becoming obsessed with fast French cars. In early September 1904, several ministers expressed in cabinet their concern that Alfonso was risking his life with such powerful vehicles. Maura had declared: ‘We have only him and, if anything happens to him, no one else.’ The King bore a grudge. When Maura’s Minister of War tried to name a new chief of the General Staff, Alfonso insisted on his own candidate, General Camilo García de Polavieja. Opposing the view of the entire cabinet, he refused to back down and forced the resignation of Maura’s government. That his behaviour resembled an infantile tantrum was revealed when Alfonso took Maura’s successor, the seventy-one-year-old General Marcelo de Azcárraga Palmero, to watch him driving a car over blazing logs and then told him to make sure that he told Maura what he had seen. General Azcárraga’s government lasted little more than a month.14
After this brief hiatus, Maura returned to power following the election of 21 April 1907, managed by the Minister of the Interior, the thuggish Juan de la Cierva. It was one of the most corrupt in Spanish history. Maura disliked La Cierva’s open espousal of electoral corruption yet came to rely on him. The relationship would consistently undermine his own career. Although the anarchists eschewed establishment politics, the Socialists and Republicans were slowly becoming ever more effective in mobilizing working-class votes in order to secure representation in the Cortes. Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Republican Party had also had some success in this regard in Catalonia in the elections of 1901 and 1903.15 In consequence, La Cierva’s ‘skills’ came to seem indispensable.
Elections aside, in the two decades before the First World War the principal challenges to the system came from a burgeoning anarchosyndicalism and the more slowly growing Socialist movement. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), saw their ranks swelled by the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao, and the coalminers of Asturias. Given the ideological differences between anarchism and socialism, there was never much likelihood of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement. The possibility was definitively eliminated by the decision, in 1899, of the party’s rigid leader Pablo Iglesias to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent, this cut off the Socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was further hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism, mediated through the dead hand of Pablo Iglesias. He rendered the party isolationist, committed to the view that the Socialists should work legally for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.16
The differences between the Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists were illustrated by the general strike that paralysed Barcelona in mid-February 1902. In May 1901, the government had responded to a strike of tram workers by declaring martial law. So many workers were arrested that there was no room in the city prison and many were detained in the hold of the battlecruiser Pelayo.17 This was followed in December by a strike of metalworkers in favour of a reduction of the working day from ten to nine hours. The metalworkers had faced fierce obstacles. They had no strike funds, and widespread unemployment made it easy for the factory owners to recruit blacklegs. Nevertheless, 10,000 workers managed to stay out for the next eight weeks. Then on 17 February 1902, the anarchist unions declared a general strike in solidarity with the metallurgical unions. Within a few days, it involved around 80,000 of Barcelona’s workforce of 144,000. The city was without public transport, newspapers, shops, banks and cafés for a week. The response of the authorities was brutal. Martial law was declared within a week. Strike leaders were arrested and pickets broken up with cavalry charges. At least twelve workers were killed and several dozen injured. The strikers were defeated and returned to work on 24 February. The organized workers’ movement in Catalonia was dramatically weakened. Trade unions were suppressed and the anarchist movement forced underground. The Socialist leadership had urged its militants to stand aside for fear of such consequences. Pablo Iglesias later denounced the anarchists for their irresponsibility and the party newspaper El Socialista accused the anarchists of being ‘auxiliaries of the bourgeoisie’. Although it was a failure, the 1902 strike ultimately strengthened the anarchists and consolidated their hostility towards the Socialist movement.18
The long-standing monopoly of political power by the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization, but it would not be surrendered easily. Industrialization brought with it challenges from powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement. The system was also opposed by an increasingly influential group of middle-class republicans. As well as distinguished individuals like Joaquín Costa, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic. The most notable among them was the intensely learned man of letters Manuel Azaña, who would eventually become Prime Minister and later President of the Second Republic.
Some elements within the PSOE, notably the young Asturian journalist Indalecio Prieto, recognized that the non-violent triumph of socialism required the prior establishment of liberal democracy. The rise of republicanism inclined them to fight for an electoral alliance with middle-class Republicans. Anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and opposition to the Moroccan adventure was bringing the two closer together. Prieto’s experiences in Bilbao had shown that, alone, the Socialists had little chance of electoral success while, with the Republicans, it was possible. His advocacy of a Republican–Socialist electoral combination in 1909 opened up the long-term prospect of building socialism legally from parliament. However, it also brought him into conflict with local leaders such as Facundo Perezagua, who advocated an exclusively syndicalist strategy of confrontational strike action. After a long and bitter struggle within the Federación Provincial Socialista de Vizcaya, Prieto eventually defeated Perezagua, and thereafter Bilbao became a stronghold of Republican–Socialist collaboration. That was enough to earn Prieto the lifelong hostility of the UGT Vice-President, Francisco Largo Caballero, who shared Perezagua’s distrust of bourgeois Republicans. Republican–Socialist collaboration would be the basis of eventual PSOE success. Indeed, Pablo Iglesias himself was elected to parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the unrelenting animosity of Largo Caballero would bedevil Prieto’s existence and eventually, in the 1930s, have devastating consequences for Spain.19
Another Republican movement that seemed to be threatening the system was the brainchild of the outrageous rogue and virtuoso carpetbagger Alejandro Lerroux. After his success on the back of the Montjuïc tortures, his popularity was consolidated by his exposure of a series of provocations by a Civil Guard named Captain Morales. In 1903, Morales fabricated a supposed anarchist conspiracy to set off bombs in Tarragona. Having then ‘discovered’ a cache of bombs and thus ‘foiled’ the plot, he had numerous workers arrested who, after being tortured, confessed their involvement. Lerroux played a leading part in exposing the farce and securing the release of the prisoners and the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Morales.20 His skills as a rabble-rousing demagogue propelled him to the leadership of a mass Republican movement in the slums of Barcelona and his ability as an organizer built a formidable electoral machine. He was receiving money from the central government, a common practice in a period when politicians paid for news to be inserted in or excluded from newspapers. This gave rise to the widespread belief that he had been sent to Barcelona by Segismundo Moret, the Minister of the Interior in Mateo Sagasta’s government, in order to deploy his rabble-rousing skills to divide the anarcho-syndicalist masses and undermine the rise of Catalan nationalism.
Probably no government slush fund could have achieved what he did. His links to anti-monarchical terrorist conspiracies would also have made him far from suitable as an agent of Madrid. He had been called to Barcelona to be a republican parliamentary candidate in the 1901 general elections. To become ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’, the Barcelona district where misery, criminality and prostitution held sway, required more genuine appeal than anything that could be conjured up in Madrid ministries. His sincere concern for the injustice suffered by the working class