Nello Quilici's "Spagna" : Chapter 1

Historical Precedents

Of all the great European countries, Spain is the only one in which the process of unification has not yet been completed, despite the fact that the formal unity of the nation, which can be traced back to the happy marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, preceded that of the major peoples of the continent.

This fact explains many, if not all, of the historical events of the last century and is at the basis of today's internal crisis, from which, certainly, the substantial unity of the people will emerge strengthened, if not defined forever. Spanish.

We must not believe that separatism acts as a centrifugal force only in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Here the phenomenon is more impressive, because it reacted to unity with greater coherence and luck, thanks to the strong distinction of language, the characteristics of the economy and the suggestions of cross-border kinships. But they have not ceased to work, in the sense of detachment or at least of autonomous distinction from Madrid, other provinces in which the pride of a past of pre-eminence (and sometimes of empire) over the Mediterranean world, is it was complicated, and is still complicated, by profound differences in climate, customs, production and civil development compared to the other regions of the peninsula.

An Englishman, Martin A. S. Hume, in the classic study "The Spanish people" which is thirty years old and seems to have been written yesterday, speaks of "Libyan and Semitic foundations" of Spanish civilization. Unamuno defines the millennial dissociative and anti-unitary labor of Spain "el nuestro kabilismo". Spain is Europe's bridge to Africa. Before being Roman, it was Phoenician and Punic; after Rome, it was owned by the Swabians, the Alans, the Vandals, then by the Visigoths and finally by the Arabs, who established in 711 the Caliphate of Cordova. Jewish emigration flocked there in dense masses, formed compact islands, left traces in blood and customs, above all after the Catholic kings imposed the abjuration of the name and faith on the Jews, many of whom remained ever since indistinct among the Christian population.

The "fueros", or privileges, which even recently, after the fall of the monarchy, have been claimed by this or that region, have complex and very ancient historical precedents. High barriers of mountains and deep rivers have favored and maintained the distinctions of origin, race, custom and language.

In the centuries of autonomous national formations, between the 12th and 15th centuries, the Iberian peninsula was a kind of archipelago: the Galicians speak their own language, and are profoundly divided from Andalusia; the Basques included for a long time with the Navarrese, form a nation of their own, with blood relatives wedged in French Brittany and are, conversely, in continuous rout with the Castilians; Castile and Léon, quartered by marriage alliances, are antipodes with the Aragonese, whose dialect assumes to be a language; Catalonia and Valencia with the Balearic Islands are proud of their Romance dialect, related to the dialects of southern France, the so-called "limosé".

Economic and social heterogeneities then act profoundly within the individual regions. The most modern civilization has presumed to erase the caste differences that date back a thousand years; but the equation is more formal than substantial. The legal statutes and special privileges acted too much on customs and prevented the formation of a fierce and autonomous bourgeoisie. If one studies the social aspect of Spain, it is still easy today to trace the distinctions that continued from the early Middle Ages up to the liberal revolutions of 1820-23. Under the crown of Castile, the whole territory was divided into Abadengo (Land of the Church), Realengo (Dominion of the Crown), Salariego (Land of the Nobles), Behetria (in their language, "benefactoria". or land of the people).

The proportions still remain by far to the advantage of the first three categories. The part assigned to the people was also organized in a semi-feudal structure: the small owners of the rural districts were obliged to elect a "lord" or a "chief" to whom tributes were paid in money and soldiers: this in turn was in the employ of the Crown. Notwithstanding the relative freedom of choice in the election of the chief, who the rural fraternities could seek in any territory of the Crown domains, from Biscay to Gibraltar, and change and dismiss when they wanted (the formula was: "from sea to sea and seven times a day") however, once the election had taken place, the relationships of dependence became peremptory and absolute between the leader and the community: often these rural fraternities were obliged to choose the leader according to the formula "de linage", i.e. among the members of families exclusively destined for this function, and this, above all, in the Mozarabic or Christian regions, who lived under the rule of Muslim laws.

Countless cities that for centuries lived with particular constitutions, practically small republics, scattered in full monarchical regime, each of which enjoyed a « carta pueblo » (popular statutes similar to those of our medieval Communes) and special "fueros" or unquestionable privileges. Not all the statutes and "fueros" derived from royal authority or were recognized by the King: many had been granted by ecclesiastics or nobles: the populace easily did without royal assent. Spain, even in the period of greater formal cohesion, was teeming with local laws; legal uniformity has always been more or less unknown to you. From the ancient "fue-Tos" other new and different ones germinated, by natural virtue or by the push of exceptional events. In the major cities there were statutes with a wider jurisdictional range: the so-called « comarcas », which in the Middle Ages were similar to our Counties and then continued, despite the unifying effort of the Monarchy and their juridical abolition, in tenacious and proud particularisms, which have continued to pit the major cities of Spain against each other in perennial rivalry. When the minor localities grew and tended towards emancipation, bitter struggles, not only for the bell tower, but economic and political, were developing against the capital: the King had to remedy them with the bestowal of new privileges.

Even the Church, despite her traditional force of unification, which has acted in such a beneficial way in some other large Western country (such as France), has been in Spain the cause of a delay in national training. Until the end of the 18th century and beyond, the Church in Spain never enjoyed a general law of exemption from taxes or uniform privileges of the forum: each monastery or abbey or bishopric claimed its particular privileges, regulating itself on historical precedents, true or usurped.

The same prerogative never tired of claiming the nobles, in perpetual struggle with the royal power. The distinctions between Christians and non-Christians, between nobles and non-nobles, between ecclesiastics and civilians, created a wild forest of laws and customs, always in sharp contradiction with each other.

The Monarchy, in Spain as elsewhere, supported fierce struggles to level the claims and pride of the privileged classes: but it often had to indulge itself, for the first time, to the claims of the vassals, indeed sometimes reinforce them: the necessities of the reconquest and the of defense against the periodic and never extinguished threat of the Moors forced the Monarchy to found garrisons on the frontiers; their leaders demanded special rights and were encouraged to keep arms and guns. Anyone who provided himself with arms entered the large category of milites and became a caballero every mile. Hence a hypertrophic increase in the nobility, large and small, encamped in the country with increasingly weaker duties and wider rights, usurper of state and private property, eager for adventures, pomp and power, but lacking sufficient means , grandiloquent and ragamuffin, megalomaniac and ridiculous. The epic, grandiose and melancholy, tragic and comic, of the Knight with a sad figure, of the noble Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, is grafted into this chapter of the history of Spain: it is a symbol that has its correspondences and its offshoots right up to the last centuries.

Finally, the vicissitudes of the Monarchy seem to contribute more to the disorder than to the unity of the Spanish people. Not that high and noble figures are lacking, both in the Castile and Aragon branches: but an atrocious fate condemns the monarchs of Spain to an exhausting internal war, often fought between members of the same family and overwhelming the universal cares of the state internally and externally.

In the Monarchy of Castile, a great figure is that of Alfonso X (1252-84) writer, legislator, fine and shrewd politician, who added, with the help of the vassal King of Granada, the pearl of Cadiz to his crown, and he almost made Spain, in advance of Charles V, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Even among these magnanimous dreams, his activity is exhausted in quarrels with court and family people, vassals, barons, rebel soldiers and turbulent bishops, and ends with his death in the field against his eldest son, Sancho, from he disinherited, after a chain of murders and family massacres. Thus dies at the age of 38, causing a real disaster to the cause of unity, that Alfonso XI, known as del Rio Salado, who had fought the Moors victoriously even on the lands of Morocco and Libya. Peter the Cruel owes its name to bloody adventures, whose cruelty is testified in the halls of the Alcazar of Seville by the sinister call. And we are not talking here except of the majors. As for the Kings of Aragon, who followed one another from the death of James the Conqueror (1276) to the death of Martin I (1410), one can well say the lavish humanitas of which their court was proud in Naples and in the other lands of the southern Italy, was bitterly repaid by the abandonment in which the native Aragonese region was left under the viceroyalty of inept, overbearing or insane relatives, joined to that of Catalonia and the Balearics. Woe to lift the veils of the Kingdom of Peter III, of James II and of that same Alfonso known as the Magnanimous, who made Naples the most splendid palace of the Renaissance: in essence, the Aragonese adventure in the Two Sicilies went to the detriment of Spain: it was a diversion exploited without regard and without measure by the turbulent barons of Aragon and Valencia.

Later, Spain enjoys a period of stability and political and moral union due to the happy conjunction of the two Crowns which takes place with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella: but how ephemeral!

The integral reconquest of the peninsula raises the question of aliens, Jews and Muslims and their innumerable crossbreeds. In 1480 the Inquisition had already established itself in Castile, in 1487 in Aragon; the professing Jews were expelled from the kingdom in 1492, precisely in that year, that is, in which the two most glorious dates of the Monarchy were celebrated: the conquest of Granada and the discovery of America. The entire economy of the country, its laborious internal settlement, are shaken by an earthquake. And this is accentuated ten years later, in 1502, when the Mohammedans and the Mudejares suffer the same condemnation. Infinitely more serious consequences, for internal peace and the moral unity of the Spanish people, they say when the Inquisition lays the hand, some time later, on the Marranos and the Moriscos, whose definitive expulsion is delayed by just a century: 1610. They want to eradicate all racial hybridism from Spain; but the enterprise is thorny, because the bastardy of blood and religion has been favored by the compulsory conversions, on pain of life, of the previous years: it turns out that the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries and very many nobles are partially or directly descendants of Jews and of Muslims! The trick of abjuration has spread and continues to spread: bonfires are blazing. Furrows of hatred are being dug between family and family; Spain is a hothouse of turbid and restless blood.

The history of Spain, even very recent, cannot be understood without going back to those distant causes: whoever seeks an explanation for the brutalities of the civil war, which make Westerners tremble with horror, finds it in the dark ordeal of mixed blood, in which everything East and West, Christ, Yehova and Mohammed, fight in a dialectic which has the absolute as its impossible synthesis, and rages in the depths of souls with flashes of hallucination, nightmare prostrations, mystical outbursts, gloomy despair.

The more homogeneous peoples, because they are more protected, along the course of their history, from pollution by extraneous and opposing elements, have not known and do not know what an intimate and daily tragedy the uncertainty of origin represents, this residue of murky moods of the blood, this perennial and vain search for inner unity.

But another element has been active from the beginning, against the moral unification of the peoples of Spain. Here too there is an analogy between Spain and post-Roman and Renaissance Italy: that is, in both the conflict is prolonged between the universal or imperialist conception of one's own civilization, and the particular, well-identified and well-defined conscience precise, within specific limits of geography and political action, of the nation.

The pride of a supranational supremacy, which asserted itself in the splendor of culture, thought and art, in the tradition of Rome I renewed by the Papacy, induced, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Italians not to give too much importance to the subdivisions interior of the peninsula and its lack of political unity. The imperial inheritance gave them accents of greatness and patents of nobility unknown to other peoples, but contributed to delaying the definition of Italy as a unitary power in the modern sense.

But Italy had other rewards, it marched along other paths, it finally reached the finish line without the need to renounce either one or the other historical premise of its development, and the ancient greatness of Rome has today finally become the certain and natural foundation of future Rome.

In Spain the universality of the Empire, created by Charles V, did not help the internal consistency of the peninsula, indeed, it harmed it; it was shipwrecked very quickly and then remained a legacy, excruciating, but sterile and negative, of a narrowness, a misery, a progressive humiliation of the nation, disinherited of its Empire.

In Charles V, who arrives in Spain from Flanders without knowing a word of Spanish, alien in all respects to the customs, aspirations and civilization of the country of which he assumes the crown, the last concern is precisely that of Spain. He is engaged in the international politics of the whole continent and Spain, with the immense riches that the conquest of Mexico, of Hernan Cortes, and of Peru, of Francisco Pizarro confer on it, serves him to draw capital to keep the German electors, to draw levies of soldiers against the French and the English, to shore up against the Pope or together with the Pope, an empire on which the sun never sets. Spain's internal history does not change its pace, nor does it rise to a better climate, while the Emperor with the Hapsburg nose goes from one European land to another to wage war or to conclude ephemeral treaties of friendship and peace. The nobles become agitated, the clergymen become enraged, the people are left to themselves. Charles thinks only of the greatness of his house: his indifference passes in the eyes of the Spaniards due to incapacity: the imperial purple does not prevent them from judging the Monarch very severely and repaying him with equal indifference: when he renounces the throne, few miss him...

Virtues and defects are accentuated in Philip II, even more withdrawn and deaf than his father to the joyful celebration of the Spanish sun, to the calls of the flowery land, to the poetry and splendor of the Latin people. His realm is a prison system, a closed block, an airless house; the novelty, the interest, the very goal of his policy is constantly outside Spain and sometimes against Spain: until, with the defeat of the Invincible peoples. A sort of Spanish Giolitti, Canovas, re-establishes a semblance of legality, consolidating the Monarchy for a generation with electoral corruption. His predecessors got rid of their opponents with a firing squad: Canovas silenced them by buying them. It is said of Narvaez that on his deathbed, to the priest who asked him: "Do you forgive Your Excellency to your enemies?" he replied in a firm voice: "I have no enemies: I shot them all." Canovas' motto was instead: "Time and God against all". One word made a fortune and came back into fashion in Europe under his rule: "la camarilla". All the secret was in the process of narcosis with which they calmed down, through the factory of deputies, reactionaries and conservatives. Less shrewd than Alfonso XII, his widow, Maria Cristina, gets engulfed in a war adventure against the United States: it is Spain's last adventure on those American seas where her flag had one day flown as a lady: the Admiral Cervera's squadron is destroyed in the bay of Santiago de Cuba by the two US admirals, Sampson and Schley. Spain loses, together with Cuba, the Philippines and the Carolines. It was 1898. The generation that takes its name from this date set out to draw from the defeat the reasons for a political, civil, economic and moral rebirth of Spain.

The regency of Maria Cristina, precipitates, among the first clamors of the socialist strikes, in Barcelona and Zaragoza, in full religious war between the Cortes and the convents, and in the universal economic hardship that heralds the imminent bankruptcy of the state.

At the beginning of the century Spain emerged from a defeat (the Cuban war) which liquidated its overseas empire forever; its function as world power is over; and it is also exhausted in the world of the spirit, after the liberal reform of the nineteenth century destroyed the foundations of that state of divine law, of which the Spanish Monarchy was the symbol and exponent. Extinguished any force of projection of its culture beyond the borders, since classical times. People of creators, the vein has dried up. The ideas of German naturalism and French rationalism are ruminated in the universities. So what does Spain represent in the world? What are you tending to? What word does he have to say? What mission to carry out? How will he save himself from dying of inanition, now that his countryside is depopulating, the index of industrial production is decreasing, are its resources hoarded by the British? What voices rise from the disconsolate land of the ancient queen of the world to advise the sixteen-year-old king? And is he able to answer?

Alfonso XIII begins his reign on May 17, 1902, with an assassination attempt, a fatal omen. The eyes of the world fix on him. His balance, physical and psychic, is not perfect, and is resolved in alternatives of intemperance and prostration. His education was not exemplary: narrow-minded men and mediocre culture influenced his spiritual formation: he reacts with natural intelligence, but demonstrates more cunning than character. Nor does he have hope of help from the now deprived old people, nor can he count on the trust of the young people who are increasingly detaching themselves from the monarchical institution, and yet, just after the defeat of '98 or even thanks to that defeat, the advent of Alfonso coincides with an ideal renewal of the spirit that can bring Spain back to creative times.

After the philosophical and moral pontificate of Don Francisco Giner, who in the second half of the previous century, with the open help of the English and the French, attempted to organize secular education in Spain, the process of adapting the Iberian culture to that European Union is led by four young writers, soon in conflict with the established authorities, non-conformists, more or less at war with each other, but united in a work of strengthening the nation, of resurrection ab imis. They are Joaquin Costa, Angel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset. Here is the formula of the first: «Let us lock the tomb of the Cid under a triple lock and attend to the needs of the moment». What needs? « School and pantry ». Costa writes, agitates, fights, for culture, for the economy. Many young people follow him. Nuclei are formed. Matters stir. Each of his books is a battle. It has a great virtue: it doesn't stay on the clouds. And an opponent; can become a friend.

Angel Ganivet was instead a poet. Among the olive trees and cypresses of his native Granata, he had gone in search of the ideal and eternal motifs of the Iberian soul: in his *Idearium Español* he wondered if among the formulas of an ecclesiastical policy, which had sacrificed Christ to Mammon, it was not possible to trace the gold vein of mystical idealism, that pietas, divine and human at the same time, which had given universal value to message of Spain in the world, during the previous centuries. He asked for a purer air, a higher inspiration, a more fervent solidarity with those responsible.

The third, Miguel de Unamuno, shook the conformist torpor of the younger generations by demonstrating that the truth is in the struggle, in the "agony">> of good versus evil, in the eternal dialectic between light and shadow that stirs at the bottom of individual consciousness and flashes with its dazzling reflections in collective life. The "sense of the tragic", (which Giovanni Papini then echoed in his "Tragic daily") leads him to resume the stages of Don Quixote's wonderful journey through the lands of his homeland, to seek under the veil of symbol the light of truth, the guide in a fight without quarter against hypocrisy, falsehood, inertia, injustice: neither contingent nor political, but universal and religious, the message of Michele de Unamuno formulated a theme of Christian unity in the midst of modern civilization, tore apart intellectualistic myths, to place man before God, naked and solitary like a hero of Michelangelo on the day of universal judgement. His verb was more negative than positive: woe to the critic who does not reconstruct! But it cracked like a whip, it flashed like an Apocalypse, it even shook the dead in their graves. In a country stiffened by frost, prostrated by catastrophes, determined to abandon any struggle in the face of overwhelming destiny, the word of that solitary and thorny Basque, inspired and vehement, rang out like that of the prophet.

The fourth, José Ortega y Gasset, survives in a formidable book: España invertebrada. The tragic pessimism of Unamuno, who never ceases to seek God amidst the searing pangs of doubt, indeed erects a system and substance of nobility and a license of salvation only to the hope of the desperate, in Ortega y Gasset, is resolved in a formula: "God is in sight." Nothing that is human is foreign to him: the inorganicity, the contradictions. moral misery of Spain, are ruthlessly analyzed by him with a kind of lyrical fury, which recalls the stripping brushes of Velasquez and Greco: but the conclusion is optimistic: the Spanish problem is a problem of solidarity: to the exasperated individualism it is necessary to replace the sense of the human, indeed that of the universal. The more Una muno exalts herself in the search for typically Spanish elements, the more Ortega Europeanises herself, calls France and Germany to the rescue, the in intellectualism and technicality, solidarity, progress. Its God is science, the guarantee of salvation is the rational organization of civilization. He is distrustful of the Anglo-Saxon world, because it is too empirical and contemptuous in the face of the absoluteness of "systems". Born a journalist, "on the frame of a rotary press" as he says, he vogues on the crest of current events and gives phosphorescence and suggestion to all the illusions that pass through the empyrean of the West.... This one, which is the reason of his fame, is also the frontier of his ingenuity.

But, in the meantime, the immobile and stagnant bottom of the Spanish soul stirs. Together with a productive awakening, which influences the economic fate of the nation and is reflected in agriculture, industry, commerce, a new culture is being formed to replace the traditional and historical one that had been squandered . The names of Spanish novelists, scientists and artists are forcing the borders of the nation and acquiring worldwide resonance. Rivers of blood no longer flow in Spain, but of ink: perhaps this too is a calamity: but how much less!

In these circumstances, with a quarter of a century at his disposal, what did Alfonso XIII do? He could have summarized and synthesized the disparate tendencies, attracted them to the Monarchy, personified their yearning for renewal, realized the impetus towards unity: or resolutely denied them as not conforming to the Spanish temperament, and replaced them with another formula that revealed an address and an original program. He had no obstacles or prejudices. A certain tendency to break with ceremony made him popular with the masses; after the first conflict, which was waged in his name by Canalejas, the priests would not have bothered him: as for the army, it emerged remade from the experience of '98, it was a monarchist by tradition and expected only orders and orders from him. measure; with a minimum of good will, land reform, the basis of every attempt at renewal in Spain, could have been tackled and gradually resolved. Finally, later on, the world war restored to Alfonso a universal teaching of justice and almost of arbitration between warring peoples: it was no longer the ancient splendor of the Empire that had faded forever, but something that in the political order and morally he vaguely resembled him; an honor, a prestige, a mission, which restored to Spain the respect of the whole world. Alfonso from the beginning did not choose either the part of the constitutional king or that of the despot; he kept to the middle ground. Immediately after the coronation, at the first council of ministers, staring those present in the eyes, he took the text of the constitution to which he had sworn allegiance and claimed on the basis of art. 54 his absolute right to appoint or dismiss the government, to dissolve or annul the chamber, to elect all the high officials of the state, to distribute promotions and honors as he pleases. The Duke of Veragua, Minister of the Navy, interrupted him: "Your Majesty forgets the Art. 49, according to which no act of the King is valid without the confirmation of the competent ministers..." What will the King do? Will he respond, with impetus, to the arrogant? No: the King bows his head and does not add a word.

This alternative lasted until the end of the reign: in the first two years five ministries succeeded one another in power: Silvela, Villaverde, Maura, Azcarraga and Villaverde again. Every now and then it is announced that the King has come out of the clerical-conservative pupillary; in the fight against the Vatican he goes beyond the intentions of the liberal ministers.... But no: he soon recedes and lets the caciques rage. Canalejas, Maura, Moret, Romanones, are as many stages in a political zig-zag. In his long-suffering as in his hardness he surprises: he refuses the pardon, insistently requested even by the Pope, to Francisco Ferrer, but grants it, in 1922, after the riots in Valencia, to those sentenced to death, who in no way should have been pardoned.

His personal action is perceptible throughout the life of Spain but he acts, like a mere politician, in view of momentary opportunities, not with the measure of a Head of State whose responsibilities are historical and remain above and beyond outside current events. No clear belief system, a certain disregard for things of the spirit, a nimble but erratic will. Exuberant in his confidence, he suddenly withdrew it. Although it was compliant with Bourbon customs, and inherent, so to speak, to the special style of cordial and welcoming gentleman of Don Alfonso (in many respects similar to the Neapolitan kings of the early nineteenth century: remember Don Ferdinando, the Joker King), the familiarity of the Monarch with generals and colonels above the Minister of War, some went at the expense of hierarchies. The King summoned opposition politicians to the Palace, negotiated with them, openly, the issues of the day: he loved the populace of Madrid, who in turn adored him, and of the undeniable popularity, which he had won among the petty people, he often took more account than parliamentary susceptibilities. Ultimately, this was a system for an absolute king: but in Spain, vice versa, a constitutional regime was in force: hence contradictions and fractures, rapid and easy changes of government, misunderstandings with the typical and political middle classes. In short, Don Alfonso (who did not dislike large military parades and saber noises) tended to eliminate the intermediaries between the Monarchy and the people: he was stuck on a "paternalistic" concept of his royal function: but the great social problems of the moment required solutions of justice: and when, sated with diversions and dissatisfied with a very picturesque but sterile sentimental tutelage, the people of the cities and the countryside, gathered in class organizations, demanded the rights of work, the spell was broken. Monarch and people no longer understood each other.

Any demonstration, even legitimate, of the working masses was an act of sedition, to be repressed with arms. Hence the violence, riots and innumerable attacks. At the time the Monarchy seemed truly uprooted from the country: in contrast with the privileged (whom Don Alfonso rightly held in awe); without harmony, indeed in perennial conflict with bourgeois liberalism, which was inspired by Franco-English ideals, of university origin, hostile to the majority of Spaniards and to the King in particular; in open and continuous battle with the masses, convulsed by economic crises and agitated by red demagogues or priests, Don Alfonso of Bourbon ended up believing that the dynasty had exhausted its task in Spain and came to abdication: a mistake, this too, of perspective. Because Spain, when the King crossed the frontier, was still profoundly monarchical: indeed, it could not fail to be monarchical by mentality, by custom, by irresistible tendency and only asked the Monarch for a more direct and energetic, human and profound direct action. tive, inspired by the eternal and sacred, not fleeting and transient functions of control and intervention, of synthesis and measurement, of the Crown.

The proof of the Monarch's difficulty in understanding men or things resulted in the dictatorial experiment of Primo de Rivera. II Marquis of Estella, Don Miguel Primo De Rivera y Orbaneja, born in 1970, promoted to major for war merits during the Cuba campaign, decorated in the Philippine war, former Captain General in Valencia, then Military Governor of Catalonia, subject to agreements with high military and civilian personalities such as Emilio Barrera and Martinez Anido, he proclaimed a state of siege and assumed power on September 14, 1923 without opposition, but also without the prior consent of the King, who was at that time in San Sebastian. Primo de Rivera complained from the outset of the "frost" with which he was surrounded. The bourgeois hated him, and the reason for this is understandable: he had deprived them of the use and abuse of freedoms that had degenerated into license; the nobles fought it openly (Primo De Rivera had destroyed their privileges and aimed at the moral unification of the country). But the people? He worked for him, tended towards social justice in action; positive, concrete. But the King? The Dictator was an honest and loyal monarchist. The people and the king left him alone.... What Primo de Rivera did in seven years of government is known: administrative reorganization, financial restoration, technical reorganization of production, huge public works, liquidation of the Moroccan question with the victorious campaign in Riff, followed by the revision of the Statute of Tangier in 1928. In the second phase of his government, which dates from December 3, 1925, the personal dictatorship Primo de Rivera had replaced by a regular government presided over by him, Spain was heading towards a beneficial era of social harmony, accompanied by economic prosperity and renewed political prestige. The exhibitions in Barcelona and Seville in 1929 demonstrated to the world what a formidable contribution that simple, upright, energetic and disinterested man represented for Spain and for the King.

Instead, Alfonso XIII fired him on January 28, 1930, morally forcing him into exile which was then abruptly and mysteriously broken by his death in Paris the following year. Why? The reason is to be found in the Sovereign's intolerance in tolerating intermediaries between the Crown and the People as mentioned above. Primo De Rivera constituted a sort of diaphragm for Don Alfonso. He interrupted, and in part denied, the paternalistic function of the Bourbon dynasty, the supreme ideal of Alfonso XIII. The unpopularity of Primo de Rivera (who lacked some formal qualities, before above all eloquence) made the King believe that the reflection of the incomprehension, if not of the antipathy of the bourgeois classes and the indifference of the masses towards the Dictator struck the Dynasty. Later, Primo's own successes gave shade to Alfonso. As a loyal soldier, Primo De Rivera had put noble labor at the service of the King. The calculation proved to be incorrect. The old coterie of the Court worked on the loose fund of the Monarch's susceptibility. The Count of Romanones said in an interview with the Tharaud brothers: "Our King is very intelligent. And its biggest flaw. When one possesses political qualities, ingenuity, ideas, how can one adapt oneself not to use them and to calmly remain a constitutional King?"

This music was not to take long to find the ways of the heart of Alfonso who had the impression of having been put on leave and out of picture. Even more the other reason, which Romanones himself mentioned to the journalist, influenced the King: "It is possible that a liberal monarchy, for which so many Spaniards have sacrificed their lives, is now abandoned to a Carlist absolutism ?... Did our internal situation perhaps require similar sacrifices? Between the silence and the drum, as they say in Andalusia, there is also room for something..."

Yes, there was room for something; and the King, after dismissing the Dictator, immediately noticed it. He could not replace Primo De Rivera in any way. As usual, he lacked an address and a programme. General Berenguer did not last a year in power; the garrisons of Ciudad Real and later that of Jaca rebelled: a revolutionary committee chaired by Alcalà Zámora demanded the constituent; Liberals like Romanones refused to assume responsibility for power. Uncertain whether to turn to the right or to the left, Alfonso chose the middle path, that is, he focused on psychological elements, personal sympathy and prestige: he formed an apolitical Cabinet, "de concentración monarquica" headed by an admiral, Aznar, who was supposed to convene the municipal elections and, immediately after, those of the Cortes.

The first ones were enough. Alfonso was completely isolated. The soldiers were furious at the recent convictions of the Jaca rebels, some of whom had been shot against the advice of the President of the Military Tribunal himself (among the insurgents were the aviator Franco, brother of the current Dictator, and Commander Queipo de Llano); the parclerical titi, having lost all faith in the King who at all costs did not want to become a tyrant, had approached the Carlists; the working classes, socialists in Madrid, syndicalists and anarchists in Barcelona, were already giving themselves over to subversive agitators; the middle class more than ever apathetic, rambling, absent.... Since the Director General of Public Safety frankly demonstrated to the Sovereign the absurdity of a popular plebiscite in those conditions, he was fired by Alfonso just on the eve of the elections. This was General Mola, now an illustrious name.

The situation soon escalated. On the evening of April 13, the first results were known; in Barcelona, Cordoba, Eibar, Zaragoza, the republic was proclaimed. In Madrid the republicans immediately occupied L'Alcadia, in other places communist soviets were established. Churches, convents, banks, public buildings were set on fire here and there throughout Spain. Aznar had already resigned. Elements of the left questioned by the King, Sanchez Guerra, Gillanueva and Melquiedez Alvarez, advised him to abdicate. Alfonso's final appeal was to the Commander of the Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo: "Too late," replied the proud soldier. The King prepared to leave. On the morning of April 16, 1931, he landed in Marseilles.

Ironically, it soon became known that the results of the municipal elections were not at all catastrophic, as the King had believed at the first announcement. But the electoral verdict was only one incident, the latest in a long series of errors which had led the monarchy to the exhaustion of strength and prestige. The hour of the Bourbons had struck.

And Spain? Spain, left to itself, plunged towards catastrophe.

©repth