he expressed the fierce
anti-clericalism of liberal intellectuals, and especially of the Masons. The leftist
workers did the dirty work. Many of the anti-clericals had been educated by religious
orders, Azaña himself had been educated in the Escorial, an experience he describes
unkindly in El Jardín de los Frailes (The Garden of
the Friars). Already in May 1931 many churches and convents had been burned. In
December 1931 the Constituent Assembly, led by Azaña, approved an anti-clerical
constitution. It separated the Church and the State, withdrew state support for the
clergy, even though that had been part of the deal by which in the nineteenth century
church properties had been nationalized. It banned church schools even though government
schools were totally inadequate. Even private schools were virtually forbidden to teach
religion. It banned street religious processions without special authorization. It
introduced divorce and civil marriage. It expelled the Jesuits, whom Pérez de Ayala had
besmirched in A.M.D.G.
It is hard for us to realize the depth and extent of
anti-clericalism. At a dinner at the house of a couple of liberal intellectuals, they
introduced me to their son, aged about ten. Proud of his artistic skill, they told him to
sketch something for me. He skillfully and without prompting drew some grotesque cartoons
of priests, to the delight of the parents, who regaled me with stories of priests’
callous, grasping behavior. At the other end of the life cycle was the funeral of the
mother of Don Alberto Jiménez Fraud. We all piled into taxis, following the hearse at a
fair speed through the streets of Madrid to the cemetery. There the coffin was carried
into the chapel, but all the men stayed outside; they would not soil their reputation by
setting foot in a church.
I was and am deeply concerned about religion, but I was aware of
the abuses of the Catholic Church, and I went along with the stories I heard without
falling into the absolute, intolerant anti-clericalism of those around me. One of the few
Western scholars. defending the Spanish church against its persecutors was Allison Peers
of the University of Liverpool to whom English Hispanism owes a great debt since he
created the Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Already
in 1936 he published The Spanish Tragedy. As
the war went on and the anti-clerical atrocities became more savage, he recorded them
relentlessly, thereby winning the hostility of his liberal colleagues. In retrospect I
feel he was slandered. He showed his understanding of the Catalan problem in Catalonia Infelix (1937). He summed up the Civil
War tragedy in Spain in Eclipse (1943).
The Spanish right was regaining courage. In October 1933 José
Antonio Primo de Rivera founded the Falange. Elections in November 1933 parliamentary
elections gave victory to the moderate right. It reversed the anti-clerical policies of
the previous government and suspended the closing of religious schools. Black is the color
of the Catholic Church (in France the clergy were called corbeaux) and for this reason the period following
the elections came to be known as el bienio negro—the
black two years. It was then that I returned to Madrid.
The atmosphere was very political, and politics was the major theme
of conversation on every level of society. For example, a minor episode which was blown up
into a national tragedy was the January 1933 anarchist uprising in the village of Casas
Viejas just east of the port city of Cadiz. It is so tiny that it does not appear in the
very detailed Michelin map of Andalusia, but its name became a household word in every
part of Spain. The local Civil Guard repelled an assault by anarchist outsiders and
telephoned for help to nearby Medina Sidonia. It came in the form of a detachment of the
Assault Guards, a special corps founded after the May 1931 riots to defend the republic.
They drove out the anarchists, and in the process lost several lives. Authorized to use
all necessary force, they executed some dozen prisoners. After a siege in which an
aircraft dropped bombs, the village surrendered and some more people were shot.
The right
should have been pleased that the anarchists had been vanquished, but they used the
episode to accuse the liberal government of murdering the people. If the uprising had not
been forcefully suppressed, they would have accused the government of weakness. In the
summer of 1933, Prime Minister Azaña resigned, opening the way for the elections
which the moderate right won. He became the hero of the liberals, who idealized him
unrealistically, to my bemusement. During the Civil War, as President, he was totally
ineffective and the Liberals blamed him for the defeat of the republic. The right hated
him more than ever. In Paris, after the outbreak of the Civil War, I was guest at a dinner
attended also by a conservative Spanish woman. Her hatred of Azaña was unique in my
experience. She declared with unbridled anger that she would like to take Azaña, cut him
up into small pieces, make a soup out of them and then spit it out. Perhaps this was a
form of the black mass.
The new government was
dominated by the Cathedral CEDA (Confederación
Española de Derechas Autónomas) led by José María Gil Robles (father of the
present European Parliament, who has the same name as his father), who was connected with
the Catholic newspaper El Debate. He was accused
of wishing to establish a Catholic corporative state, and the left warned that if the CEDA
entered the government there would be civil war. The ant-clerical Alejandro Lerroux became
Prime Minister with the support of the CEDA, having promised to rescind anti-clerical
measures.
The Army was becoming restless. Already in August 1932 General
José Sanjurjo, a veteran of the Spanish-American and Moroccan wars who had taken part in
Primo de Rivera’s 1923 coup, had revolted in Seville to overthrow the anti-clerical
government of Azaña and to restore the monarchy. There was an attempted coup in Madrid
but it failed in a ridiculous way. Sanjurjo was taken prisoner and sent to the penal
settlement in Santoña on the north coast. He had been backed by the Carlists of Navarre,
with whom he had close family ties and who were later to fight for Franco. He and his
fellow plotters were freed by the new conservative government.
The miners of Asturias were plotting a rebellion, but a large
shipment of arms for them was discovered and the government of Ricardo Samper proclaimed a
state of alarm. Gil Robles staged a big CEDA meeting in the shrine of Covadonga hallowed
by the leaders of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. He told the crowd that he was
determined to preserve order, whereupon the CNT and UGT labor unions proclaimed a general
strike in Asturias. Gil Robles and the other CEDA members returned to Madrid with
difficulty. He announced that CEDA would no longer support the Samper government when it
met in October 1934. The UGT feared that he planned to establish a fascist state and
warned of the consequences. Lerroux formed a new government which included thee CEDA
members, but not Gil Robles himself. Despite his omission, this was the signal for trouble
in many regions of Spain. In Catalonia, Luis Companys proclaimed the Catalan state.
Being in Madrid, I saw
the trouble in the capital. Some Socialist militants advanced on the Ministry of the
Interior in the Puerta del Sol, shooting as they went. However, they were overcome and
their leaders imprisoned. The confusion was enormous. The newly formed Assault Guards, a
special police to put down riots, careened around in special open trucks, their sirens
piercing the air. On a double row of benches down the middle of the truck sat the guards,
each row facing outward their rifles at the ready. Workers sat around in the cafes, the
theme of their conversations being: We have our republic, now we want our revolution! From
this moment on there would be no peace in Spain.
The worst trouble was in Asturias, about which we heard
confused reports The flashpoint was the coal mining area of Mieres, south of Oviedo. The
tough miners were armed with dynamite. Some of the historic monuments of Oviedo which I
had seen earlier in the year were destroyed or badly damaged. The revolt really triggered
the Civil War, since it persuaded General Francisco Franco, who had hitherto been a good
republican, that force must be used against the leftists. He and General Manuel Goded were
appointed as joint chiefs of staff to suppress the rebellion. They brought the Foreign
Legion from Morocco to fight the miners, who were plotting a march on Madrid. The
legionnaires were Spanish, but with them came some Moorish regulares, i.e. Moors. The suppression of the
revolt was incredibly brutal. Since Covadonga in Asturias was the sacred spot from which
the reconquest of Spain from the Moors had been launched, leftist posters appeared later
showing Moors squatting around a fire, with the caption below saying simply “Los
Moros en Covadonga”—the Moors had taken the one area of Spain which they had not
conquered. This lurid simplification was inaccurate since the Spanish legionnaires were as
brutal as the Moors, and the action in Covadonga was minor. Among the lucky rebels who
were sent to jail rather than shot was Manuel Grossi, who wrote there his account of the
rebellion, published later as La Insurrección de
Asturias. In Madrid, the tension was serious, and Franco was generally credited with
saving Spain and especially Madrid, threatened with an invasion of miners. From this point
on Spain would know no peace.
Many leftist leaders, including Manuel Azaña and Francisco Largo
Caballero, were jailed, although there were calls for the death.penalty. Prime Minister
Lerroux appointed a new cabinet which included five CEDA members, including Gil Robles as
Minister of War. However, confusion followed, compounded by a financial scandal, and
President Alcalá Zamora decided to call elections. I missed the latter part of 1935,
since I had received a grant to study in Italy.
This is a good place to discuss two writers whom I did not know
because they were before my time, but whose memory still reverberated. They represented
the two opposite poles of the intellectual spectrum: the Catholic conservative Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912) and the leftist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928).
Menéndez y Pelayo, born in Santander, was a scholar’s
scholar. He was first a professor at the University of Madrid, and then director of the
National Library. His tireless research into Spanish literary history brought about his
early death, but he is justly regarded as the founder of. the school of serious literary
scholars which was flourishing when I was in Madrid. Whereas it was commonplace to say
that Spain had produced no science, he attempted to disprove this and thus to rehabilitate
the Spanish tradition. Because of his Catholic conservatism, there was a conspiracy of
silence about him among the liberals I frequented. He was rehabilitated during the Franco
era, as was evident in the 1944 book by Pedro Laín Entralgo, Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de sus problemas
intelectuales.
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez has been mentioned as the author of
the anti-clerical novel about Toledo Cathedral, La
Catedral.(1903). Born in Valencia, he became a journalist and a the author of regional
novels about that area. He moved on to the national scene and wrote scathingly not only
about the Catholic Church but also about the whole Spanish tradition, of which
bullfighting was a notorious example. In Blood and
Sand (1908) he described the fickleness of the spectators. It is the story of a famous
bullfighter who retired after being gored by a bull. At once the crowd forgot him, and
began roaring its applause for his successor. The villain is not the bull, but the crowd.
The novel ends “The beast was roaring, the real one, the only one”—the
crowd. Since the liberals of my time idealized the Spanish people, this supercilious
attitude was unwelcome. Moreover that Andalusian lover of gypsies and bullfights, Federico
García Lorca, wrote a famous elegy on the death of a bullfighter, which is a silly
antithesis to Blood and Sand. Curiously, the
Franco dictatorship promoted bullfighting for a different reason, namely as part of the
glorious Spanish tradition, despite the attacks of foreigners and cosmopolitans like
Blasco Ibáñez. The present conservative government of José María Aznar takes the same
attitude, but more discreetly.
Blasco Ibáñez became internationally famous and wealthy because
of his novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse (1916), which was made into a
popular film; I saw it as a child in England. It described European culture as an apple
with a beautiful skin. World War One peeled it off and showed how rotten it was. The novel
described harshly the Germans whom traditional Spaniards admired. It showed the
author’s sympathy for France, which the conservatives viewed as the source of the
subversive ideas undermining the Spanish tradition. He took an active part in politics,
but because of their hostility he quit and moved to France, He bought a house in Menton
and died there. I visited it after World War II with his son, who was keeping it going as
a museum about his father. He was trying to get the Spanish government to provide funds
for it, but I believe he was unsuccessful.
When I was in Spain, Blasco Ibáñez was hated by the right, and
the leftists, who should have admired him, were pretty silent about him. They probably
resented his retreat from the political fight, viewing it almost as a betrayal. They were
jealous of his international fame and of his wealth. He had sold out to Hollywood. These
things are true, but he will remain a great literary figure when the literary idols of the
Spain I knew are forgotten. There is a common but unproven story that García Lorca was
killed by the Guardia Civil. An equally trustworthy story alleges that he was killed in a
homosexual brawl. Anyhow, he died, and the assassination of President Kennedy shows that
martyrdom helps one’s political reputation. Blasco Ibáñez died in comfort on the
French Riviera. This was terrible public relations. His son has tried without success to
persuade the Spanish government to maintain his house as a museum dedicated to him.
Ortega y Gasset left a school of liberal Catholics, among the most
prominent of whom was José Bergamín (born 1897). A Catholic influenced by Jacques
Maritain, he founded and edited the review Cruz y
Raya until 1936. The Civil War forced him into exile. Another Ortega disciple, the
Basque Xavier Zubiri (born 1898), taught the history of philosophy in the University of
Madrid, but went to Rome in 1935 where he remained studying theology until the triumph of
Franco. He taught in the University of Barcelona from 1940 to 1942, when politics forced
him to give up his chair.
The aforementioned Pedro Laín Entralgo (born 1908) was a follower of his. Trained in medicine, he
devoted himself to its history and to general questions of Spanish culture. When I met him
in Madrid during the Franco period, he was well-respected, but after the restoration of
the monarchy he was hailed as a liberal defender of the Spanish cultural tradition. On
this ninetieth birthday he was honored in an
impressive ceremony. The stooped old man was
no longer the vigorous intellectual leader I had known.
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