the rank and file, the twelfth congress of the Socialist UGT on 12–13 May decided to call on the anarcho-syndicalist CNT to undertake joint action to resolve the social problems. The agreement was enshrined in the Pact of Zaragoza, signed on 17 July 1916, which coincided with a successful strike of Socialist railway workers in favour of recognition of their union. After more revolutionary proposals from the CNT had been rejected, the success of a one-day UGT strike in December 1916 encouraged hopes that a joint general strike might lead to free elections and then reform. The economic crisis thus brought about a remarkable alliance of the reformist UGT and the revolutionary CNT. Nevertheless, there was friction between the essential caution of the UGT and the militant élan of the CNT.26 The survival of the alliance was facilitated by the fact that the CNT at the time was led by the thoughtful duo of the watch-mender Ángel Pestaña and the house painter Salvador Seguí. Known as El Noi del Sucre (the Sugar Boy) because of his sweet tooth, the affable Seguí was always elegant in public, usually wearing a hat and a starched collar and sporting a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. The gruff Pestaña was more outspoken than his more subtle friend. Although later regarded as moderates, by 1917, believing that the monarchy was about to fall and that revolution was imminent, both countenanced violence to further those aims.27
As a result of the boom, the balance of power within the economic elite was beginning to shift. Although agrarian interests remained pre-eminent, industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June when Romanones’s Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, proposed paying for radical economic reforms by means of a tax on the notoriously spectacular war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with the profits made by the agrarians. Accordingly, the measure was denounced by Basque, Catalan and Asturian industrialists as a tyrannical attempt to punish the productive classes. In fact, the outrage expressed on their behalf by Cambó and the Basque industrialist Ramón de la Sota was largely to do with the challenge to their profits. Largely at the hands of Cambó, Alba’s initiative was blocked in December in the Cortes and thereby the possibility of alleviating the desperate situation of a substantial part of the population was frustrated.28 Nonetheless, Alba’s initiative so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it would precipitate a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to implement political modernization. In the meantime, Romanones was coming under increasing pressure from the left for his inability to resolve the economic crisis and from the right for his pro-Allied stance. With Spanish shipping under attack from German submarines, he had proposed breaking off relations with the Central Powers. In response, the Germanophile Alfonso XIII forced him to resign and invited García Prieto to form a government.
In 1917, the working class, the military and the industrial bourgeoisie would all mount challenges to the existing order. Seemingly linked by their temporal coincidence, their aims were, however, starkly contradictory. The opposition to the Restoration system of Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen the emergence of powerful regionalist movements backed by industrialists – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga Regionalista. The equivalent in Asturias was the Reformist Party led by Melquíades Álvarez. While there was a revolutionary air to these groups’ opposition to the economic inertia and political incompetence of the rural oligarchy, they also pursued reactionary and oppressive policies against their own workforces. The leader of the Lliga, the shrewd financier Cambó, emerged as spokesman for the northern industrialists and bankers. He was convinced that drastic action was necessary to prevent the Restoration system being engulfed by a revolutionary cataclysm. His vision of a controlled revolution from above was based on the idea of an autonomous Catalonia as the dynamo of a new Spain.29 Ironically, the reforming zeal of industrialists enriched by the war saw them ally briefly with the proletariat that was being impoverished by it. While industrialists and workers with significantly different agendas were agitating for change, middle-rank army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A deceptive and short-lived alliance between all three was forged in part because of a misunderstanding on the part of the first two regarding the political stance of the army.
By 1916, already exiguous military salaries were being hit by wartime inflation, even more so than those of industrial workers who could secure some wage increases by means of strike action. Junior and middle-rank officers in Spain had to take on civilian jobs to maintain their families. This in turn fed a division within the army between those who had volunteered to serve in Morocco, the so-called Africanistas, and those who had remained in the Peninsula, the peninsulares. For the Africanistas, the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. Brutalized by the horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars, the Africanistas had acquired a sense of being a heroic band of warriors alone in their concern for the fate of the patria. They felt contempt for professional politicians, for the pacifist left-wing masses, for Catalanists and, to a certain extent, for their peninsular comrades for whom the mainland signified a less well-paid but more comfortable, sedentary existence with promotion only by strict seniority. Inevitably, there was resentment among the peninsulares for the Africanistas who enjoyed the higher pay that came with quick promotion for battlefield merit.30 They responded by creating the Juntas Militares de Defensa, a form of trade union, both to protect their rigid seniority system and to seek better pay as an escape from what they called ‘the drip-feed of misery’. In the words of Cambó, ‘the Juntas Militares de Defensa appeared, like frogs and mosquitoes in stagnant pools’.31
The Juntas’ complaints were couched in the fashionable language of regenerationism, although the entire movement would turn out to be merely a significant step towards military dictatorship. In late May 1917, García Prieto ordered the dissolution of the Juntas Militares de Defensa and the arrest of the leaders. On 1 June, the Juntas threatened to launch a coup d’état if their comrades were not released and their movement not recognized as a legal military trade union. On 9 June, García Prieto was forced from power. The King, endlessly meddling, had toyed with the idea of a coalition government built around Santiago Alba and Francesc Cambó, despite the pair’s mutual loathing. However, he replaced García Prieto with Dato, whose Conservative government recognized the Juntas.32 Mouthing empty regenerationist clichés, they were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement when, in fact, they were merely consolidating the army’s belief that it was the ultimate arbiter of political life. For a brief, illusory moment, workers, capitalists and the military seemed to be united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. In the unlikely event of that three-pronged movement being successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the civil war might perhaps have been avoided. In fact, the events of the crisis of 1917 simply gave slightly more power to the industrial and banking bourgeoisie without undermining the dominance of the entrenched landed oligarchy.33
The lengthy denouement of the crisis began when Dato suspended the Cortes. Cambó was also using a regenerationist rhetoric, claiming that a progressive Catalan capitalism could modernize backward agrarian Spain. His project guaranteed the hostility of Santiago Alba. To push it forward, and in response to Dato’s closure of the Cortes, Cambó organized an alternative Assembly of Catalan deputies which met on 5 July 1917 in the Ajuntament de Barcelona and called for the reopening of the Cortes. They announced that if the government did not agree, a wider Assembly, with reforming parliamentarians from all over Spain, would meet in Barcelona as a kind of shadow Cortes. Dato declared the first Assembly seditious. Cambó went ahead with the threat and arranged the meeting of the Assembly for 19 July. Ossorio y Gallardo believed that it could carry out Maura’s revolution from above. Cambó was anxious to secure the support of Maura himself to prevent the Assembly being smeared as a separatist and revolutionary initiative. Because it was illegal under the Constitution, Maura had refused to cooperate with the Assembly, denouncing it in a letter to his son as ‘grotesque’ and its members as ‘a professional flea-market’.
Had Maura agreed, it would have brought the Juntas aboard and the momentum of the reform movement might have overthrown the monarchy. However, Maura had already denounced the Juntas as ‘a monstrous freak of vintage depravity’. Despite maintaining a correspondence with Cambó, the leader of the Juntas, Colonel Benito Márquez, and his comrades were not prepared to collaborate with the Assembly movement because of its Catalanist emphasis