present volume is another work written by a British historian who loves Spain and one who has spent the last fifty years studying the country’s history. As might be deduced from its title, this book echoes the spirit of Richard Ford and of many Spanish commentators such as Lucas Mallada, Ricardo Macías Picavea, Joaquín Costa, Manuel Azaña and José Ortega y Gasset. While drawing on the perceptions of Ford, it does not adopt his simplistic comparisons of a benighted Spain with an idealized Britain. Equally, while deriving great insight from the critical analysis of the regenerationists, it does not share the view of Costa that the problem called for an authoritarian solution – the ‘iron surgeon’. This book makes no attempt to suggest that Spain is unique in terms of corruption or governmental incompetence. There are other European nations for which, at various historical moments, similar interpretations might be valid. For instance, while writing the book, I have lived, on a daily basis for the last three years, under the shadow of the Brexit process in Britain. It has been a painful experience to have to witness the combination of lies, governmental ineptitude and corruption that have bitterly divided the nation and threatened to provoke the break-up of the United Kingdom.
There are many possible approaches to the rich and tragic history of Spain. This book spans the period from the restoration of the Borbón monarchy in 1874 with Alfonso XII, to the early days of the reign of his great-great-grandson Felipe VI in 2014. It aims to provide a comprehensive and reliable history of Spain with a dramatic emphasis on the way the country’s progress has been impeded by corruption and political incompetence. It demonstrates how these two features have resulted in a breakdown of social cohesion that has frequently been met with, and exacerbated by, the use of violence by the authorities. All three themes consistently emerge in the tensions between Madrid and Catalonia. Throughout the Restoration period, and most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, institutional corruption and startling political incompetence were the norm. Popular disgust with this opened the way to the country’s first democracy, the Second Republic.
From the inception of the Republic in 1931 until its demise in 1939, corruption was less toxic, not least because the newly installed political elite was inspired by many of the propositions of the regenerationists. That is not to say corruption did not exist. A recurring character in the book, the multi-millionaire Juan March, who was behind some of the most spectacular corruption during the Primo de Rivera period, was equally active during the Republic, as indeed he would be in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. This was also true of Alejandro Lerroux, an important politician who was on March’s payroll. A lifetime of shameless corruption reached its peak when, as Prime Minister in 1935, Lerroux brazenly sponsored a system of fixed roulette wheels, an outrageous operation that gave rise to the word estraperlo which has become a synonym for economic malfeasance.
The victory of General Franco saw the establishment of a regime of terror and pillage which allowed him and his elite supporters to plunder with impunity, enriching themselves while giving free rein to the political ineptitude that prolonged Spain’s economic backwardness well into the 1950s. Ironically, throughout his life, Franco would express a fierce contempt for the political class that he held responsible for the loss of empire in 1898. In 1941, on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, he declared in a speech to the top brass of the Falange: ‘when we started out in life … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’.5 In fact, some of his own fatuous errors would far outdo those of the predecessors he mocked. That he would not scruple to put his determination to stay in power above national interests can be seen in his relationships with the Third Reich and later with the United States. His scatterbrained get-rich-quick schemes, ranging from alchemy and synthetic water-based gasoline to the disaster of his autarkic policies, contributed to Spain’s backwardness until he was persuaded in 1959 to let others supervise the economy.
In denouncing politicians in 1941, Franco was far from alone. With brief intervals when optimism flowered, between 1931 and 1936 and the first decade of the rule of King Juan Carlos, the attitude of Spaniards towards their country’s political class has often been one of disdain bordering on despair. Belief in the incompetence and venality of politicians has been an underlying constant of Spanish life since the Napoleonic invasion if not before. Franco used rhetoric about corrupt politicians to justify a dictatorship under which corruption flourished unchecked and was indeed exploited ruthlessly by the Caudillo himself, both for his own enrichment and to manipulate his followers.
The humiliation of 1898 was just the final confirmation of a truth that had been coming for nearly a century. Spain’s internal economic problems could no longer be alleviated by imperial plunder. A backward agrarian economy, an uneven and feeble industrial sector, the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, parasitical armed forces and growing regional divisions were endemic burdens. They were perpetuated, as was perceived by the far-sighted polymath Joaquín Costa, by a corrupt and incompetent political system which blocked social and economic progress and kept the Spanish people in the servitude, ignorance and misery which lay behind the contemporary slur that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’. However, the solution proposed by Costa, the iron surgeon, showed little confidence in the people and in democracy.
Other equally damaging, and inextricably linked, features of Spanish politics and society have endured since the late nineteenth century. The unspoken assumption that political and social problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for hundreds of years civil strife was no rarity. In modern times, certain forms of social violence have been a consequence of corruption and government incompetence. Electoral corruption excluded the masses from organized politics and challenged them with a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution. The war of 1936–9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s.
Between 1814 and 1981, Spain witnessed more than twenty-five pronunciamientos, or military coups.6 That crude statistic provides a graphic indication of the divorce between soldiers and civilians. In the first third of the nineteenth century, those pronunciamientos were liberal in their political intent, but thereafter a tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. Accordingly, a factor generating hatred within Spanish society was the repression by the army of deep-rooted social conflicts that had arisen in the wake of imperial decline and military defeat. Military resentment of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular was the other side of the same coin.
The role of violence in Spain was consolidated by the way in which the armed forces dealt with post-imperial trauma. A resentful officer corps, which blamed the humiliation of 1898 on the politicians who had provided inadequate support, came to consider itself the ultimate arbiter in politics. Determined to lose no more battles, it became obsessed not with the defence of Spain from external enemies but with the defence of national unity and the existing social order against the internal enemies of the regions and of the left. At one level, this was not surprising. After the Cuban disaster, the army was inefficient, overburdened by bureaucracy and ill equipped. An absurdly high proportion of the total military budget was absorbed by salaries, administration and running costs which left very little for training or equipment.
Spain’s rulers had tried to shake off the immediate post-war shame with a disastrous new imperial endeavour in Morocco. Woefully unprepared, this African adventure stimulated massive popular opposition to conscription, thereby intensifying the mutual hatred of the military and the left. While working-class conscripts became militant pacifists in response to the appalling conditions in North Africa, there emerged within the military an elite corps of tough professional officers, the Africanistas, of whom Franco became the iconic example. They came to believe that they were a beleaguered band of heroic warriors alone concerned with the fate of the patria. This inevitably exacerbated their sense of apartness from a society which they felt had betrayed them. The Africanistas came to dominate the officer corps, particularly in the late 1920s when Franco was Director of the Military Academy. They would be at the heart of the coup of 1936 and then used against Spanish civilians the same terror tactics that they had perfected in Morocco.
They would be a favoured element of Franco’s kleptocratic