The Second Republic: Myths and Realities

Eighty years on, Spain’s brief democratic experience in the 1930s continues to provoke much debate among historians. Certainly, the Second Republic was the most serious attempt by Spaniards to make the transition from liberalism to mass democracy. As is well known, this experiment was cut short by a military rebellion that produced a brutal Civil War and a fiercely repressive dictatorship for almost four decades that dashed hopes of a pluralist Spain where the transfer of political power would be peaceful and orderly. Unsurprisingly, the longevity of the Franco regime meant that the Second Republic became the most obvious reference point for Spanish democrats by the 1970s. And it became even more attractive when compared to the dictatorship which signified political regression, a rejection not only of an emerging democratic system but also of a constitutional and parliamentary tradition established in the nineteenth century that had gradually extended civil and political rights.

Yet retrospectively evaluating the Republican experience in the light of the Civil War and Francoist regime does little to explain its significance or its eventual failure. The rebellion of 1936 not only marked a clear constitutional break but also indicated that the rebels had more military and civilian support than in previous coups such as in August 1932. This backing was essential in transforming a weak conspiracy into a major insurrection capable of dominating large parts of Spain. Moreover, the July 1936 rising does not in itself explain the almost immediate collapse of the state in those areas that remained under the control of the Republican government, an occurrence without precedent in other civil wars of the period. For months, this government had to share power with a multitude of revolutionary committees and political organisations of ‘a new type’ organized by parties and trade unions that openly rejected the ‘bourgeois’ state. Therefore, if one needs to provide an adequate explanation for the lack of confidence in democratic institutions and the evident lure of insurrection by the summer of 1936, the Republic has to be studied in terms of its own specific characteristics and internal evolution. After all, civil war was not necessarily likely, let alone inevitable.

Such an approach characterizes most Spanish historiography on the early 1930s. But there are still studies that place the Republic as a mere prelude to the Civil War, and depict political conflict and violence before 1936 as preliminaries of the fratricidal conflict. These popular historians, more interested in selling books than in historical rigour, deliberately invite polemic with their reproduction of Nationalist and Republican propaganda. What is disappointing is that some professional historians (such as Josep Fontana, Ángel Viñas and Eduardo González Calleja) sympathize with these one-sided interpretations, mostly with the reproduction of Republican propaganda found in the books of Francisco Espinosa, Francisco Moreno Gómez and Francisco Sánchez Pérez, ¹ and portray a bipolarization of Spain that did not exist before the military rebellion.

Thus an examination of the Second Republic from the perspective of the Civil War has produced some important problems. The first is the assertion that Spain was socio-politically divided into two irreconcilable blocs (revolutionaries/counter-revolutionaries, reformists/reactionaries, republicans/anti-republicans, exploiters/exploited, leftists/rightists, etc) from April 1931. This ignores the evident fact of intense internal conflict within each so-called ‘bloc’. Few non-specialists are aware of the fierce disputes within the left between Socialists and anarchists, Communists and Socialists, Socialists and left Republicans, especially between 1931 and 1934. Similarly, talk of a monolithic ‘right’ overlooks the conflictual relationship between the Catholic CEDA and the Republican centre-right on one side and authoritarian monarchists on the other, mostly between 1933 and 1936.

Another problem is the conflation of the Second Republic with the ‘Republicans’ of the Civil War or the political ideas of left Republicans and the Socialist Party. Although the latter clearly shaped the 1931 Constitution, these were not the only ‘Republican models’ with popular support. One should not forget the Republican centre-right’s visions of the Republic in 1931 or the alternatives formulated by the CEDA and the Radical Party after November 1933, even if they never came to fruition. If anything defines the Second Republic, it is not the political dominance of the ‘left’ but the absence of a hegemonic party or coalition of parties as the early 1930s witnessed the rapid emergence of a plural but also highly fragmented political system that encompassed all parties to the right of the Communist Party and to the left of the monarchists.

The third problem is even more serious: interpretations of the Second Republic are too often excessively based on the writer’s own sympathies towards one of the opposing sides in the Civil War. This is even true of some academic history, even if it is disguised with a pseudo-scientific methodology. These narratives are grounded on myths generated by the extreme right and left during the Republican era itself. Thus Francoist propaganda was modelled on the denunciations of the Republic made by authoritarian monarchist groups such as Renovación Española, which had an unambiguously ‘catastrophic’ attitude towards the Second Republic. Put simply, the extreme right saw April 1931 as the beginning of a revolutionary process led by the workers’ and republican atheistic ‘left’ that intended to destroy traditional Catholic Spain; any notion that the Republic could be conservative or liberal-democratic was dismissed as a contradiction in terms. Indeed, since there could be no accommodation with the ‘revolution’, it was held, the Republic had to be violently overthrown. Such were the ideological bases of Francoism, which still has its defenders today, although not in the academic sphere.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of ‘Republican’ mythologies. One has to use the plural to encompass the diverse narratives of Socialists, Communists and anarchists (among others). This diversity helps explain why the vanquished were never able to institutionalize a common narrative of the Second Republic during and after the Civil War. Yet in many respects, leftist mythologies are similar to their Francoist counterparts. Indeed, they both are crude one-sided narratives of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’. Paradoxically, the fact that the left lost the Civil War, and were thus unable to impose their views of the Second Republic after 1939, meant that these views were more likely to re-emerge after Franco died in 1975.

In general terms, ‘Republican’ mythologies most commonly identify the Second Republic with the programme of left Republicans and the Socialists, depicted as a reformist, democratic and progressive attempt to defend the interests of the ‘oppressed’ (that is, workers and peasants) against the traditional ruling oligarchy of landowners, capitalists, priests and military officers. The ‘right’ was only seen as the political expression of an oligarchy determined to protect its privileges by legal (the accidentalism of the CEDA) or illegal means (rebellion). Since the ‘right’ was prepared to use violence to destroy the Republic, it was only understandable that leftist parties and trade unions responded in kind. More generally, violence, when carried out by the ‘left’, was merely a reaction to socio-economic injustices. ²

That such interpretations, pitting ‘oppressors’ against the ‘oppressed’, flourished in the immediate aftermath of Franco’s demise is less surprising than the fact that they still have their passionate defenders today in the academic community. In the context of the supposed ‘recuperation of historical memory’, some historians have sought to institutionalize an ‘official truth’ that attributes to the ‘Republicans’ (including left-wing Socialists, Communists and anarchists) the honourable label of defenders of democracy (and thus deserving of state recognition) while their enemies were ‘anti-democratic’ or simply ‘fascist’. Interestingly, these historians are the same ones that criticise the ‘low quality’ of contemporary Spanish democracy for its failure to break with its ‘Francoist’ origins and base its legitimacy on the ‘antifascist crusade’. Although it is obvious that the 1978 Constitution or current political praxis have nothing to do with the Francoist dictatorship, these historians do not admit debate, insulting those who dare to criticise their theses.

These Spanish historians have their counterparts among historians of Spain from abroad. One example is Chris Ealham, whose recent review in this journal of two studies (El precio de la exclusion written by myself and Manuel Álvarez Tardío and The Spanish Second Republic Revisited edited by Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Fernando del Rey) preferred to question the professionalism of the authors rather than discussing the theses of the books themselves. Thus Ealham took offence at the fact that the former’s publisher was owned by a man who belonged to a Catholic Church organization, and thought it important to point out that two historians who had provided chapters for the latter had also published articles in journals connected with the FAES, a think-tank associated with the conservative Popular Party. Does Ealham really think that working with a particular publisher is evidence of a nefarious right-wing ‘revisionist’ conspiracy? In any case, although Ealham repeatedly condemned the authors as ideologically partisan, he failed to inform the reader that he writes for journals such as International Review, a publication closely related to the far-left British Socialist Workers Party. ³ Regretfully, Ealham’s invective is only too representative of the reaction to any questioning of the antifascist ‘last great cause’.

Ealham’s review is therefore nothing more than an attempt to discredit historians who do not share his views on the Second Republic. Yet even more worrying than Ealham’s piece is the fact that the prestigious Hispanist Paul Preston has also failed to provide a nuanced and balanced depiction of the Second Republic in his recent The Spanish Holocaust. The chapters that deal with the period between 1931 and 1936 are highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of political exclusion and the underlying hatreds that existed before the Civil War. But overall, Preston simply reproduces his theses about the destruction of the Republic that first appeared in the 1970s. For example, he argues that the climate of violence that emerged in the spring of 1936 was produced exclusively by the ‘right’. This claim, despite its proximity to ‘heroic’ Republican narratives, is entirely legitimate if Preston is able to provide new evidence to substantiate it. But he does not.

More generally, Preston ignores the most important recent work on the Second Republic. There is little to suggest that he has considered the work of José Manuel Macarro or Manuel Alvarez Tardío ⁴ on the nature and limits of the left-Republican/Socialist project between 1931 and 1933, which questions the degree to which it was based on liberal-democratic principles. Moreover, both Alvarez Tardío and I ⁵ have shown that the Republic’s constitutional framework was constructed to suit partisan political interests that did not even promote the political integration of the Republican centre-right, let alone those absent from the coalition that took power in April 1931 following the departure of Alfonso XIII. This bias can particularly be seen in the Republican electoral system which was designed to favour the left-Republican and Socialist coalition. This reflected the refusal of these left-wing parties to accept that their main political rivals on the centre and right, the CEDA and the Radical Party, could ever form a government; indeed, in November 1933 their leaders demanded that President Alcalá-Zamora annul the elections results once it became evident that the left had lost. ⁶

Similarly, Preston places much emphasis on rural discontent but does not seem to have consulted the aforementioned research of José Manuel Macarro, Fernando del Rey or José Antonio Parejo. ⁷ Their work reveals the complex socio-political realities of the Spanish countryside, in which smallholders and tenant farmers (rather than landless day labourers in latifundista areas) played the leading role in conflicts between 1931 and 1936. Moreover, political allegiances were not always based on ‘class’; many that Preston considers ‘oppressed’, such as smallholders, tenant farmers and day labourers, supported conservative parties and indeed some would even enter the fascist Falange in the spring of 1936. An excessive reliance on dated historiography can also be seen in Preston’s treatment of significant issues. For example, Preston, when stressing the important role that ‘the rightist offensive’ played in the radicalization of the Socialist Party ignores Santos Juliá’s excellent analysis, which demonstrates that the process of radicalization had begun long before the centre-right took power in November 1933. ⁸ Likewise, the British historian does not take into account Stanley Payne’s nuanced and multipolar account of the Republican crisis from 1934, in which the American Hispanist significantly develops the interpretative framework elaborated by Juan Linz to explain the collapse of European liberal democracy in the interwar period. ⁹

In sum, given the complex and polemical nature of the Second Republic, it is essential that historians offer balanced and comprehensive explanations for the problems faced by Spanish democracy in the 1930s. While it is entirely legitimate to hold different opinions, debate should not be based on simplistic one-sided interpretations of the Republic. And of course, the duty of the historian is not to revive and deepen the traumatic divisions of the Civil War, especially as these have been overcome by Spaniards for decades.