A People Betrayed

In the wake of the Liceu attack, there were many demands for suppression of the anarchist movement. On 9 November, the government initiated a suspension of constitutional guarantees in the province of Barcelona which remained in force until 31 December the following year. For a brief period, vigilante groups patrolled the streets of bourgeois neighbourhoods. In July 1894, the law was strengthened to make the placing of bombs in public places or causing loss of life punishable by life imprisonment or death. It also widened the penalties against those suspected of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. The exceptional measures did not just limit the rights of those of anarchist ideas but were also used to justify the arrests of republican workers, teachers from lay schools and other freethinkers. General Weyler’s ruthless application of these measures provided Barcelona with nearly two years of tranquillity in large part because the horror provoked by the attack on the Liceu silenced any criticism of police methods.32

Posted to Cuba, Valeriano Weyler was succeeded in Barcelona in January 1896 by the somewhat more moderate General Eulogi Despujol i Dusay. Nevertheless, mass arrests followed a further terrorist outrage on 7 June that year. A bomb exploded in the midst of the Corpus Christi procession moving towards the beautiful Gothic church of Santa Maria del Mar in the Born district of Barcelona. This spectacular annual ceremony was a local tradition that was an excuse for dressing up and it always attracted large crowds. Unusually for a religious ceremony, the monstrance with the host and the ecclesiastical dignitaries did not lead the procession but came after the principal banner. This was always carried by the Captain General with its ribbons held by the Civil Governor and the Alcalde. As the banner was entering the basilica, an explosion was heard at the rear of the procession. The bomb exploded in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous as the crowd was kneeling before the monstrance. Because, a few moments earlier, it had started to rain, the bishop and the other clerical dignitaries had hastened into the church. The bomb killed twelve people including a six-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy and seriously injured a further fifty-four people. Since the bishop and other dignitaries were unhurt and all the victims were working-class citizens, there were suspicions that the perpetrator was a police agent provocateur. Another theory was that the culprit, ignorant of the particular arrangements of this procession, had assumed that the military and civil authorities would have been walking behind the monstrance. Whatever the doubts, the atrocity united public opinion in general and the bourgeois press of Barcelona and Madrid, Liberal and Conservative. The entire city of Barcelona declared mourning, the street lights dimmed.33

There were widespread demands for harsh reprisals against the anarchists who were assumed to be the culprits. The almost unanimous calls for revenge were the prelude to a brutal repression which would take place over the next months. Despite international condemnation, there was a hardening of the legal measures open to the Spanish authorities with the introduction that September of the law for the repression of anarchism. A new police squad was created which imitated the techniques of the Russian Okhrana, using bribery, informers, undercover operatives and agents provocateurs commanded by a Civil Guard, Lieutenant Narciso Portas Ascanio.34 The Captain General placed the investigation in the hands of a military judge, Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Marzo Díaz-Valdivieso, who had presided over the trial after the attack on Martínez Campos that had led to the execution of six anarchists. The torture of prisoners was carried out under the supervision of Lieutenant Portas. Admitting that they had no clues, the authorities proceeded to arrest more than 500 anarchists, republicans and freethinkers. Among them were the widows of previously executed anarchists such as Paulí Pallàs, writers, women who took food to those already imprisoned and even the staff of cafés frequented by leftists. Policemen were paid a bonus for every arrest, so local prisons were bursting at the seams. Workers’ centres were closed down en masse. The majority of the anarchist and other leftist prisoners were held and interrogated in the bleak fortress of Montjuïc, the Spanish Bastille, which loured over Barcelona. The fact that among them were prominent anarchist intellectuals such as Anselmo Lorenzo, Federico Urales, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Teresa Claramunt and lawyers such as Pere Coromines ensured that articulate accounts of the abominable treatment of prisoners reached the outside world.35

One of the most effective of those drawing attention to the scandal was Alejandro Lerroux. Born in 1864 in Cordoba, he had started his adult life as a deserter from the army after squandering his Military Academy fees in a casino. As a fluent if rather lightweight journalist, he had acquired a spurious fame in 1893 by dint of an inadvertent victory in a duel with a newspaper editor. Elevated to the editorship of the then scandalmongering and left-wing El País, Lerroux acquired a popular following as a result of his exposés of the tortures in the Montjuïc prison. He achieved further celebrity with a series of revelations of military repression and government scandals. In March 1899, he launched a new weekly, El Progreso, in which he renewed the denunciation of what had happened in Montjuïc.36

It is probable that the explosion in the Carrer del Canvis Nous was the work of a French anarchist called either Jean or François Girault, who subsequently escaped to Buenos Aires after hiding in London.37 The alleged principal culprit, also a Frenchman, Tomàs Ascheri, a police informer, was arrested two days after the bombing. His denunciations led to the arrest of two Catalan anarchists, Josep Molas and Antoni Nogués. After being subjected to intense tortures, they named others. Horrendous cruelties endured by those subsequently arrested included the crushing of bones, the tearing out of fingernails and toenails, the application of red-hot irons to flesh and the cutting out of tongues. Under these torments, one prisoner – Luis Mas – was driven insane, five died and another twenty-eight confessed to having placed the bomb. On the grounds that one of the victims had been a soldier, the accused were tried by court martial between 11 and 15 December 1896. The prosecutor demanded the death sentence for twenty-eight men. In the event, on the basis of the confessions extracted by torture, lengthy prison sentences were imposed on sixty-six and eight were condemned to death. Three death sentences and forty-six prison sentences were commuted by the Supreme Military Court. Among 194 men sentenced to banishment were numerous famous prisoners who then played a part in drawing international attention to the inquisitorial behaviour of the Spanish authorities. Finally, despite the doubts raised about confessions extorted by torture, five were executed. Before a large crowd, Ascheri as the alleged bomber and Molas, Nogués, Mas and Joan Alsina, the alleged bomb maker, as accomplices, were shot by firing squad at dawn on 4 May 1897 in the fortress moat. The four supposed accomplices died proclaiming their innocence. The prisoners condemned to hard labour suffered inhuman conditions in Spain’s African colonies.38

International press exposures of the tortures brought immense discredit on Spain at the same time as the repression of independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines. In particular, the campaign in France likened the Spanish repression to that in Tsarist Russia. In Britain, a Spanish Atrocities Committee organized mass demonstrations. The exiled prisoners participated in mass meetings and provoked indignation when they showed their wounds and recounted the horrors of Montjuïc. Such campaigns stimulated support for the Cuban and Philippine rebels. However, the repression succeeded in putting an end to terrorism in Barcelona for some years at least. Some of the more violent militants had fled. Intellectuals like Tarrida and Anselmo Lorenzo advocated non-violent action. One of the last violent initiatives of this period took place in September 1897. The journalist Ramon Sempau shot and wounded Narciso Portas and his second-in-command, Joan Teixidó, in a public urinal in the Plaça de Catalunya. However, although Sempau was initially sentenced to death two days later by a military court, his case was passed to a civilian court – an indication of the impact on public opinion of the revelations about the Montjuïc atrocities. The following October, to widespread public approbation, he was found to have acted in self-defence. Portas became the target of public loathing. Cafés emptied when he entered them and he was the object of another failed assassination attempt in Madrid. He was obliged to go everywhere with several bodyguards. Alejandro Lerroux, at the height of his popularity in Barcelona, called him an ‘executioner and a hitman’, comparing him to Nero and Caligula. Portas challenged Lerroux to a duel. He refused on the grounds that a gentleman could have nothing to do with a torturer. Finally, Portas bumped into him in the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid. They went at each other with their walking sticks but neither could be said to have won the day.39

The Montjuïc trial and the preceding repression opened a new phase in the history of the anarchist movement. A direct consequence of the Montjuïc affair was the revenge assassination, on 8 August 1897, of the then Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, by a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist journalist, Michele Angiolillo. It had been widely rumoured that the tortures had been carried out on the direct orders of Cánovas. This was suggested during demonstrations held in Paris and London in protest against the mistreatment of the prisoners. Angiolillo had attended a huge rally in Trafalgar Square at which some of the victims showed the burns and scars that they carried from Montjuïc. After meeting them, he travelled to Spain. He went to Santa Águeda near Mondragón in the Basque Country where Cánovas was taking the waters. He shot him three times. When Cánovas’s wife Joaquina de la Osma shrieked ‘assassin’ at him, he bowed courteously and said: ‘I respect you because you are an honourable lady but I have done my duty and I am calm. I have avenged my brothers from Montjuïc.’ In fact, the savage violence inflicted on the anarchists was successful in curtailing individual terrorism and inclining the movement towards the use of the general strike.40 Cánovas was replaced by the now seventy-two-year-old Sagasta, who immediately put an end to the strategy of total war in Cuba. In this sense, the assassination may have boosted the liberation movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

According to Joaquín Romero Maura,

the most significant factor of the Montjuich repression lies perhaps elsewhere. For the excesses committed by the police did not occur simply because the men in charge of the investigation happened to be heartless and brutal. The Spanish Administration was top-heavy, cumbersome, undisciplined and often corrupt. Scrupulous civil servants had only their conscience to restrain them from abuses. The legislation regarding civil service responsibilities was confused and rarely applied, and no efficient control mechanisms existed. Under these circumstances, with the police force as badly paid as most other lower grade civil servants, its recruitment totally haphazard and providing no security of tenure, scrupulousness could hardly be expected. But the conditions which in other branches of the civil service gave rise to bribery and tiresome delays, resulted in the police harassing individuals and making unwarranted arrests; arbitrariness was accentuated by a lack of self-assurance bred of inefficiency.41

The proliferation of social violence within Spain was matched and indeed intensified by the deterioration of the situation in what remained of the empire. The Cuban rebellion had resurfaced in 1895 and, despite the despatch of large numbers of troops, remained an immense drain on Spanish resources. Swift-moving and flexible guerrilla forces, known as the mambises, were more than a match for the Spanish garrisons. They were supported by consignments of arms, ammunition and other supplies from sympathizers in Florida. By the beginning of 1896, they had virtually won the war. The appointment of the ruthless General Weyler was Madrid’s response. To deprive the mambises of the logistical support of the peasantry, Weyler adopted the policy of reconcentración. Large numbers of peasants were forcibly moved to concentration camps where, without adequate food, sanitation and medical care, around 160,000 died, nearly 10 per cent of the island’s population. Weyler’s brutal strategy intensified hatred of the colonial power and increased American support for the rebels. In October 1897, thanks to international censure and Sagasta’s desire for conciliation with the rebels, Weyler was obliged to resign. However, it was too late for his departure to make a difference.42

In 1897, the Philippines were also in revolt with their defence an additional drain on Spanish resources. To make matters worse, on 15 February 1898 the battlecruiser USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour, killing 266 American sailors. The explosion may well have been accidental or possibly the work of Cuban anarchist provocateurs hoping to see the blame placed on Spain. This was certainly the consequence and it pushed American popular opinion further in favour of the Cuban rebels. Outrage in the United States at Weyler’s measures together with their impact on American trade with Cuba forced President William McKinley to reiterate a demand first made in 1848 that Spain abandon Cuba, albeit by selling the island to the US. In Spain, a wide spectrum of jingoistic sentiment, excluding only the conscripts who had to go and fight, was in favour of war.43

On 25 April, President McKinley, egged on by Theodore Roosevelt, declared war on Spain. Spain’s troops in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico numbered more than the entire United States army, nearly a quarter of a million to 28,000. However, they were scattered across many garrisons. In Cuba, the more efficient American forces, in alliance with powerful local guerrilla movements, quickly targeted key strategic objectives. Armed with rapid-fire Gatling guns, they seized the advantage over the demoralized Spanish conscripts. Moreover, the Americans had dramatically shorter supply lines and were favoured by British command of the seas. In naval terms, the difference was not just of superior resources but rather that the US strategy of heavily armoured battleships with long-range firepower had exposed the weaknesses of the Spanish option of swift cruisers with lighter guns. On the morning of 1 May 1898, at the Cavite naval station in the Bay of Manila, Commodore Dewey annihilated the Spanish Pacific fleet. On 3 July, the Spanish Atlantic fleet was also wiped out just outside the bay of Santiago de Cuba. The war had lasted less than three months. It was the end of Spanish naval power and prestige. The subsequent peace treaty in December 1898 saw Spain lose all its colonies apart from Morocco.44

Despite the reality that a vastly more numerous Spanish army had been defeated, there grew the myth cherished by General Franco that Spanish heroism had held out against overwhelming odds and been ‘cheated’ by technological superiority. Contemporary imagery about the greasy capitalist pig trampling on the dying Spanish lion contrasted with the American view that moral superiority and technical know-how had overcome a decadent enemy. Franco’s perception would continue to reverberate through his career. He was five and a half when the great defeat at the hands of the United States occurred. Although, at such an age, he cannot have been aware of the significance of what was happening, he saw the coffins and the wounded being landed in the small naval garrison town of El Ferrol where he lived. Thereafter, the disaster had an ongoing effect that influenced him profoundly. Many of his schoolmates wore mourning, having been orphaned or lost relatives. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. Living in a military family, he heard the indignant conversations that his father had with colleagues from the naval base in which the defeat was blamed on dark forces such as freemasonry. An essentially middle-class intellectual movement, freemasonry was vilified by the Catholic Church for its anti-clericalism and by army officers because of its foreign links. Subsequently, when Franco became a cadet in the Military Academy, he encountered an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Just as in Ferrol, in Toledo defeat was attributed to the machinations of American and British freemasonry and to the treachery of Spanish politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources.45

The aftermath of defeat saw private grief and public chagrin at the destruction of the illusion of Spanish great-power status. Newspaper editorials, intellectuals and politicians raked over the so-called ‘dying nations’ speech made on 4 May 1898 by the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to the Conservative Party’s Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall. Salisbury had stated that ‘the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’. His words were taken as an accurate prophecy of the future of Spain.

While the agonized inquest went on, the economic ruin that had been expected to follow the loss of empire failed to materialize. There was a minor economic boom as the return to peace brought lower inflation, less public debt and a higher level of capital investment. The drop in the value of the peseta occasioned by defeat stimulated an export boom to other European countries. Some products, such as footwear, olive oil and garlic, were still in demand in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Moreover, there were unexpectedly good harvests in both 1898 and 1899 which increased rural demand for industrial goods, as did the return of 200,000 colonial troops flush with wage arrears to spend on new clothes. Most importantly, there was a massive repatriation of capital from Spanish America. The return of colonial settlers brought both investment and entrepreneurial expertise to the areas, such as Galicia, from which they originated. Nonetheless, although the consequences of 1898 were less dramatic than might have been feared, they were still deeply damaging for the Atlantic ports and the Catalan textile industry. Already inefficient, built on a proliferation of small family firms with out-of-date machinery, Catalan textiles had survived on protection from foreign competition and a guaranteed overseas market. Both advantages disappeared with the loss of Cuba.46

Moreover, the few favourable circumstances that followed the disaster were short-lived. The troops had soon spent their back pay. With subsequent harvests poor, domestic demand slumped. By the autumn of 1900, more than thirty factories in Catalonia had been closed and, in others, workers were being laid off. Industrial militancy was on the increase. Accordingly, the loss of Cuba fostered resentment of Madrid and accelerated the development of Catalan nationalism. Government measures to balance the budget and pay off the war debt provoked a taxpayers’ strike, the so-called tancament de caixes, shop closures and riots. It also fostered the growth of the independence party, the Lliga Regionalista. Eventually, Catalan industry would find new markets, especially in Argentina, and would also diversify into automobiles, electricity and chemicals. However, there remained the problem that the army was assuaging its guilt by concentrating its anger on Catalonia. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish army had known nothing but defeat at the hands of foreign enemies, its only successes being chalked up in domestic civil wars. It was hardly surprising that, when the last significant remnants of empire were lost, the army would cling to a determination that the final battle that would not be lost was the defence of national integrity. Ironically, the defeat which thus fed the flames of Spanish nationalism also breathed life into its greatest enemy.47

The reaction to this monumental humiliation, known thereafter as the ‘Disaster of 1898’, was a national examination of conscience. Regenerationism, as it was known, was an introspective analysis of what was wrong with Spain carried out by intellectuals and politicians in meetings, articles, books and private correspondence. The ‘generation of 1898’ grappled with the so-called problema nacional. The turmoil of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, the revolution of 1868, the chaos of the First Republic in 1873 and the loss of Cuba in 1898 had stimulated an endless poking through the national entrails. The progressive republican intellectual Ricardo Macías Picavea denounced the apparently legitimate institutions and democratic parliament of Restoration Spain as merely ‘the wallpaper with pictures of a parliamentary system which hid the wall of brick and plaster, the caciquismo that was the harsh reality of our government’.48 The towering figure of the regenerationist movement was the visionary Aragonese polymath, lawyer and agronomist Joaquín Costa Martínez. It was he who responded to the defeat with the war cry ‘Schools, larders and double padlocks on the tomb of El Cid’ – that is to say, no more military adventures. In 1902, at the age of fifty-six, he presented to the great intellectual club the Ateneo de Madrid his report ‘Oligarchy and caciquismo as the present form of government in Spain’. He denounced caciquismo and the oligarchy, the political system and the political class as the principal problems of Spain. He compared the cacique to a cancer or tumour, an unnatural excrescence on the body of the nation. Accordingly, the political class had putrefied and blighted Spain through caciquismo and its corrupt practices, obstructing the forces of progress and thus keeping the nation in servitude, ignorance and misery. The solution had to be the iron surgeon who would sweep away caciquismo to facilitate democratic reform: ‘That surgical policy, I repeat, has to be the personal burden of an iron surgeon, who knows well that anatomy of the Spanish people and feels for it an infinite compassion … For Spain to be a parliamentary nation tomorrow, she must renounce it today.’49 In fact, Costa insisted that his surgical solution was compatible with parliament and did not imply dictatorship.50 Ultimately, regenerationism was open to exploitation by both the right and the left since among its advocates were both those who sought to sweep away by democratic reform the degenerate political system based on the power of local bosses or caciques and those who planned simply to destroy caciquismo by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’, to put an end to representative politics and restore the values that were thought to have made Spain great – unity, Catholicism and hierarchy.

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflected on Cánovas and the system that he invented: ‘the Restoration, gentlemen, was a panorama of phantasms and Cánovas the great impresario of phantasmagoria … above and beyond being a great orator and a great thinker, Cánovas, gentlemen, was a great corruptor, as we might say, a professor of corruption. He corrupted even the incorruptible.’51

A demonstration in Barcelona in protest against the repression that followed the Semana Tragica or Tragic Week. (The History Collection/Alamy)

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.