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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Spanish patriots have prided themselves on the fact that Spain was one of the first nations in Europe to achieve political unity. They devoutly believe that Ferdinand and Isabella created the first “nation” in Europe. To them, as well as to many non-Spaniards, Spain seems an entity unique in Europe, with a distinct psychology and value system. The traditional xenophobia of Spaniards and their emotional resentment of the outer world — the “otherness” of Spain in the twentieth century — make it difficult to conceive of the Spanish as anything other than a narrowly personalistic or nationalistic group.
* This article originally was an address to the American Historical Association, Washington, December 28, 1961. Completion of this study was made possible by a grant-in-aid from the American Philosophical Society.
1 Quoted by Brenan, Gerald, The Spanish Labyrinth (New York, 1950), p. 4Google Scholar.
2 The writings of the noventayochistas themselves are legion. With regard to evaluation of their work, there is Entralgo, Pedro Laín, La generación de 98 (Madrid, 1947)Google Scholar, but perhaps even more perceptive are the short interpretations in Vilar, Pierre, Histoire de l'Espagne (Paris, 1952), pp. 81–85Google Scholar, and in de Lara, Manuel Tuñón, La Espana del sigh XIX (Paris, 1961), pp. 323–32Google Scholar.
3 On the Spanish Church in the early twentieth century there are González, Manuel, Bishop of Malaga, El granito de arena (Malaga, 1924)Google Scholar; Zúñiga, E. Vargas, El problema religioso en España (Madrid, 1935)Google Scholar; Francisco, Peiró S.J., El problema religioso-social en España (Madrid, 1936)Google Scholar; de Iturralde, Juan (pseud.), El Catolicismo y la cruzada de Franco, I, (Bayonne, 1955)Google Scholar; and a penetrating chapter in Brenan, pp. 37–56.
4 Maura's, own point of view is eloquently expressed in his collected speeches and writings, Treinta y cinco años de vida político. (Madrid, 1926)Google Scholar. On his national armament program, see Almagro, Melchor Fernández, Política naval de la España moderna y contemporánea (Madrid, 1946), pp. 217–65Google Scholar. There is a fairly adequate discussion of maurismo in Andres, Diego Sevilla, Antonio Maura: La revolución desde arriba (Barcelona, 1954)Google Scholar. A crude outline of the action during the “Bloody Week” is given in the military report, published in the Diario de las Cortes, 1909, Vol. 4, 1–7Google Scholar. The government's point of view and activity are reported at length in Canals, Salvador, Los sucesos de España de 1909, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1909)Google Scholar.
5 Cf. Gutierrez-Ravé, José, Yo fuí un joven maurista (Madrid, 1946).Google Scholar
6 El Pais (Madrid), 12 25, 1907Google Scholar. Costa's, main political work is Oligarquía y caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España (Madrid, 1902)Google Scholar, a symposium representing a wide variety of distinguished participants. On economic life, Colectivismo agrario en España (Madrid, 1898)Google Scholar and La fórmula de la agricultura española (Madrid, 1911–1912)Google Scholar. The best study of Costa is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Gabriel Jackson (University of Toulouse, 1952).
7 The best study of socioeconomic development in nineteenth-century Catalonia is Vives, Jaime Vicens, Cataluna en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1961), pp. 1–260.Google Scholar
8 The principal book of catalonista thought was Riba, Enric Prat de la, La nacionalitat catalana (Barcelona, 1906)Google Scholar. On the genesis of catalanismo, see Venero, Maximiano García, Historia del nacionalismo catalán (Madrid, 1940)Google Scholar, Sieberer, Anton, Katalonien gegen Kastilien (Vienna, 1936)Google Scholar, and Vives, Vicens, op. cit., pp. 279–308Google Scholar. Perhaps the best interpretation of Catalan life and culture is Vives, Jaime Vicens, Noticia de Cataluna, 2nd. ed. (Barcelona, 1960)Google Scholar. The rise of catalanista feeling came fairly rapidly, for in 1860 Catalans had manifested a great deal of Spanish patriotic enthusiasm for the government's program of expansion in Morocco. Catalanismo could not perhaps have taken on popular proportions when it did had it not been for the Spanish depression of the 1880's. By the nineties the Barcelona proletariat was in much more radical rebellion than ever before, while the middle class was increasingly dissatisfied with the national government and its economic administration. Catalanismo as a political movement began to take shape with the formulation of the Basas de Manresa (1892), which demanded full internal autonomy for the area. Business and professional men formed a “Lliga Regionalista,” the first Catalanist party to score a general electoral success, winning a considerable margin in the local contests of 1901.
9 There is some indication that before 1909 the Ministry of the Interior even subsidized the anticlerical petty bourgeois Radical Party in order to subtract votes from the separatists in Barcelona. This charge has been repeated many times, but will probably never be adequately proven. It is, however, difficult to explain otherwise the violence of the physical assaults made by Lerroux's, lads on the catalanistas in 1905Google Scholar. Cf. La Veu de Catalunya (Barcelona), 11 20, 1905Google Scholar and El Ejército Españot (Madrid), 11 23, 1905Google Scholar.
10 Venero, Maximiano García, Historia del nacionalismo vasco (Madrid, 1941)Google Scholar, is the only general study on the origins of Basque nationalism. Goiri's, Arana classic statement of Basque nationalism was his Bizkaya por su independencia (1893)Google Scholar.
11 In this connection, there is some interesting material in de Ybarra, Javier, Politica national en Vizcaya (Madrid, 1948)Google Scholar.
12 It has been written, with only slight exaggeration, that “The reaction provoked in Catalonia by this catastrophe [of 1898] resulted, above all, in the entry into the ‘Lliga Regionalista’ of the majority of the industrial elements, moved by the desire to make up for the loss of overseas markets.” Cardó, Carlos, Histoire spirituelle des Espagnes (Paris, 1946), p. 161Google Scholar.
Francisco Cambó, the financial genius who emerged as head of the Lliga, virtually admitted that the Catalan bourgeoisie had embraced regional nationalism because the prospects of Spain as a whole seemed so poor. There are several biographies of Cambó, but the best is Pabón, Jesús, Cambó, Vol. I (1876–1919) (Madrid, 1951)Google Scholar.
13 The Army's viewpoint in the first part of the century was expressed in two official journals, La Correspondencia Militar and El Ejército Español. The Army had been the decisive factor in the nation during the time of troubles from 1820 to 1875, but the Restoration regime had largely kept it out of politics. It had been a liberal force during the first half of the nineteenth century, fighting the Carlists and other absolutist interests, but ever since the eighteen-sixties its narrow political perspective had been changing. The officers had been largely won over to a conservative position in national politics, in part because of the nature which the class struggle was taking, in part because of the rise of the separatist movements, in part perhaps because of a large number of marriage alliances between ranking officers and the upper middle class. There is a suggestive treatment of this in Vives, Jaime Vicens, Historia social y económica de España y América (Barcelona, 1957), Vol. IV, 406Google Scholar, and in the first chapters of Salas, Colonel Jesús Pérez, Guerra en Espana (Mexico, 1947)Google Scholar. Professionally the Spanish Army was becoming grotesque. Its size was inflated far beyond the actual needs of the nation, even though the Army was never kept up to full strength. It had the lowest officer-soldier ratio of any army in Europe, and was top heavy in the senior ranks. What made this awkward mechanism look even worse was that it seemed to be incapable of winning a seriously fought campaign. The miserable pay of the junior officers, the slowness of promotion, and the clumsiness of the whole institution produced an underlying malaise that left the Army restless and hypersensitive to any criticism. Alfonso XIII, the constitutional monarch who wanted to be an active statesman, was also something of a militarist who pampered the military both to increase his own personal power and also simply to keep the Army in line. Thus on the one hand the Army was accustomed to a privileged position in Spanish life and, on the other, was miserably frustrated by poverty, national weakness and its own professional incompetence. The Army reacted by demonstrating a certain superiority complex toward the rest of the nation and was quick to reply to any insult. The government went so far to comply with the Army's demands as to grant the officers the right to try before military tribunals newspapermen who dared satirize them. This protected the sanctity of the military caste, but did little to promote national unity. Army officers were supposed to be kept busy by the desultory fighting in that rather barren region known then as Spanish Morocco. This offered them the advantage of doing something active and, more important, of winning a quick promotion through bravery, if not by political favoritism. As casualties mounted in this peculiarly inefficient and meaningless struggle, opposition from liberals and the working class movements grew. The Army in turn felt that such antagonism was a betrayal of the abstraction “Spain” for which they were dying and became increasingly dissatisfied with each passing year.
14 There is a documentary collection of Junta material in Diaz-Plaja, Fernando, El siglo XX (La historia de España en sus documentos) (Madrid, 1960), pp. 384–95Google Scholar.
15 An interpretation of Primo de Rivera will be found in Ratcliff, Dillwyn F., Prelude to Franco: Political Aspects of the Dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (New York, 1957)Google Scholar. Apologetic works are numerous.
16 The fullest account of the abortive 1932 sanjurjada is in Arrarás, Joaquín (ed.), Historia de la Cruzada (Madrid, 1940), I, 485–97Google Scholar. See also Ansaldo, Juan Antonio, Para qué … ? (De Alfonso XIII a Juan III) (Buenos Aires, 1953), pp. 31–41Google Scholar.
17 This is treated in detail in Payne, Stanley G., Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford, 1961), pp. 21–100Google Scholar.
18 The main sources for a history of the 1936 conspiracy are Zabalza, Antonio Cacho, La Unión Militar Española (Alicante, 1940)Google Scholar; Iribarren, Antonio Lizarza, Memorias de la Conspiración (Pamplona, 1957)Google Scholar; Iribarren, José María, Mola (Zaragoza, 1938)Google Scholar; Güell, Felipe Beltrán, Preparación y desarrollo del alzamiento national (Valladolid, 1937)Google Scholar; Maíz, Félix B., Alzamiento en España (Pamplona, 1952)Google Scholar; and, for unpublished material, the Ferrer Archives, Seville.
19 The lack of any concrete content is quite apparent from the newspapers published in the rebel zone during the first months of the war.
20 The Catholic rationale for “Christian civil war” was given in Fr. Menéndez-Reigada, Ignacio, La Guerra Nacional española ante la Moral y el Derecho (Bilbao, 1937)Google Scholar and Catecismo patriótico español (Salamanca, n.d.). The official Catholic position is stated in Tomás, Cardenal Isidro Gomá y, Pastorales de la Guerra de Espana (Madrid, 1955)Google Scholar.
A very hostile account, backed up with a good deal of documentation, is Iturralde, op. cit., II.
21 This category of middle class includes the property-holding northern peasantry, who were basically conservative.
22 In this connection, there is an interesting study by Sierra, Fermín de la, La concentración econdmica en las industrias básicas españolas (Madrid, 1953)Google Scholar.
23 The most representative expression was de Areilza, José María and de Castiella, Fernando María, Reivindicaciones de España (Madrid, 1941)Google Scholar. On the original Falangist ideas of empire, see Payne, , op. cit., pp. 80–81Google Scholar, 277.
24 Religious tradition and painful historical memories had combined to impress on the mentality of Spanish conservatism a conspiracy theory of politics and social movements. This had come out strongly as early as 1909, in response to the national and international uproar over the Ferrer execution. Spanish conservatives had then insisted that the indignation was the result of a sort of international conspiracy against “Spain,” and that the honor of the country was at stake rather than the continuity of a reactionary government. The notion of an “anti-Spain,” however, had received its full elaboration only after the advent of the Second Republic, when it was propagated with general ideological orchestration by the monarchist journals Acción Española and Las Españas.
25 The classic statement of “Hispanidad” doctrine was de Maeztu's, RamiroDefensa de la Hispanidad (1934)Google Scholar, which contended that the Catholicism of the Spanish-speaking peoples was different from and in some respects superior to the Catholicism of other lands.
26 There is a good study of the development of “Hispanidad” ideas and their use in Spanish policy in an unpublished dissertation of Bristol, William B., “Hispanidad in South America, 1930–1945” (University of Pennsylvania, 1947, 51).Google Scholar The later Spanish notion of the transformation of “Hispanidad” into a federation of Hispanic states was given semi-official expression in Alberto Martín Artajo's speeches during the period 1945–55, published under the title Hacia la comunidad hispánica de naciones (Madrid, 1956)Google Scholar.
27 Franco tried to give positive content to his policy of quiescent nationalism-from-above by insisting on a state-controlled program of national industrial development. His sincerity in this aspect, at least, has been shown by the vast amounts of money poured into the INI, Spain's National Institute of Industry. This was one of the major factors in bringing the government to the verge of bankruptcy in 1959. The very mixed success of this operation indicates once more the dubious results of such a policy of artificially controlled nationalistic development. Without American aid the whole structure would probably have collapsed. de Sebastián, Vicente, Cómo gasta el Estado el dinero de los españotes (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar is a well-documented, if politically biased, study of the regime's financial policies.