of landowners were not prepared to make substantial concessions and preferred to paralyse strikers with the unrestrained violence of their estate guards (guardas jurados) backed by the Civil Guard. In some towns such as Puente Genil, the local bourgeoisie created a well-armed militia to assist the Civil Guard in clashes with strikers, a pre-echo of what would happen in many Andalusian towns in the summer and autumn of 1936. Some landowners abandoned their estates and fled to Madrid, while those who stayed bought stocks of weaponry for themselves and their retainers. The CNCA continued to preach the gospel of class collaboration, but its real position was starkly exposed as conflict grew more acute.16
On 18 April 1919, Antonio Monedero Martín was made Director General of Agriculture and his appointment was greeted by El Socialista with the headline ‘Scabs in power’. There was little proletarian faith in the CNCA’s declared ambition of creating a class of smallholding peasants. Monedero soon confirmed the Socialist view that he was the puppet of the landowners when he called for the closure of working-class organizations and for the deportation or imprisonment of strike leaders. In mid-April, the government of Antonio Maura intensified the repression by suspending constitutional guarantees, declaring martial law in Cordoba and sending in cavalry units to reinforce the Civil Guard. The Africanista General Manuel de la Barrera was put in command of the 20,000 troops sent against the landless labourers. He declared that ‘the Andalusian problem will not be solved without a cruel and energetic persecution of the propagandists who organise the masses’.17 There were more than 2,000 arrests. The leaders of all unions, except Antonio Monedero’s Catholic unions, were detained. Republican and Socialist leaders who had had nothing to do with the strike were deported from the province specifically to disrupt their campaigns for the April 1919 elections. With the area under virtual military occupation and the owners free to intimidate strikers, the revolutionary movement was gradually brought under control.18 However, the repression of 1919–20 and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930 did nothing but douse an agitation which continued to smoulder until the Second Republic revived the spectre of land reform.
Indeed, Pascual Carrión noted that the landowners’ instinctive intransigence and ready resort to repressive violence during the trienio bolchevista ensured that peasant rebellion was unlikely to end soon:
Nobody who knows the history of those movements could possibly think that, after that period, the caciques and the landowners would not recover their previous domination. The weight of the government repression, the deportations and reprisals carried out by a well-known general [Manuel de la Barrera] sent by the government in May 1919 to Andalusia, put an end to the proletarian movement. Instead of channelling that movement, it was crushed with cruelty as so often before and, for that reason, it is not surprising that hatred of the latifundistas was fomented among the humble classes and that now [in 1932] there is a resurgence of agitation and revolts with greater violence than ever.19
While the Spanish countryside seethed with conflict, the failures of the two national governments in 1918 were exacerbated by the social crisis in industrial cities that followed the end of the First World War. The Basque iron and steel industry was hit by the dumping of the wartime surpluses accumulated in Britain and the United States. The shipping industry, which relied on transporting ore to Britain, was hit by the post-war slump in the British steel industry. During the war, Asturian mines and the Catalan textile industry had expanded but profits had not been ploughed back into achieving greater efficiency. Everywhere in industry and agriculture, the end of the war saw wages reduced and workers laid off.20 Working-class militancy increased and was met by military intervention. The Spanish state faced similar challenges to those confronting the defeated belligerent nations of Europe. In Madrid, there were strikes and food riots during which trams were set alight. According to significantly understated official figures, the number of strikes mushroomed from 71,440 in 1917 to 244,684 in 1920, while the number of working days lost in those strikes increased from 1.75 million to 7.25 million.21 Already terrified by the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, the Spanish ruling classes were further alarmed by the foundation in Moscow of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. Although defeat in 1917 had traumatized the Socialist leadership, it had not marked the end of the assault on the system. Between late 1918 and the beginning of 1921, industrial workers in northern Spain followed the example of the anarchist day labourers of the south. Industrialists responded to economic recession by limiting production, cutting wages and laying off large numbers of workers. This inevitably provoked greater worker militancy, to which industrialists in Catalonia and landowners in the south reacted by turning to the army.
In Catalonia in 1919, determined to crush the CNT, intransigent industrialists were backed by the hard-line Captain General of the IV Región Militar, Lieutenant General Joaquín Milans del Bosch y Carrió. He in turn enjoyed the support of the Juntas Militares de Defensa. Conflict intensified after a strike broke out on 8 February at the Anglo-Canadian-owned Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company or Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro, known as La Canadiense. It began in protest at the arbitrary dismissal of eight administrative staff for trying to unionize. It mushroomed as successively the sacked men’s department, then the entire factory and finally, in a show of power by the Sindicato Único of Gas, Water and Electricity, all the power workers in Catalonia went on strike. By 21 February, three-quarters of Catalan industry had been forced to close down for lack of power. Trams were stalled in the streets, and cafés and theatres had to close. Milans del Bosch, himself an upper-class Catalan with connections to the industrialists, called for a declaration of martial law. The government of Romanones hesitantly agreed on 1 March. Workers were conscripted, a measure that exposed strikers to the threat of four years’ imprisonment for mutiny. Despite the arrest of 3,000 workers, the strike did not fold. Romanones appointed a distinguished criminal lawyer, Gerardo Doval, as chief of police. He also named a conciliatory Civil Governor, Carlos Montañés, and sent the Under-Secretary of the cabinet office, José Morote, to negotiate with the strikers. Helped by the moderation of Seguí, these mediation initiatives led to the Canadiense agreeing in mid-March to rehire the workers and raise wages. At a mass meeting of nearly 30,000 initially hostile workers on 19 March, Seguí’s oratory secured agreement for a return to work conditional on the release of prisoners. However, it was to be only a brief truce. Within five days, the city was again paralysed.22
Interestingly, in 1919, Lerroux had been placed on the payroll of the Canadiense (in addition to his many other income streams), in the hope that his rabble-rousing skills might help break the strike by undermining working-class solidarity. The company continued to pay him a monthly stipend for at least a further decade and half. In 1934, when he was Prime Minister, he was asked by the London offices of the Canadiense to try to reduce the company’s fiscal obligations. It is not known what action he took.23 Although the strike in the spring of 1919 had not been violent, the employers, shaken by the CNT’s ability to shut down Barcelona, were determined to destroy the union. Moreover, Milans and the Juntas were infuriated by the readiness of Romanones to work for a peaceful solution. Even before the Canadiense strike, confident of the support of the army, the industrialists were becoming more militant. In February 1919, the recently formed Unión Monárquica Nacional had called for action against both strikers and Catalanists. Fearful of losing its conservative support, the Lliga-dominated employers’ organization, the Foment Nacional del Treball, toned down its Catalanist aspirations and threw its support behind the coalition of the army and industrialists determined to destroy the Catalan section of the CNT, the Confederación Regional de Trabajo (CRT). The principal function of the industrialists’ organization, the Federació Patronal de Catalunya, under its belligerent president Félix Graupera, was simply to combat the Sindicatos Únicos. To this end, it emulated the structure and tactics of the Sindicatos Únicos. Against the general strike would be deployed the general lock-out. The Catalan Federation belonged to the nationwide Confederación Patronal Española presided over by the equally militant Francisco Junoy. In Barcelona, as in Bilbao, Madrid and Valencia, the most hard-line members of the Confederación Patronal Española were owners of small and medium businesses in the metallurgical, building and woodworking industries who were badly hit by the post-war economic crisis and the rise in labour militancy.24
With the enthusiastic support of industrialists and businessmen, Milans del Bosch was already going onto a war footing