hope was to see a government presided over by Antonio Maura, but, to the disappointment of his followers, he was not prepared to come out of retirement. In a letter to Ossorio, Maura referred to Cambó’s plan as ‘the subversive way’ and went on to say: ‘but I’m not one of those who have the vocation for such exploits’. Dato took an authoritarian approach. Much of the Catalan press was banned and he obliged the Madrid press to portray the Assembly as a Catalan separatist initiative. Extra reinforcements of the army and the Civil Guard were sent to Barcelona and a battlecruiser docked in the port. Nevertheless, projected as the progressive parliament that Spain would have if clean elections were possible, the Assembly met in the Palau del Parc de la Ciudadela. It called for an end to the dominance of the corrupt centralist oligarchy. Dato ordered the Assembly dissolved. The members were symbolically arrested by the Civil Governor placing his hand on their shoulders and immediately releasing them. They left the building to the cheers of a large crowd.34
Despite the apparent coincidence of their reforming rhetoric, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and army officers were contradictory and Dato skilfully exploited their differences. Despite the popular support for the Assembly movement, there were already significant differences between it and the Juntas. The UGT and the CNT had been preparing for a revolutionary strike, under the impression that they would enjoy the support of both the Lliga and the Juntas. This was highly unlikely since the fears provoked during the Semana Trágica had been reawakened by the February revolution in Russia. It was even more improbable that army officers would view a revolutionary strike with any sympathy. In any case, UGT–CNT collaboration was difficult. While the anarchists nurtured unrealistically extreme ambitions such as the dissolution of the armed forces and the nationalization of the land, the maximum aim of the Socialists was a provisional government capable of ending political corruption and dealing with inflation and food shortages. Nevertheless, in March 1917, a CNT delegation of Pestaña, Seguí and Ángel Lacort had gone to Madrid for meetings with the UGT. While there, they took part in a public meeting at which they and UGT representatives launched a manifesto that vehemently denounced the failure of the government to respond to the demands made during the UGT’s one-day strike in December 1916. It was meant and was taken as a declaration of war on Dato, who duly had them arrested, but a public outcry forced their early release.35
The intransigence of the government pushed both the CNT and the UGT towards more militant positions, although the Socialists remained the more cautious of the two. Their unease derived from the fact that, from August 1916, extremist action groups on the fringes of the CNT had occasionally resorted to assassination attempts on recalcitrant employers, foremen and strike breakers. The more moderate elements, represented by Pestaña and Seguí, may have disapproved but were unable to disavow these activities. Pestaña wrote: ‘tied by our love of the organization, not only did we not denounce such outrages but, if necessary, we would go out into the street to defend the organization when it was attacked’. The CNT’s sporadic terror was met by a much more organized counter-terror lavishly funded by the industrialists. Over the next seven years, numerous murders were carried out by gangs led by the corrupt ex-police chief Manuel Bravo Portillo and a German agent, Friedrich Stallmann, who went by the name Baron de Koenig. The arrogant Bravo Portillo was tall and swarthy, sported a large curly moustache and tried to pass himself off as an aristocrat. He had made a fortune working for the Germans during the war. He had subsequently been dismissed and imprisoned, albeit for only six months, when it was discovered that he had revealed the sailing times of Allied ships from Barcelona, thereby permitting German submarines to torpedo them. The Bravo Portillo and Koenig gang also carried out attacks on industrialists who were exporting to France.36
By the time of their return to Barcelona after the meetings in Madrid, Pestaña and Seguí found their followers feverishly planning an armed uprising. Pestaña wrote later, ‘The unions’ cashboxes were emptied, down to the last cent to buy pistols and make bombs.’ The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge wrote of those days:
At the Café Espagnol, on the Paralelo, that crowded thoroughfare with its blazing lights of evening, near the horrible barrio chino whose mouldering alleys were full of half-naked girls lurking in doorways that gaped into hell-holes, it was here that I met militants arming for the approaching battle. They spoke enthusiastically of those who would fall in that fight, they dealt out Browning revolvers, and baited, as we all did, the anxious spies at the neighbouring table. In a revolutionary side-street, with a Guardia Civil barracks on one side and poor tenements on the other, I found Barcelona’s hero of the hour, the quickening spirit, the uncrowned leader, the fearless man of politics who distrusted politicians: Salvador Seguí …
In long conversations, Seguí and Serge discussed what the latter called the ‘dubious alliance’ between the workers and the Catalan bourgeoisie. Seguí was aware that the CNT was being used by Cambó: ‘we are useful in their game of political blackmail’. Nevertheless, he was optimistic: ‘Without us, they can do nothing: we have the streets, the shock-troops, the brave hearts among the people. We know this, but we need them. They stand for money, trade, possible legality (at the beginning, anyway), the Press, public opinion, etc.’37
In contrast, the Socialists had initially planned only to support the Assembly movement for the establishment of a provisional government under Melquíades Álvarez with the participation of Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias and Largo Caballero. It would call elections for a Constituent Cortes to decide on the future form of the state. Such aims were compatible with those of Cambó. The discrepancies between the Socialists’ limited ambitions and those of the CNT led to increasing tension.38 When the CNT was about to hold an assembly on 20 June to decide on the immediate declaration of a revolutionary general strike, Largo Caballero hastened to Barcelona to try to restrain the anarchists. Used to working openly in Madrid, he was shocked to have to meet clandestinely at Vallvidrera in the hills outside the city. He was even more taken aback when confronted by a crowd of pistol-toting militants, who declared their readiness to use them to fight off the police or the Civil Guard. They accused the Socialists of being in cahoots with bourgeois politicians and demanded the immediate declaration of the strike.
In the event, Largo Caballero managed to persuade the assembly that the strike should not be declared before adequate preparations had been made. Only the intervention of the moderates Salvador Seguí and Ángel Pestaña saved the alliance.39 On the day that the Assembly was about to meet in Barcelona, the Socialist leader Pablo Iglesias, himself en route to the meeting in the Parc de la Ciudadela, met Pestaña, Seguí and two other CNT leaders, Francesc Miranda and Enric Valero. They explained that the CNT was anxious to launch a general strike in support of the Assembly. To their barely concealed annoyance, Iglesias listened to them ‘with contemptuous indifference’. Expressing surprise at how advanced their plans were, and clearly fearful of exacerbating military hostility, he tried to talk them out of strike action. When they argued that the time was ripe, he replied patronizingly: ‘You, the manual workers see things like that but we, the intellectuals, see them differently.’ They left him, utterly disillusioned, not to say disgusted, with the Socialist stance.40
Moreover, the CNT rank and file was suspicious of the Assembly movement, seeing it as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. In particular, there was considerable suspicion of Cambó, who was regarded as representing hated employers. Accordingly, the CNT was holding back, waiting to see if the Assembly would call for the overthrow of the monarchy. The Socialists, too, planned action only if the Assembly was repressed.41 However, in Valencia, the left-wing republicans Marcelino Domingo and Félix Azzati convinced railway workers that the Assembly was the signal for the general strike. There were also agents provocateurs of the government present, stirring up militancy. The subsequent strike was not supported nationally by the UGT and was put down by the authorities at the cost of two dead and several wounded. The railway company took severe reprisals, dismissing hundreds of workers.42
Remembering their success the previous summer, the UGT’s railway union threatened a nationwide strike in support of their demand for the sacked workers to be reinstated. The issue could have been settled easily, but Dato’s government seized the opportunity to drive a wedge between the forces ranged against the establishment. Dato put pressure on the owners of the railway company to refuse to negotiate. Daniel Anguiano, Secretary General of the railway workers’ union, was forced