Free The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas Page A

This unrest was partly the consequence of a new and ‘suicidal egoism’ of employers who celebrated, throughout Spain, the Right’s victory at the polls by attempting to lower wages, raise rents, and enforce evictions. 1 On 8 December, a revolutionary committee, led by Buenaventura Durruti, was installed at Saragossa. This fought for several days against the civil police, reinforced by the army, backed by tanks. Durruti became a national legend. In numerous places in Aragon and Catalonia, ‘libertarian communism’ was briefly established. Fighting occurred in many places, causing 87 dead, many wounded, and 700 imprisoned. 2 It was hard to accept that the country was at peace. Not surprisingly, militancy spread more and morethrough the UGT, especially its largest, but least well led, section, the agrarian FNTT. Their members were hit by falling wages, themselves the consequence of right-wing chairmen having been appointed by the radical minister of labour, José Estadella, to Largo’s arbitration boards. The recovery of the agrarian upper class was everywhere complemented by a more radical attitude on the part of the workers, supported by a more embittered Largo Caballero. Prieto, a moderate socialist if ever there was one, did not discourage this, to his everlasting regret. Besteiro did: he criticized the ‘anti-governmentalism’ in 1934 of his colleagues as much as he had done their ‘pro-governmentalism’ in 1931, to no avail.
    In the new year of 1934, the government introduced a series of measures designed to halt the reforms of their predecessors. The substitution of lay for religious schools was indefinitely postponed. The Jesuits were shortly to be found teaching again. 1 By a clever debating speech, Gil Robles secured that priests would be treated as if they were civil servants on pensions and they began to be paid two-thirds of their salary of 1931. Though the Agrarian Law remained on the statute book, its application was in many places tacitly abandoned. An amnesty was eventually also granted to political prisoners—including General Sanjurjo and all those imprisoned at the time of the rising in 1932. This clemency merely stimulated the old plotters to new schemes.
    By this time, many small
pueblos
seemed to have been utterly divided by politics. In places which still had socialist or left-wing councils, efforts were being made to impose a new cultural order, the exact reverse of its predecessor in that religious ideas had given way to atheism, not just agnosticism; old festivals were giving way to celebrations of the revolutionary tradition—The First of May, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution or the death of Galán and García Hernández. Women, whom old Spain had traditionally kept at home behind high windows, came out into the streets wearing party colours, ‘forming groups like men, singing, shouting and dancing in great gangs to celebrate the name of Liberty’. 2 Battles took place now over working conditions as well as over the church. For example, in one village inAragon, a café had been made into a labour exchange. Everyone had to seek work through the officials in the café. Nobody liked that and those of the Right disobeyed, as did all workers who had any old arrangement to work for a particular farmer. The Left called a general strike: the men of the Right went on working, and were picketed. Fighting began and a death occurred. Threats, taunts, and demonstrations then became part and parcel of the life in the village. Everyone began to join one group or another. The uncommitted sought ideologies, while leaders on both sides schemed to make politics out of all entertainments.
    People on the Right assumed automatically that Azaña’s, and the socialists’, defeat meant a victory for old Spain. Certainly, whether the government liked it or not, all over Spain the old masters of the economy used what they believed to be their opportunity to restore their position; and, as certainly, the