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
The officer corps became obsessed with the defence of national unity and the existing social order and thus was increasingly hostile both to the left and to the regional nationalists. There were clashes with both Basque and Catalan nationalists. The military attitude to Catalanism was especially aggressive and bordering on racist. Catalans were denounced as cowardly traitors and misers. The anti-Semitic right frequently described Catalans as the Jews of Spain and this was reflected in the military press. A newspaper that claimed to represent army officers, La Correspondencia Militar, demanded that Catalan and Basque nationalists be forced from the country. ‘Let them wander the world, without a fatherland, like the cursed race of the Jews. Let this be an eternal punishment.’27 Since Cuba had been regarded as simply an overseas part of the patria, its loss was perceived as a diminution of the nation. Thousands of officers had served in Cuba and the Philippines and many had been killed or wounded in defence of Spanish hegemony. Traumatized by their loss, colonial officers saw the rising Catalan and Basque nationalist movements as threats comparable to the Cuban independence movement and thus an intolerable challenge. There was another practical consideration – military ambitions to rebuild the armed forces and regenerate Spain would be fatally undermined if Catalonia’s wealth and its tax revenue were lost. Even if Catalan autonomy could be held off, Catalanists were regarded as anti-militarists keen to reduce the army budget and the size of the inflated officer corps.28
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
The reaction to the ¡Cu-Cut! incident of both the high command and the King himself was to celebrate the Barcelona garrison’s indiscipline. Not only were the culprits not punished but they were sent messages of congratulation by units all over Spain and the Moroccan colony. The Captain General of Barcelona, Manuel Delgado Zulueta, made a speech to a group of officers, congratulating them as if the attack on the press had been a heroic act of war. When parliamentary deputies debated what action to take, there were threats that the garrison of Madrid would assault the Cortes. Under the banner headline ‘The Army in Defence of the Fatherland’, La Correspondencia Militar demanded that ‘Catalan deputies and senators be immediately expelled from the Parliament’ on the grounds that there could be no room in the Spanish Cortes for those who represented ideas opposed to national unity.31 The most damaging intervention was probably that of Alfonso XIII. He encouraged military sedition and diminished the credibility of the government in several ways. As ‘the first soldier of the nation’, he sent ‘an affectionate greeting’ and expressed his approval of what he called ‘the legitimate aspirations of the Army’. He was pushing the government of Eugenio Montero Ríos to suspend constitutional guarantees in the province of Barcelona. The military press described the army as ‘the sublime and august incarnation of the Fatherland’. According to Romanones, when the cabinet met in emergency session under the chairmanship of the King, ‘his face revealed that his mind was far from the room where the cabinet had met and much nearer to the meetings being held in the officers’ mess’. In these meetings, increasing numbers of officers were calling for legal prohibition of insults aimed at the armed forces. In fact, such safeguards existed through the civilian courts, but what the officers were now demanding was that perceived offences against the honour of the army, of the monarchy or of the patria should come under the jurisdiction of military tribunals.
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
Support for the military came from an unexpected quarter. On his return from Paris where he had gone to make a statement on behalf of Vallina, Lerroux published a virulent article headed ‘El alma en los labios’ (Speaking from the heart). He attacked Catalan separatism as ‘an overflowing sewer that had infected the city’. He praised army officers for avenging the fatherland declaring: ‘if I had been a soldier, I would have gone to burn down La Veu, ¡Cu-Cut!, the offices of the Lliga and the Bishop’s Palace at the very least’. He called on the republicans of Barcelona not to ally with what he called ‘the vile scum’ of the regionalists. He later tried to row back but it was too late. He had made a serious mistake. The revelation of his pro-militaristic and centralist abhorrence of Catalanism exposed the fraudulence of his radicalism and ended any real chances that he had of middle-class support.33
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
There was little or no security presence along the procession route from the Church of Los Jerónimos (San