, among landowners than among the dispossessed, among women than among men . . .’
It was soon evident, moreover, that the coalition’s religious policy was providing a fertile terrain for the reaction to recruit and regroup its forces in defence of religion, public order, property and the family, resulting in the formation of the mass Catholic political party, the ceda (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas). The religious measures—few of which were enforced because the coalition collapsed before the date on which they were to come into effect—nonetheless had a dramatic impact on pious Catholics, already seared before the Republic was a month old by an outburst of anticlerical incendiarism in response to an insignificant monarchist youth provocation. The Republic’s founders never took seriously enough the Catholic reaction, as the author justly observes; the church burnings in Madrid and Málaga, which the government did not move immediately to stop, remained vividly etched in Catholics’ memories.