Restoration system were worsened by the machinations of the King. Concerned by the fall of other European monarchies and fearing that his own downfall might be precipitated by the outbreak of revolution in Barcelona, on 15 November Alfonso XIII tried to secure the loyalty of Cambó. He told him that he saw Catalan autonomy as the only certain way to divert the revolutionary threat. Cambó made the mistake of falling for what was simply a cynical ploy and went ahead with a project for autonomy. Although received sympathetically by Romanones, who had formed a new government on 10 December 1918, it was rejected violently in the Cortes by both the Liberals and Maura. Niceto Alcalá-Zamora scored a direct hit when he pointed out the contradiction between Cambó’s two ambitions, autonomy for Catalonia and hegemony of the Spanish state. He said: ‘the problem with Cambó is that he wants to be at the same time the Bolívar of Catalonia and the Bismarck of Spain’ – a phrase later accepted as true by Cambó himself. The defeat of his aspirations for Catalonia deeply embittered Cambó and led to the Catalan deputies withdrawing from the Cortes for six weeks. Cambó himself was moved to break with Alfonso XIII. On 16 December, he made a speech in Barcelona under the title ‘Monarquia? República? Catalunya!’ in which he declared that the Lliga, while not expecting a republic to bring about autonomy, would not abandon campaigning for autonomy out of any concern that it might bring about the fall of the monarchy.5
In 1919, the Liberal senator Amós Salvador, without naming him, compared Alfonso XIII to a naughty child: ‘Dealing with kings is like dealing with children. One is inclined to let them do whatever they want despite being convinced that there is no better way to do them the most damage.’6 In his memoirs, the Conservative Manuel Burgos y Mazo wrote: ‘After 1919, I promised myself that I would not serve again as a minister for a disloyal King who could never be trusted by any one of his advisers.’7 Cambó had a similar perception, believing that the King was behind the creation of the virulently anti-Catalan Unión Monárquica Nacional, a group that would eventually play a key role in the conspiracy to overthrow the Second Republic. Essentially, Alfonso XIII’s meddling would contribute to the definitive break between conservative Catalanism and the monarchy.8
Despite these fissures and the aspirations of the coalition governments, at the end of the First World War Spain was still broadly divided into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the smallholding peasantry. Significantly, in the course of the second decade of the century, the Catholic farmers of Old Castile were mobilized in defence of big landholding interests. As left-wing ideologies captured the urban working classes, the more far-sighted landowners realized that efforts had to be made to prevent the poison spreading to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary agrarian syndicates sponsored by landlords had begun to appear from 1906. The process was systematized by Ángel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain, and founder in 1909 of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP), a group of dynamic, high-flying Catholics in the professions. From 1912, Herrera and the Palencian landowner Antonio Monedero Martín set out to divert the smallholders away from socialism and anarchism by the implementation of the Christian-social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. In the next five years, through the efforts of the determined activists of the ACNP, a series of Catholic Agrarian Federations appeared in León, Salamanca and Castile and tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery. Access to such assistance was made explicitly dependent on adherence to a militantly conservative Catholicism. Taken to its logical extremes, the rhetoric of the federations implied a challenge to the economic interests of big landowners. Only in the more prosperous north was it possible to maintain an uneasy balance between the mitigation of poverty and defence of the socio-economic status quo. By 1917, the various local federations were united as the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria (CNCA), but their implantation was intermittent outside the provinces of León and Old Castile. This was understandable since, in the south, the only palliative that landowners could offer the braceros, possession of the land, involved an unacceptable transfer of wealth.9 The credibility, in the eyes of hungry labourers, of rich landowners arriving in limousines to establish a ‘union’, was necessarily minimal.10
The CNCA would almost certainly have remained confined to the smallholding areas of central and northern Spain had it not been for the massive upsurge in the revolutionary militancy of the rural proletariat of the south after 1917. Social tensions had been intensifying since the desamortización. Both the more ruthless exploitation of church and aristocratic lands by their new owners and the enclosure of the common lands had put an end to many practices that had eased rural hardship. The economic model of southern latifundismo was the exploitation of the labour of the landless rural proletariat.11 For the majority, work was available only at harvest time and involved long hours of backbreaking labour often from sun-up to sun-down on starvation wages. The situation was dramatically worsened during the First World War. While landowners were enriched by the massive export of agricultural produce, the day labourers were impoverished by the inability of wages to keep pace with rocketing food prices.12
The consequence was a wave of strikes, land occupations and bread riots across Andalusia, especially in Cordoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville, between 1918 and 1920. The period was termed the ‘three Bolshevik years’ by the great chronicler of the events, Juan Díaz del Moral, the liberal notary from Bujalance in Cordoba. The initial objectives were wage increases and better working conditions, although, inspired by the Russian revolution, some militant leaders saw the possibility of ‘a red dawn’.13 Even though the intentions of the majority of the strikers were considerably more reformist than revolutionary, the peasant agitations were seen by the big landowners as equivalent to the Russian revolution. Fear of insurrection provoked cursory interest in the CNCA from some latifundistas. That was hardly surprising since, as an acute observer of the revolutionary agitation of the spring of 1919, the distinguished agronomist Pascual Carrión, noted, ‘we cannot forget the extension and intensity of the workers’ movement; the strike in Cordoba, among others, was truly general and impressive, managing to frighten the landowners to such a degree that they were ready to hand over their estates’.14
From early 1919 until late 1920, the CNCA had received financial support each month from Alfonso XIII himself. As the class conflict intensified, however, he switched his support to the more aggressive landowners’ organization, the Liga de Terratenientes Andaluces. There was a vain hope that this organization would collect money to combat ‘the red wave’, but during the trienio bolchevista it resorted to more violent measures. Throughout Andalusia, the sons of landowners formed cavalry units to support the Civil Guard in clashes with the workers.15 In Andalusia, as in Catalonia, the King had little interest in promoting social cohesion, just like the majority of the latifundistas, whose intransigent response to the strikes intensified the social resentments of the rural south. The consequences of the trienio bolchevista would be masked by the imposition of a military dictatorship between 1923 and 1930. Nevertheless, the conflicts of 1919–21 ended the previous uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and their estate managers. What remained of those elements of paternalism that mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros’ lives came to an abrupt end.
The CNCA began an extensive propaganda campaign in Andalusia in January 1919, denouncing the blind egoism of the landowners, who were ‘Catholics who boasted about their charity but then paid lower wages and exacted higher rents than they would ever dare admit to their confessor’. Teams of CNCA representatives toured the southern provinces and were egged on by the ACNP newspaper, El Correo de Andalucía, which declared: ‘Anarchy is spreading amongst those below and is being fomented by the apathy of those above. We live in serious times; either Andalusia will be saved now if she follows you or will die for ever in the clutches of hatred and revolution … If the landowners of Andalusia follow you, they will be saved; if they repudiate you, they will be drowned in their own blood.’ In the first months of the year, the CNCA campaign was extremely successful with the owners, but the orators sent to workers’ centres were booed off the stage. In their panic, a few latifundistas put up money and made available small plots of wasteland for settlement by