Violence,Continuity,and the Spanish State: Some Considerations

Massacres and repressive regimes have plagued mankind since the beginning of time. Yet, the emergence of organized state governments by the twentieth century made such phenomena all the more horrific, increasing the scale and efficiency with which death could be inflicted on political, ideological, ethnic, and social enemies. Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, this new kind of state-led extermination demanded a new term: genocide. The American historian Timothy Snyder recently broadened our understanding of this phenomenon, expanding it beyond its Nazi-centered perspective, to refer to Central and Eastern Europe as the ‘Bloodlands’. In his book he outlines how ideology and deep cultural and ethnic tensions planted the seeds for the exterminatory policies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Indeed, Snyder notes the extraordinary state-sponsored violence by these two states separated ‘east European history from west European history’. ¹

Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust disputes this last assertion. ² Given the scale and proportion of deaths resulting from the Spanish Civil War and the bloody repression of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which followed, Preston rightly seeks to place the Spanish experience firmly in the context of the broader ‘European Civil War’. Preston’s use of the word ‘holocaust’ – stopping short of the term ‘genocide’ used by a handful of Spanish historians – makes the historical and moral association of the Francoist cause with that of Nazi Germany all the more explicit. While such links make some scholars – as well as a significant minority of the Spanish population – uneasy, few historians of twentieth-century Spain would dispute the fact that the Spanish Civil War and the first phase of the Franco regime were particularly violent and bloody.

This leaves us with the fundamental question: why was Spain one of the more extreme examples of the European Civil War? The Franco regime propagated a narrative that the violence of the 1930s was the inevitable consequence of the Second Republic’s attempts to introduce reforms inspired by foreign ideologies which supposedly were ill-suited to Spanish civilization. Spain therefore needed the firm hand of a paternalistic ruler that would purge and protect Spain from harmful, ‘anti-Spanish’ influences. After Franco died in 1975, Spaniards attempted to prove him wrong by embarking on the construction of a new democratic state that would share the values and politics of their neighbors in the (western) European community of nations. It was in this context that the ‘failure’ of the Second Republic became a major topic of interest for scholars. How could Spain make a break with its unhappy past, to no longer resemble the old ‘Black Legend’ stereotype as represented by the infamous Spanish Inquisition?

Rejecting the stereotype that Spaniards were predisposed to violence by culture and temperament, two academics sought to provide structural explanations for Spain’s apparent departure from the ‘European path’ to democratic modernity. Given the historic political role played by the Spanish military, and the fact that a military rebellion had sparked the civil war which ultimately destroyed Spain’s first attempt at democracy, it was natural that Manuel Ballbé and Diego López Garrido would focus on what was commonly called ‘the military problem’ in their respective works. ³ Since General Franco had entrusted the continuation of his regime to his comrades-in-arms – which found its most notable manifestation in the attempted coup of February 1981 – there was a sense of urgency in resolving the ‘military problem’. In his well-researched and pioneering book, López Garrido noted the deeply ingrained role of the military in a highly centralized Spanish state in the nineteenth century. This embedding of the army officers in the civilian state structure was best exemplified by the creation and expansion of the paramilitary constabulary: the Civil Guard. Since López Garrido equated military power with the political structure of the feudalistic ancien régime, he saw it as a direct impediment to the development of bourgeois democracy in Spain. Ballbé followed a very similar argument, with an important difference: while López Garrido recognized the reforming efforts of the Second Republic, the key argument in Ballbé was that its ‘authoritarian’ statesmen lacked the will and desire to break the cycle of a militarized public order apparatus. This not only was the main cause of violence in the pre-Civil War Republic, but the overlapping of military and civilian competencies implicitly and explicitly gave the military a role in Spain’s internal political situation. This, in turn, provided the foundation which allowed the military to forcibly usurp political power from their civilian counterparts.

While more nuanced views of the evolution and dynamics of the modern Spanish state have emerged in the last two decades, ⁴ López Garrido and Ballbé – particularly the latter – continue to exert a strong influence over the historiography of 1930s Spain. ⁵ A group of scholars have attempted to build on Ballbé’s thesis by applying the theories of Historical Sociology to the study of protest, mobilization, and radicalization during the Second Republic. ⁶ In their works, the militarization/authoritarian paradigm remains key to understanding the breakdown of Spain’s ‘process of democratization’ and for engendering the violence of the period. The primary determinant of political action, argues Rafael Cruz, is the manner in which a government employs its ‘despotic power’ to control public life. The exclusionary policies pursued during the various Republican governments combined with a largely unreformed militarized public order apparatus, was a recipe that inevitably provoked violence. The Republican governments, he affirms, ‘did not suffer from a lack of authority, but an excess of authoritarianism’. ⁷ Indeed, the issue of exclusion has become an important focus of recent works examining the alienation of Spanish Catholics from the democratic Republic, ⁸ as well as understanding the anti-regime actions of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacíon Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). ⁹ Partisans of the latter have found such explanations a useful justification of the CNT’s unhelpful role during the pre-war Republic, criticizing the ‘paranoia’ of its governments, who created a ‘new economy of repression’ that surpassed the preceding monarchy and dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera and was legitimized by a ‘democratic ideology of domination’. ¹⁰

These studies have generated important debates and have made significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of 1930s Spain. They have modified – and some have outright challenged – the previous perception of the Second Republic as a noble experiment in democracy toppled by the military. While most historians would draw a sharp distinction between the nature of the violence witnessed during the Civil War and that experienced in the antebellum Republic – at least in reference to the Spanish Left – the militarization paradigm still remains crucial to their analyses of the relatively high violence of the period. At the very least, this casts some shadow of responsibility over the pre-war Republican governments for the bloodbath which followed the military rebellion of July 1936, as well as setting the foundations for the distrust and sometimes violent divisions which plagued the left-wing coalition of forces during the war. ¹¹ It is therefore important to evaluate some of the ideas and evidence underpinning the militarization/authoritarian paradigm.

The logical starting place is also, surprisingly, the weakest point of the historiographical literature: the police forces of the Spanish state. In particular, the Civil Guard is seen as emblematic of the power of the military within the Spanish state, and of the violence purportedly inherent in a force of its nature. The fact that many of its personnel defected to the military rebellion – and became a key component in the bloody repression that followed in its wake – is seen as evidence for the perception that the corps was fundamentally anti-republican and an inherent enemy of the regime. Accordingly, Republican statesmen have come under heavy criticism by both contemporaries and later historians for not dissolving the force. While there were serious shortcomings to Republican policies – such as the failure to equip civil guards with non-lethal means of crowd control – there are fundamental problems with the traditional conceptions of this issue. The one-dimensional and ahistorical, static view of the Civil Guard presented by most scholars is maintained primarily by the absence of serious research into the corps. Despite routine assertions about the mentalities and loyalties of civil guards, and the important historic role attributed to them, little to no direct evidence is provided from primary sources originating from within the force itself. Under any circumstances this would be considered poor historical methodology, but it is common practice amongst historians of Spain when referring to the Civil Guard or, for that matter, any of the other Spanish police forces. The Civil Guard’s military nature was only one of many influences on its personnel, and often not even the most relevant – particularly when trying to understand their reactions to the 1936 military rebellion and their use of violence before, during, and after the Civil War. ¹² Unfortunately, due to the deeply ingrained nature of the militarization paradigm – and stereotypes about the Civil Guard that are equally ingrained, and useful for certain historical narratives – new research on this topic has been met with personal smears and blatant distortions of its findings rather than serious engagement with its findings. ¹³

As for the Republic itself, the militarization paradigm – particularly as presented by Ballbé – is particularly unhelpful when coupled with a broad ‘continuity’ argument which focuses selectively on various absolutes while marginalizing important relative differences, ¹⁴ as well as not giving enough attention to historical context. Virtually all of the criticisms of the republican attempts at reform have centered on the first two years of Republican-Socialist administrations. The supposed inadequacies of their reforms of both the military and the police are presented as directly linked to defection of the latter two institutions in July 1936, and thus the ultimate defeat of the Republic’s democratic experiment. Yet, this is problematic on several levels. First, from April 1931 until the summer of 1933, there was a clear and consistent policy of steadily bringing the military and the security forces under the bureaucratic control of civilians. ¹⁵ This policy was extended to more explicitly political matters as well, such as the punishment of prominent officers like General Sanjurjo after he publically spoke out and then later rebelled against the government. Indeed, until July 1936, the military was largely impotent to prevent any of those reforms that most of its personnel opposed. Furthermore, they had little direct role in the various major political crises before the Civil War itself, all of which were primarily civilian in their origin. Second, there was an equally clear policy on the part of the Center-Right governments to increase the influence of the military. This was due to their desire to use the military as an effective counterweight against the organized working classes, and thus keep themselves in power. Not only did these ‘counter-reforms’ undermine the efforts of the previous Center-Left governments to impose political marginalization on the military, they also make nonsense of the ‘continuity’ argument as applied to the policies of the 1931–3 period. Ultimately, it was the Right’s active encouragement of the military to intervene politically – particularly in 1936, after they found themselves out of power again – that mattered most in regards to ‘the military problem’, not the supposed side-effects of overlapping competencies.

What of the ‘authoritarian’ approach of the Republican-Socialist governments to protest and dissent? Again, context is perhaps more helpful than theory. As Helen Graham said of the war-time Republic, criticisms of the ‘constitutional flaws’ of its governments are based ‘not in the real context of [their] time, place and culture, but against some idea of Republican perfection’. ¹⁶ We should keep in mind that the republican project was not primarily about democratic conflict resolution, nor protection and representation of all interests. The regime was conceived as transformative in nature, a process that would become progressively more democratic once Spain had passed through a necessary transition phase from a monarchical to a republican society. The most fundamental issue was to consolidate the regime, and to have those faithful to the republican cause at the helm of government. The Republican-Socialist coalition understood that reforms would take time, and that there were those on the Left and the Right who would attempt to take advantage of any difficulties to undermine this process and topple the regime. Several contemporary European examples gave them solid grounds for concerns about the potential for this latter scenario. Indeed, it should be noted that it was the perceived weakness of the regime that invited armed challenges from both the Left and Right. Violence does not always beget violence. The resiliency of the Republic in the face of the attempted military coup of August 1932, for example, deterred would-be conspirators for several years. This fact was well-understood by those on the Right, who did their utmost during the spring and summer of 1936 to create an impression of a dysfunctional and compromised Popular Front government and a consequent descent into anarchy. Their efforts, combined with the assassination of one of the leading politicians of the Spanish Right, successfully persuaded enough of the military to rebel against the government – with disastrous consequences for the Republic, and for Spain.

Perhaps the better approach to this issue is not that of theory-driven concepts on ‘democratization processes’, but a more historically based question: Given the dynamics of the time, could the Republic have been less ‘exclusionary’? When considering the deep-rooted problems that needed tackling, and the deep divisions within Spanish society, could any government have successfully balanced the various vested interests – which were often violently hostile to one another – and still carried out meaningful reform? The very likely answer is ‘no’. In fact, competing groups during the Second Republic did not view issues as amenable to compromises between conflicting interests, but rather as occasions for the ‘victory’ of one side and ‘absolute defeat’ of the other. Ideology was crucial in forming such perspectives and thus contributed to a general permissiveness of violence. ¹⁷ As is apparent from the first few chapters of Preston’s Spanish Holocaust, there were influential groups on the Right who plotted against the Republic before any ‘controversial’ legislation was passed. While events would come to give them rallying points around which to mobilize popular support, such elements were never interested in using their considerable resources to help consolidate the regime. Instead, Preston argues, they employed them to oppose reforms, inflame opinion, and to plant the seeds for the Republic’s downfall. ¹⁸

What is largely missing in these same chapters is any detailed examination of the revolutionary rhetoric coming from the more radical sectors of the Left prior to the Civil War. Preston does give adequate attention to the ‘Red Terror’ in the wartime Republican Zone, and little sympathy is shown either to those bands of revolutionaries who carried out their own murderous crusade against their social and ideological enemies, or to those criminal elements who latched on to them. Whatever excesses occurred on the Republican side, Preston notes, these mainly came from outside the central government, which sought to curb such activities. While there are debates about how clean were the hands of the wartime Republican governments and how systematic the Franco regime was in its attempts to ‘cleanse’ Spain of those deemed to be ‘Reds’, ¹⁹ the contrast between the two sides is clear both qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides noting that the repression was around three times greater in the rebel zone, Preston repeatedly points out the absence of debate or restraint within the rebel zone regarding the use of violence, due to the ideologies that influenced both civilian and military thought. The contrast is even more striking when comparing the violence during the periods of rule by the Center-Left before the war. Despite all the attention on the perceived shortcomings of the Republican-Socialists’ approach to public order and dissent during the 1931 to 1933 period, any violence that did occur was largely incidental and accidental. For Franco and his fellow travelers, state violence was instrumental. It was this latter mentality that made Spain another ‘Bloodlands’ zone, and it should give us pause before resorting to deterministic arguments regarding ‘militarization’ and ‘continuities’. Indeed, it was due to the fact that the Republic represented a fundamental break with the past that reactionary elements within the military and its civilian allies felt the need to eradicate the regime and its supporters.