The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 Read Online Free PDF Page A

this movement against government from Madrid as well as the Carlists and Basques. The First Republic lasted only a few months.
    The conservative politician Cánovas del Castillo had been planning the re-establishment of the Bourbons since the fall of Isabella. He also wanted to institute stable government while returning the army to barracks. This was achieved when General Martínez Campos proclaimed Alfonso XII king at the end of 1874. Alfonso was Isabella’s son (and therefore presumably of good military stock), but he was still only a Sandhurst cadet.
    Under Cánovas’s constitution, which was to last half a century, Church and landowner were back in strength. They had every intention of keeping it that way and elections were unashamedly manipulated. Peasants and tenants had to vote as their landlord told them or face eviction. Canvassing consisted of the political bosses, the caciques , sending out armed gangs known as El Partido de la Porra (the Bludgeon Party) and if that did not look like working, then ballot papers were destroyed or substituted. Political and economic corruption spread from Madrid in a way that far exceeded anything known in previous centuries. The courts were rigged right down to the village tribunals, so no poor person ever expected to have his case heard, let alone obtain justice.
    Although there may often have been a vicious rivalry between liberals and conservatives in the provinces, there was virtually a gentleman’s agreement between their leaders in the capital. Whenever there was an unpopular measure to carry out, the conservatives retired and the liberals, who had now become almost indistinguishable from their opponents, came in. The two parties resembled those little wooden men who appear alternately to indicate the weather. But any high-minded figure, however aristocratic, who denounced the corruption was regarded as a traitor and shunned. The trinity of army, monarchy and Church, which had originally made the empire, was also to preside over its final collapse. In 1898 the Spanish-American War saw the pathetic rout of the armed forces and the loss of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Most of the soldiers’ food and equipment had been sold by their officers.
    Even the tawdry end of the reconquista vision in Cuba in 1898 did not rouse the rulers of Spain from their myopic complacency. They could not admit that the obsession with empire had ruined the country. To admit that would have been to undermine the institutions of aristocracy, Church and army. This refusal to face reality started to come up against new political forces, which were growing rapidly and which, unlike the liberalism of the early nineteenth century, could not be absorbed into the governing structure. The incompatibility of ‘Eternal Spain’ with these new political movements developed into the clash which later tore the country apart.
     
    Alfonso XIII, the driver of the broken-down car, became king at the age of sixteen in 1902. Poverty was so great at the beginning of the twentieth century that over half a million Spaniards, out of a population of eighteen and a half million, emigrated to the New World in the first decade of the century alone. Life expectancy was around thirty-five years, the same as at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Illiteracy rates, varying sharply by area, averaged 64 per cent overall. Two thirds of Spain’s active population still worked on the land. Yet it was not just a problem of property rights and tensions between landowners and landless peasants. Within the total of five million farmers and peasants, there were huge differences in standards of living and techniques, according to region. In Andalucia, Estremadura and La Mancha, agriculture remained primitive and ineffectively laborious. In many other areas, such as Galicia, León, Old Castile, Catalonia and the north, small proprietors worked their own land with fierce independence while the rich coastal plain of the Levante