created in medieval times to repel Muslim raids, its name refers to the bells rung to summon the militia, so emetent, literally ‘emitting sound’ – that is, sounding the alarm. In fact, the revival of the Somatén had been long in preparation as a Guardia Cívica. However, now that it was armed by Milans del Bosch, this 8,000-strong auxiliary military force seriously worried Romanones, but he did not subject the Somatén to civilian authority. On 25 March, Milans decreed that anyone not a member of the Somatén caught carrying arms would be considered guilty of military rebellion.25 The Somatén ran public transport and patrolled the streets, arresting and mistreating strikers and obliging shops and cafés to remain open. Milans also approved the use of a parallel police force financed by the Federació Patronal de Catalunya and led by the recently released Manuel Bravo Portillo. This gang of well-paid gunmen and cut-throats recruited in the underworld carried out assaults on trade union leaders that ranged from beatings to murder. To facilitate these activities, military funds financed the compilation of a huge card index of prominent CNTistas, the so-called Fichero Lasarte, compiled by a Civil Guard, Captain Julio de Lasarte Persino, who had worked with Baron de Koenig. With the encouragement of the recently appointed Military Governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, Lasarte’s often fabricated information was used to facilitate arrests and occasionally murders.26
Neither Milans del Bosch nor the Federació Patronal was interested in conciliation. When Milans refused to release prisoners, undermining the agreement for the return to work, the CNT was provoked into declaring a disastrous general strike on 24 March. With the loud support of the Barcelona garrison, martial law was reimposed, CNT offices were shut down and hundreds of union leaders, including Pestaña, arrested. The assault on the CNT was led by Martínez Anido, a brutal Africanista and a favourite of Alfonso XIII, who had been appointed Military Governor in February. The moderate syndicalists and the Romanones appointees, Montañés and Doval, were outflanked by the military. Milans was furious when Doval called on him to break up Bravo Portillo’s gang. He sent the intimidating Martínez Anido and Colonel Julio Aldir of the Civil Guard to threaten Montañés and Doval that they would be imprisoned if they did not leave Barcelona immediately. With the strike effectively broken, it took the oratory of Seguí to persuade another mass meeting that a return to work was the only way to avoid further disaster. Unsurprisingly, the principal military newspaper denied, in rather vague language, that the Barcelona garrison had had anything to do with the expulsion of Montañés and Doval.27
The treatment of Montañés and Doval demonstrated the impotence of civilian rule. It provoked the fall of Romanones’ cabinet and opened up a major political crisis in which a key role was played by Alfonso XIII.28 Romanones asked the King to dismiss Milans, but Alfonso refused to accept the General’s token resignation. In the light of the King’s unreserved support for Milans, Romanones had no choice but to resign.29 Alfonso’s identification with the most reactionary elements of the army and the Church would consistently undermine any government attempts at conciliatory social policy. Indeed, the King was flirting ever more keenly with the idea of a military dictatorship. He chose to replace Romanones with a reluctant Maura on 15 April. It would be a temporary solution since Maura no longer represented the dominant sector of the Conservative Party, which was now led by Eduardo Dato. The shift in power within the party derived from disquiet at the methods of Juan de la Cierva and his links with the Juntas de Defensa. Dato and others inclined to a policy of negotiation with the moderate trade unionists. Suffering ill health, Dato had favoured a government under his ally, the moderate Conservative Joaquín Sánchez de Toca. However, the King granted Maura the dissolution decree. Despite his reputation as an opponent of electoral corruption, to secure success in the elections of 1 June 1919 Maura opted to exploit the worst kind of caciquismo. It was to no avail. Opposed by much of his own Conservative Party, he failed to win an overall majority. Moreover, his reputation was shattered and he resigned on 20 July.30
Under Maura and persisting after his fall, despite the defeat of the CNT’s ‘general strike’, the dirty war against the organization continued in Catalonia. At the behest of Milans del Bosch, the Bravo Portillo gang maintained its offensive against trade unionists, eliminating moderates in order to disrupt industrial negotiations. Among those murdered had been Pau Sabater (‘El Tero’), a distinguished leader of the textile Sindicato Único, whose bullet-riddled body was found on 20 July. Inevitably, there was a desire for reprisals. Moreover, the scale of the repression undermined the credibility of the moderate trade unionists among their own affiliates. And, as the economic repression bit harder and more workers were laid off, there were more men ready to take a small salary to become gunmen.31 When Bravo Portillo was assassinated on 5 September, his gang would be taken over by the sinister Prussian Friedrich Stallman who, it will be recalled, went by the fake title of Baron de Koenig. He was described by the conservative politician Francisco Bastos Ansart as ‘a prince of rogues’. Koenig was subsidized by the French secret service as well as by the bosses who paid him to murder trade union leaders. In turn, he also blackmailed the industrialists with a protection racket and was finally expelled from Spain in May 1920.32
To the delight of industrialists and landowners, in the twelve weeks that Maura was in government, aided by Antonio Goicoechea, his hard-line Minister of the Interior, he had responded with brutal force to social tension in Catalonia and the south. Constitutional guarantees were suspended and union leaders were imprisoned. As has been seen, he had sent General de la Barrera to Andalusia to smash the rebellion of the agricultural labourers. When Dato once more suggested as Maura’s successor the moderate Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, Alfonso XIII resisted, pushing for Maura, even threatening to appoint the relatively left-wing Melquíades Álvarez. Eventually, Dato was able to secure the appointment he wanted. An enlightened team consisting of Sánchez de Toca, his Minister of the Interior, the devout social Catholic Manuel Burgos y Mazo, and a new Civil Governor of Barcelona, Julio Amado, adopted a conciliatory line towards the unions. According to Burgos y Mazo, there were 43,000 syndicalists in prison. Believing that repression could only encourage the extremist wing of the CNT, the government was inclined to recognize the unions as the legitimate representatives of the workers in dialogue with the industrialists. To this end, prisoners were released, martial law lifted and the eight-hour day introduced. The intelligent application of conciliation resolved strikes in Valencia and Malaga and saw a significant reduction in the number of assassinations in Barcelona. In return, Seguí, Manuel Buenacasa and other moderate syndicalists issued a manifesto declaring that if the CNT was legalized, strikes would be peaceful. They denounced state violence as the cause of left-wing terrorism.33
This coincided with a devastating speech in the Cortes by the thirty-nine-year-old republican deputy for Sabadell, Francesc Layret. The bearded Layret was severely disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of two and needed iron leg braces and two sticks to walk.34 A close friend of Seguí, Layret was a brilliant lawyer and frequently defended syndicalists in court. In his speech on 7 August 1919, Layret denounced the dictatorial role in Barcelona of Milans and the Juntas de Defensa. He revealed the threats made by Martínez Anido and Colonel Aldir to Gerardo Doval and Carlos Montañés and explained how the expulsion of both had precipitated the fall of Romanones. He went on to accuse Romanones of cowardice for resigning rather than sacking Milans del Bosch. Layret may have thereby signed his own death warrant. At the time, the response of Burgos y Mazo, far from attacking Layret, was to confirm his own conciliatory approach.35
The efforts of Sánchez de Toca, Burgos y Mazo and the Civil Governor of Barcelona, Julio Amado, to reach agreement with the unions were not at all what was wanted by La Cierva, the alarmed industrialists or the army. At the second congress of the Confederación Patronal Española, held in Barcelona in the last week of October 1919, it was decided to institute a lock-out of industrial workers (public services and the food sector were excluded) in order to starve the workers into leaving the CNT or provoke them into a reaction that would justify military intervention. The lock-out lasted until January 1920, left over 200,000 men out of work and intensified class hatred.36 The credibility of the moderates in the CNT was undermined and workers increasingly placed their faith in the so-called grupos de afinidad, tightly knit action groups. Led by hard-liners such as Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso and Ricardo Sanz, groups such as ‘Los Solidarios’ and ‘Nosotros’ would eventually coalesce into the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.37 At