problems and Cambó’s brilliant performances in the Ministries of Public Works and Finance. However, his offer of total power was conditional on Cambó’s renunciation of Catalanism and taking up residence in Madrid. It was not much of an offer. Even if Cambó did give up his aspirations for Catalonia, the opposition of the dynastic parties was guaranteed and, if he renounced Catalanism, the Lliga would be finished.
Deeply offended by Alfonso’s assumption that he would betray his principles in return for power, something that he perceived as a repetition of the King’s duplicitous attempt to seduce him in November 1918, he took his revenge.45 The opportunity arose later that evening. Cambó went as usual to the Cortes where a debate was taking place on the Picasso report. He heard Maura declare that, once responsibility had been established, the Cortes should take the case to the Senate which would act as a court of justice. At that moment, Cambó saw, as he wrote later, ‘the opportunity to return the blow given me by the King that morning’. He knew that the King was desperate to avoid investigation into the question of responsibility for the disaster of Annual. Accordingly, later that evening and on the next day, 1 December, Cambó delivered measured speeches in which he accepted that there should be an examination of the possible responsibility of the Allendesalazar government which had been in power at the time, but hinted darkly that the blame lay elsewhere: ‘As long as the Senate does not exonerate that Government under whose mandate the catastrophe took place or does not establish that the responsibility lies very specifically elsewhere, I believe that the Senate, if it wishes to do its duty, has to make a judgement in some direction and that it would be a disaster for the country and its prestige if it did not do so.’ In the corridor afterwards, Romanones asked him what had happened between him and the King. Cambó, already wondering if he had gone too far, declined to respond.46
While his indignation was perfectly understandable, it is arguable that, in rejecting the King’s offer, Cambó sealed the fate of the Restoration system.47 Three of Sánchez Guerra’s ministers, and the President of the Cortes, all of whom had served in the Allendesalazar government, felt obliged to resign. In part because of this and Cambó’s intervention, the debate on the Picasso report grew more heated when it was renewed on 5 December. Having also been a member of Allendesalazar’s cabinet, Juan de la Cierva furiously attacked Cambó, accusing him of corruptly using his position as Minister of Finance to support the Banco de Barcelona. There were physical confrontations as deputies jostled one another. Sánchez Guerra’s cabinet resigned on 7 December.48 It was the tenth government to fall since Antonio Maura’s third, in November 1918. It was replaced by García Prieto’s fifth cabinet, the bloc on which he had been working with Romanones and Alba. The strong man of the coalition was Santiago Alba, who was again Foreign Minister. It consisted of representatives of the various Liberal factions and the Reformist, José Manuel Pedregal, as Minister of Finance. Romanones became Minister of Justice and President of the Senate. Melquíades Álvarez was to be President of the Cortes. The cabinet was well received, the presence of the Reformists seen as likely to promote a tentative step towards democratization and a serious effort to pursue responsibility for Annual. However, most of the participants were far more interested in the spoils of office than in actually resolving the great problems of the day. As Romanones put it: ‘We parcelled out the ministries like children divvying up treats at a picnic.’ Accordingly, such was the scale of those problems – Morocco and the army, anarchism and social ferment, unemployment and soaring living costs and Catalan separatism – that the grand coalition was doomed to last only nine months.49
Morocco was probably the single most difficult issue. In an effort to limit the drain on resources and the simmering public discontent about casualties, Burguete had been ordered to attempt to pacify the rebels by bribery rather than by military action. On 22 September 1922, he had a deal with the now obese and burned-out El Raisuni whereby, in return for keeping the Berber tribes of the Jibala under control, he was given autonomy and a large sum of money. Since he was already under siege in his new headquarters at Tazarut, his power might have been squashed definitively had the Spaniards concentrated their forces against him. The policy of withdrawing troops from the territory of a man on the verge of defeat merely ensured his enrichment and the inflation of his reputation and power.
Burguete’s objective in the accommodation in the west was to secure more freedom in his efforts to crush the altogether more dangerous Abd el-Krim in the east. After first pursuing negotiations with him for the ransom of the 375 prisoners of war held since Annual, Burguete moved on to the offensive in August.50 He intended to dig in along a line to the south of Annual, using as his forward base Tizzi Azza, a fortified position extremely difficult to supply with food, water and ammunition. However, a pre-emptive attack by Abd el-Krim on a supply column at nearby Tifaruin was driven off only at the cost of numerous casualties. The Rif tribes then struck on a major scale at the beginning of November 1922. Safely ensconced in the slopes above the town, they fired down on the garrison causing 2,000 casualties and obliging the Spaniards to dig in for the winter.51
In the meantime, Cambó’s break with Alfonso XIII ensured the continuation of unstable government and it also drew a line under his own political career. In June 1923, disgusted both with Alfonso XIII and with the sterility and intrigues of political life, Cambó would finally resign his seat in the Cortes, announcing that he was retiring from active politics. Perceptive observers predicted correctly that his departure would open the way to a radicalization of Catalanism. Indeed, the moderate regionalism of the Lliga was already being pushed aside by the more radical nationalists of Acció Catalana, the group that had broken away a year before and was starting to enjoy success in provincial elections. Acció Catalana was a belated reaction to what was seen as Cambó’s betrayal of the Assembly movement in 1917.52 Ironically, the man who had championed efforts to clean up Spanish politics would henceforth concentrate on augmenting his already substantial wealth as President of CHADE-CADE, the principal electrical company of Latin America.53
A somewhat more liberal line was adopted by the government of García Prieto, but it hardly constituted the daring step towards democratization suggested by Raymond Carr when he wrote of its eventual overthrow by the military coup of Primo de Rivera: ‘Not for the first nor for the last time, a general claimed that he was killing off a diseased body when he was, in fact, strangling a new birth.’ If anything, the riposte of Javier Tusell seems more plausible: ‘The Captain General of Catalonia did not strangle a new-born but simply buried a corpse; the political system died of terminal cancer not of a heart attack.’54 In fact, the limits of García Prieto’s reforming ambition were revealed when he announced that his government would not undertake any constitutional revisions. The timidity of the cabinet was exposed further when clerical onslaught, backed by the King, obliged Romanones to withdraw a decree preventing the sale abroad of art treasures, most of which belonged to the Church.
Worse was to follow when the hierarchy made it clear that it would not tolerate any attempt to amend Article 11 of the Constitution, which denied freedom of public worship to other religions. When Romanones gave way, the Minister of Finance, José Manuel Pedregal, resigned in protest, but his party chief, Melquíades Álvarez, did not, thereby underlining that for him, as for his Liberal colleagues, power meant more than principle.55 The clearest evidence of that came when the government finally got around to holding elections in April 1923. All the arts of electoral manipulation were put into practice in one of the most undemocratic elections of the entire Restoration period which recorded the highest ever number of deputies returned unopposed under Article 29. The various Liberal factions within the government engaged in the most unseemly rivalries over the encasillado. Among many corrupt arrangements, Santiago Alba managed to secure a seat for his benefactor, Juan March, who dispensed enormous sums of money. As so often before, the winner was the old fox Romanones. In fact, he and García Prieto each managed to secure seats in the Cortes for nine of their close relatives. In ironic contrast, the Socialists managed to win seven seats.56 Cipriano de Rivas Cherif gives a vivid account of the scale of corruption in Puente del Arzobisbo in Toledo, the town where he was campaigning on behalf of his friend Manuel Azaña. In his contest against the local cacique, Azaña was financed by a Bilbao shipbuilder. Votes were bought on both sides but, when it came down to election day, the local officials, in the pocket of the cacique, simply falsified the votes. The cacique set out thereafter to ruin the local republicans who had supported