Paul Preston

A People Betrayed


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expenses of the deposed Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the Ministry’s budget. By his identification with the army and his insistence on his personal prerogatives, the King impeded the modernization of the Restoration system. In a series of clashes between civilian and military power, he undermined the authority of various governments and encouraged military insubordination.26

      Denounced as ‘separatists’, the Barcelona bourgeoisie responded by mocking as unsophisticated hobbledehoys the officers stationed in Catalonia. Right-wing and centralist, army officers were easily needled by the anti-militarist views of Catalanist politicians and the sarcastic jibes of their press. ¡Cu-cut!, the Lliga Regionalista’s weekly satirical journal, often published derisive cartoons portraying army and navy officers as pompous buffoons. In November 1905, the Lliga celebrated its victory in Barcelona’s municipal elections by hosting a victory dinner for 2,500 guests. The report of the event in ¡Cu-cut! was illustrated with a cartoon in which a soldier asks a civilian what was being celebrated. ‘The Victory Banquet’, replies the civilian, to which the soldier comments ‘Ah, they must be civilians then,’ a clear reference to the 1898 colonial defeat and to the fact that the army had known no triumphs for nearly a century. In revenge, on the night of 25 November, 300 armed officers in uniform assaulted both the printing presses and offices of ¡Cu-cut! and the offices of Lliga’s daily newspaper La Veu de Catalunya. Forty-six people were seriously injured.29 This was merely the most violent of many attacks on newspapers and magazines that had criticized the army, such as those in Madrid in 1895 on El Globo and El Resumen, in Játiva in 1900 on El Progreso and in 1901 on El Correo de Guipúzcoa.30

      Delegations of middle-rank officers came to put pressure on the Minister of War. Montero Ríos was determined to maintain civilian jurisdiction over the armed forces. Romanones commented later: ‘Poor civilian power! We had nothing to defend it with!’ Unprepared to sanction the proposed Law of Jurisdictions, Montero Ríos resigned. His successor, Segismundo Moret, was chosen by Alfonso XIII and given the specific task of introducing the required legislation. Moret’s Liberal coalition government was essentially the puppet of the army. General Agustín Luque, who, as Captain General of Andalusia, had sent one of the most extreme messages in praise of the Barcelona garrison for the attacks on the Catalanist press, was appointed Minister of War. In the event, the Law of Jurisdictions was not as sweeping as had been desired by the military hotheads but it still constituted a dangerous step in the process whereby the officer corps came to consider itself to be the ultimate arbiter in politics. It also had consequences within Catalonia which were hardly what the government had hoped for.32

      The Spanish army was not prepared to be simply the defender of a despised constitutional regime. The officer corps wanted to rebuild its reputation with a new imperial endeavour in Morocco. This was made feasible by British desires for a Spanish buffer against French expansionism on the southern shores of the Straits of Gibraltar. The consequences could hardly have been worse for Spain’s political stability. The bloodshed occasioned by the new adventure stimulated massive popular hostility against conscription and thereby intensified military contempt for the working class. Moreover, military failures could be attributed to a woeful lack of preparation, for which in turn officers blamed the political class.

      The instability of Spanish politics did not diminish. The anarchist plan to assassinate the King and trigger a republican coup was not abandoned after the failure of May 1905 but revived one year later. This time the plot, in which Ferrer, Lerroux, Estévanez and Morral were again involved, was to kill him on the day of his wedding in Madrid, on 31 May 1906, to the English Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg. On the grounds that Estévanez was going to Cuba and unlikely to return to Europe, Lerroux had successfully requested the Civil Governor of Catalonia, the Duque de Bivona, to grant him permission to enter Spain in mid-May and sail to Havana from Barcelona. The 68-year-old Estévanez was thus able to meet the other three conspirators and discuss the assassination and a subsequent seizure of the fortress of Montjuïc as the first step to a nationwide insurrection. It has been suggested that Estévanez brought the bomb that Morral was to use to kill the royal couple.34