The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas Read Free Book Online

accepting the dictator’s resignation. Others were now unrepentant republicans. The church was equivocal, with some of its most influential figures concerned (following the still Wilsonian mood of Pope Pius XI) to establish a democratic system if at all possible. Other churchmen were more opportunistic. Neither bourgeoisie nor lower classes had anything to hope for from a continuance of the monarchy. The King, however, was not prepared to establish a royal dictatorship of the Balkan type, and General Berenguer dilly-dallied before calling for elections. In the summer of 1930, a pact was signed at the summer watering-place of San Sebastián between several republican politicians and intellectuals, the socialists, and the advocates of Catalan nationalism. The former conceded autonomy for the Catalans who, in return, agreed to support the republican plots, such as they were. In Madrid, three eminent intellectuals, Dr Gregorio Marañón, Ortega y Gasset and the novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala, formed themselves into a ‘movement for the service of the republic’. Ortega (whose earlier, well-phrased criticisms of parliament had helped Primo) wrote a famous article announcing, ‘Spaniards! Your state is no more! Reconstitute it!
¡Delenda est monarquía!
’. 3 More importantly, several discontented officers supported the rebels, and even the anarchists, submerged but alive, gave weary sympathy to the bourgeois opponents of the King. In December, a
pronunciamiento
was prepared. The plotters issued the following statement:
A passionate demand for Justice surges upwards from the bowels of the Nation. Placing their hopes in a Republic, the people are already in the street. We would have wished to communicate the people’s desires through the due process of Law. But this path has been barred to us. When we have demanded Justice, we have been denied Liberty. When we have demanded Liberty, we have been offered a rump parliament like those of the past, based on fraudulent elections, convoked by a dictatorship, the instrument of a King who has already broken the Constitution. We do not covet the culminating drama of a revolution. But the misery of the people of Spain moves us greatly. Revolution will always be a crime or an act of insanity when Law and Justice exist. But it is always just when Tyranny prevails.
    These republicans were men who not only opposed the idea that a single man, even if a Bourbon, could dismiss and appoint a prime minister, but who also saw in the idea of the abolition of the monarchy a step towards the modernization of Spain.
    The sequel was swift. First, the garrison at Jaca, in Aragon, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, led by two zealous young officers, Captain Fermín Galán and Lieutenant García Hernández, rose against the monarchy before the conspirators in the rest of Spain gave the word. Captured while marching their men in the direction of Saragossa, the two officers were shot for rebellion. The indignation at the executions was great. Elsewhere, the movement failed. A young captain in the air force, Ramón Franco (a national hero because of his pioneering flight in the
Non Plus Ultra
across the south Atlantic to Buenos Aires), set out to bomb the Royal Palace, hesitated, and dropped pamphlets instead; he then fled to Portugal. The signatories of the Pact of San Sebastián were arrested. When they were tried, they defended themselves by saying that the King had broken the constitution by accepting Primo de Rivera as dictator. From their much visited cells, the republicans’ reputation grew. Several small parties were founded to raise enthusiasm for the monarchy: they failed to do so. Primo de Rivera’s PatrioticUnion became converted as the Monarchical Union, but defended the memory of the dictator, not the future of the King. General Berenguer hesitantly offered elections. The idea was refused as insincere and the general, ill, resigned thankfully. After unsuccessful negotiations with politicians,