from Castile, yet two years later it was a mere 10 per cent. The various components of the northern industrial bourgeoisie were barely represented within the system but, for the moment, were content, as Cánovas had hoped, to devote their activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the early twentieth century, they began to organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers tended to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, in their case to protect the Spanish market against cheaper British and Indian competition. In contrast, the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders. Nevertheless, because of its lack of representation, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was forced to act as little more than a pressure group. Thus, despite having interests in common with the agrarian protectionists, they could be attacked by Liberals and Conservatives alike as the mouthpieces of Catalan nationalism.43
It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression unless they were in the interests of the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. Rafael Shaw, an English journalist who lived in Barcelona, wrote in 1910:
Ministerial changes in Spain are the outcome of a tacit arrangement made some thirty years ago between Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the then leaders of the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and continued by their successors, that each side should have its fair share of the loaves and fishes. After one party had been in office three or four years it was agreed by common consent that the time had come for the other side to have a turn. Thus, as Major Martín Hume says: ‘Dishonest Governments are faced in sham battle by dishonest Oppositions, and parliamentary institutions, instead of being a public check upon abuses, are simply a mask behind which a large number of politicians may carry on their nefarious trade with impunity.’
Shaw explained the impotence of the electorate to change this system as the consequence of ‘the tentacles of the octopus of corruption which holds the whole country in its grip. The simple fact is that the great mass of the people have no voice at all in the election of their representatives. Nominally voting is free: actually it is not.’44
In theory, governments were in power for five years but in practice would resign because of defeat on a particular vote, hostile public opinion, the loss of party support for the Prime Minister or some intractable social or economic problem on the horizon. The King, in theory, as the mouthpiece of public opinion or, in reality, on the basis of his prejudices or caprice, had the power to change governments because he could force an administration to resign. He could then decide to whom to grant a royal decree of dissolution of the Cortes. The rather frivolous Alfonso XIII would abuse this power.45 The newly chosen Prime Minister, often but not always the leader of the other party, would form a government. Then, he and his Minister of the Interior would spend the next few months arranging an electoral victory that both justified his party’s presence in power and gave the outgoing party a decent presence in the Cortes. When the petitions of both parties had been examined, lists of candidates would be drawn up that would ensure a substantial majority for the new Prime Minister. This process was known as the encasillado, each candidate who was selected to win a seat placed in the pigeonhole (casilla). The agreement of both parties was forthcoming. Sometimes results were faked in the Ministry of the Interior but more often they were fixed at the local level. The task of ensuring the election of the selected candidates fell to the provincial governor of each province. He would then negotiate with the local town bosses or caciques. They would deliver the vote for the government’s candidates in return for government patronage. The candidates chosen in Madrid, who were then ‘parachuted’ into the constituency, were known as cuneros. On average about half of successful candidates were cuneros, that is to say with no links to the area that they would represent. Nevertheless, sometimes the local oligarchs would accept a cunero willingly because his political influence boded well for the area.46
The two parties thus lived within a non-aggression pact which made a mockery of the apparently democratic system because the formation of governments had nothing to do with the will of the electorate. Only after governments had been appointed by the King were elections held. The results were then carefully arranged by the party in power and produced, on average, 65 per cent majorities. Such apparently humiliating defeats for one side were rendered acceptable by the certainty of an equally spectacular victory next time. Between them the two dynastic parties held 98 per cent of parliamentary seats in 1884 and 83 per cent in 1901. The republicans and the Carlists had relatively little representation. The relatively even alternation was illustrated by the fact that, between 1879 and 1901, of all the deputies ‘elected’ 1,748 were Conservatives and 1,761 were Liberals.47 Electoral falsification ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened. The system rested on the social power of local town bosses or caciques. In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique could be a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. The threat of foreclosure could secure votes. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was usually the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore whose family did not starve. The cacique thus could acquire the votes of individuals by many means, ranging from the intimidation that came from ruthless control of the local labour market to the granting of favours and bribes.
Control of the local administrative and judicial apparatus enabled the cacique to provide favourable judgements in land disputes, jobs, reduction of tax bills or exemptions from military service for someone within the clientelist network. Each change of government would see a massive changeover of jobs from the most humble doormen and roadsweepers to civil governors, judges and senior civil servants, all of whom were expected to vote as instructed.48 After the elections of 1875 had been arranged by Cánovas’s Minister of the Interior, Francisco Romero Robledo, Sir Austen Henry Layard, the British Ambassador to Spain from 1869 to 1877, reported to the Foreign Office that virtually every salaried placeholder had been replaced by a supporter of Alfonso XII.49 There was no permanent civil service or judiciary owing its service to the nation. The system itself fostered corruption by ensuring that public service was for private benefit. Thus the tradition which endures to this day was established whereby few of those who become mayors (alcaldes) leave the town hall poorer than when they entered.
General Eduardo López de Ochoa wrote in 1930 that the majority of judges and magistrates owed their places to political intrigues and passed sentences in the interests of their patrons. The same applied right down to secretaries and court clerks. It was said of the great cacique Juan de la Cierva that no leaf fell in the province of Murcia without his permission. López de Ochoa claimed that La Cierva had several judges of the Supreme Court in his pocket and could always count on judgments favourable to himself or his friends. López Ochoa quoted a law professor who had stated that ‘larceny and robbery existed in Spain only in regard to amounts lower than one hundred thousand pesetas. Above that figure, they were called financial affairs.’ In any issue, civil or criminal, that went through the courts, a sum had to be put aside to grease the wheels of ‘justice’.50
Similar accusations to those made about Juan de la Cierva were made regarding numerous other powerful caciques who also controlled entire provinces: Álvaro de Figueroa y Torres, the Conde de Romanones in Guadalajara; the wheat baron Germán Gamazo in Valladolid; Juan Poveda and Antonio Torres Orduña in Alicante; Carlos O’Donnell, Duque de Tetuán, in Castellón; Pedro Rodríguez de la Borbolla in Seville; Manuel Burgos y Mazo in Huelva; Gabino Bugallal in Orense or Augusto González Besada in Lugo.51 With the tax collector, the alcalde and the judge at his command, the cacique was able to take over parcels of common lands, let his cattle graze on his neighbours’ lands, divert water away from the land of his enemies and towards his own or that of his friends and have works done on his property at the expense of the municipality. A landowning lawyer from Almería commented: ‘Four pickpockets in top hats and four thugs usually make up the top brass of a party.’ In a similar vein, the one-time Minister of Justice Pedro José Moreno Rodríguez claimed that ‘those that the Civil Guard used to pursue now work as bodyguards for the authorities’. It was a symptom of how openly the system worked that