Chapter V - The Dictatorship

Summary

The time has come for Spaniards to be governed in accordance with the spirit of their history and the feelings which make up their better character.

Narváez in 1867, inaugurating a severe repression that led to a revolution.

The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera came in on a wave of good wishes and optimism. It reached its highest point in 1926, after a run of three years, and then began to decline. By 1928 it was unpopular even in the Army and by January 1930 it had come to an end.

The causes of its initial success and subsequent failure are mainly economic, for its period coincided with that of the world boom, of high prices and cheap money and expanding markets, and its premature decline was due to over-spending on public works and to the incompetent management of finances by a gifted but not very intelligent young man, Calvo Sotelo. There were other causes also: the Dictatorship came in with almost everyone’s good wishes because it destroyed the old corrupt regime and because it was thought to be a temporary phase that would end in the summoning of a Constituent Cortes. Primo again and again asserted this. When it was seen that his promises would not be fulfilled opinion began to change, whilst the increasing interferences with liberty, the lack of any kind of law but the Dictator’s word and the miserable expedients of espionage and repression into which he was drawn lost him the support of one group of Spaniards after another. The severe censorship was especially damaging to him: the last few years had seen a great advance in the culture and confidence in their own powers of the élite of the Spanish middle classes and it was scarcely to be expected that this movement could be suppressed indefinitely.