from the Moors. The choice of venue symbolically associated the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and identified the working class with the Moorish invaders. Local Socialists declared a general strike and tried to block the roads to Covadonga, but the Civil Guard ensured that the rally went ahead as planned. The leader of the Asturian branch of Acción Popular, the retired army officer José María Fernández Ladreda, cited the reconquest of Spain as he introduced Gil Robles, who spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque nationalists.73 The wily Gil Robles knew only too well that such language, threatening key achievements of the Republican–Socialist coalition of 1931–3, would confirm the left in its determination to prevent the CEDA coming to power.
Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation.
Later that evening, Salazar Alonso wrote once more to his lover Amparo recounting what had happened earlier in the day. He made it clear that he thought the CEDA should join the government and that his objective was to provoke a reaction by the left precisely in order to smash it.
I explained the revolutionaries’ plan. I examined the Catalan question, pointing out objectively and honestly all the circumstances, the possibilities and the consequences of our decisions … The situation is serious. I couldn’t permit any action that was thoughtless or not properly prepared. I had to consider what was necessary to justify declaring martial law … The Government, opposed by the revolutionary left, lacks the backing of the parliamentary group [the CEDA] on whose votes it relies … Was this the Government with the authority to provoke the definitive revolutionary movement?74
In his published account of his role, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was no less than that of starting the counter-revolutionary offensive to proceed with a work of decisive government to put an end to the evil.’ He aimed not just to smash the immediate revolutionary bid but to ensure that the left did not rise again.75
Not long afterwards, Gil Robles admitted that he was aware of and indeed shared Salazar Alonso’s provocative intentions. He knew that the Socialists were committed to reacting violently to what they believed would be an attempt to establish a Dollfuss-type regime. He too was fully aware that the chances of revolutionary success were remote. Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:
I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.76
The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, eventually came around to the point of view of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. At the end of September, he organized large-scale army manoeuvres in León, in an area contiguous, and of similar terrain, to Asturias, where he suspected the revolutionary bid would take place.77 When the cabinet discussed cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo argued that they were necessary precisely because of the imminent revolutionary threat. Certainly, once the revolutionary strike did break out in Asturias in early October, the astonishing speed with which the Spanish Foreign Legion was transported from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem. As Hidalgo later admitted in the Cortes, three days before the manoeuvres started, he had ordered the Regiment No. 3 from Oviedo not to take part and to remain in the Asturian capital because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.78 In any case, Gil Robles had secured confidential assurances from senior military figures that the army could crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.79
On 26 September, Gil Robles made his move with a communiqué stating that, in view of the present cabinet’s ‘weakness’ regarding social problems, and irrespective of the consequences, a strong government with CEDA participation had to be formed. In a sinuous speech in the Cortes on 1 October, claiming to be motivated by a desire for national stability he introduced an unmistakable threat: ‘we are conscious of our strength both here and elsewhere’. After the inevitable resignation of the cabinet, President Alcalá Zamora entrusted Lerroux with the task of forming a government, acknowledging the inevitability of CEDA participation, but hoping that it would be limited to one ministry. Gil Robles insisted on three in the knowledge that this would incite Socialist outrage.80
Gil Robles’s provocation was carefully calibrated. His three choices for the cabinet announced on 4 October were José Oriol y Anguera de Sojo (Labour), Rafael Aizpún (Justice) and Manuel Giménez Fernández (Agriculture). Anguera de Sojo was an integrist Catholic (his mother was being considered by the Vatican for canonization), an expert on canon law and lawyer for the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat. He had been the public prosecutor responsible for a hundred confiscations and numerous fines suffered by El Socialista. Moreover, as a Catalan rightist, he was a bitter enemy of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the ruling party in the Generalitat. As a hard-line civil governor of Barcelona in 1931, his uncompromising strike-breaking policies had accelerated the CNT move to insurrectionism. The choice of Anguera could hardly have been more offensive. The Esquerra sent a deputation to see Alcalá Zamora and plead for his exclusion. Gil Robles refused point-blank the President’s suggestions.81 Aizpún, CEDA deputy for Pamplona, was close to the Carlists. Giménez Fernández, as deputy for Badajoz, was inevitably assumed to be as faithful a representative of the aggressive landlords of that province as Salazar Alonso had been and likely, as Minister of Agriculture, to intensify the awful repression that had followed the harvest strike. The suppositions about the Minister were wrong, since he was a moderate Christian Democrat, but those about the Badajoz landlords were right. Because of his relatively liberal policies, Giménez Fernández was rejected as a candidate for Badajoz in the 1936 elections and was forced to run in Segovia.82
The Socialists had every reason to fear that the new cabinet would implement Salazar Alonso’s determination to impose reactionary rule. After all, on 222 of the 315 days of Radical government until the end of July, the country had been declared to be in a state of emergency, which meant the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Sixty of the ninety-three days on which there was constitutional normality had been during the electoral period of late 1933. Press censorship, fines and seizures of newspapers, limitation of the freedom of association, declaration of the illegality of almost all strikes, protection for fascist and monarchist activities, reduction of wages and the removal of freely elected Socialist town councils were seen as the establishment of a ‘regime of white terror’. These were the policies that Gil Robles, in his speech of 1 October, had denounced as weak. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he intended to impose more repressive ones.83
In the last few days of September, still hoping to persuade the President to resolve the crisis by calling elections, the Socialist press had resorted to desperate – and empty – threats. El Socialista implied that preparation for the revolutionary action was well advanced: ‘We have our army waiting to be mobilized, and our international plans and our plans for socialism.’84 At the end of the month, the paper’s editorial asked rhetorically: ‘Will it be necessary for us to say now, stating the obvious, that any backward step, any attempt to return to outmoded policies will inevitably face the resistance of the Socialists?’85 Clearly, Julián Zugazagoitia, the thoughtful director of El Socialista, knew full well that the Socialist movement was utterly unprepared for a revolutionary confrontation with the state. If his editorials were not senseless irresponsibility – and Zugazagoitia, a faithful supporter of Prieto, was no extremist – they have to be seen as a last-ditch threat