Free The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas

law, though finally passed, was changed during its discussion, and many doubts were raised about it, these being shared by several of its sponsors. The debates alternated in the summer of 1932 with those on the statute of Catalan autonomy. When the Agrarian Law was finally passed, there was no urgency to put it into effect. The minister seemed still to regret his time at the ministry of education. Yet great hopes had been aroused among agricultural workers. These expectations would soon turn sour when thwarted. Agrarian reform had become in Spain, as elsewhere, a myth. Like the phrase ‘general strike’, or the words ‘liberty’ or ‘revolution’, it seemed a programme in itself, regardless of the fact that big and small farms have as different problems as wet and dry regions. Something could be done to alleviate the misery of agricultural life in Spain by legislation and investment but since water control, drainage, irrigation, and the provision of chemical fertilizers are all dependent upon investment and industry, the only real solution to the agrarian problem was to find a way to reduce the population on the land by encouraging industry.

9
    The history of Spain during the two and a half years after the general elections of November 1933 was marked by disintegration. From time to time, one individual or another would attempt vainly to halt the terrible and, as it transpired, irreversible process. They lacked the energy, luck, self-confidence and perhaps the magnanimity necessary for success.
    The government after the elections was a coalition of the Centre, led by radicals. Lerroux became, to his satisfaction, Prime Minister at last. Gil Robles and the CEDA undertook to support him in the Cortes, but did not join the administration itself. This Catholic party stood—ominously, as it seemed—in the wings, waiting for the moment when Gil Robles should give the word to take power. The transformation, meanwhile, of Lerroux, the anti-clerical, into an ally of the Catholic party was too much for his lieutenant, Martínez Barrio, who, after a short period as minister of the interior, passed into opposition at the head of his own group, renamed the Republican Union party. 1 Actually, Lerroux had voted for the previous government’s anti-clerical legislation with reluctance. He was already a man of the Right, more than of the Centre. His minister of public works was Rafael Guerra del Río, an intemperate leader of ‘Young Barbarians’ in 1909; he now seemed a meremachine politician. One added source of confusion was the distrust felt for both Lerroux and Gil Robles by President Alcalá Zamora, who intrigued against the former, and tried to avoid calling the latter to form a government. Alcalá distrusted Lerroux for his corruption, and Gil Robles as a secret monarchist. In the circumstances, he preferred Lerroux and, in fact, never called on Gil Robles: a weakening of the democratic process, since the Catholic leader was as prepared to work in a constitutional democracy as much as the socialists were.
    Lerroux’s first difficulties derived from yet another series of anarchist challenges. They attacked isolated civil guard posts and derailed the Barcelona-Seville express, killing nineteen people. In Madrid, there was a long telephone strike. In both Valencia and Saragossa there were general strikes lasting for weeks. That at Saragossa, designed, to begin with, to free prisoners taken by the government the previous year, lasted indeed for fifty-seven days. The CNT never issued strike pay, but the workers’ resilience astonished the country. The anarchist leaders, as usual, for a time believed that they were in the anteroom of the millennium; and their
pistolero
friends heightened the drama by sporadic shooting. The strikers decided at one point to send their wives and children away to Barcelona by rail. The civil guard fired on the train, and prevented it from reaching its destination. The evacuees later went by caravan.