had moved to Barcelona and linked up with Juan García Oliver. With Ricardo Sanz and Aurelio Fernández, they formed Los Solidarios in late 1922. They were all young. Durruti and Fernández were mechanics by trade, Ascaso a waiter and Sanz a textile worker. In May 1923, they tried in vain to catch Martínez Anido, first in San Sebastián and later in A Coruña.69
On 17 May 1923, in León, they killed Faustino González Regueral, one-time Civil Governor of Bilbao. On 4 June, Francisco Ascaso and Rafael Torres Escartín shot dead the Traditionalist Cardinal of Zaragoza, José Soldevila Romero. Deeply unpopular, Archbishop Soldevila was fiercely reactionary. He was believed in anarchist circles to finance gunmen from the Sindicatos Libres and to have plotted, with Martínez Anido and Arlegui, the murder of Seguí. He was alleged to have acquired a fortune from the ownership of brothels, gambling dens and a construction business. His corruption was said to permit him to live in spectacular luxury while being ministered to by a number of young nuns. He was shot while making his daily visit to a convent where it was rumoured that he had a sexual relationship with a nun to whom he left a fortune.70 The assassination sent waves of horror across middle- and upper-class Spain.
Conscious of how this played into the hands of the industrialists and army officers who wanted a coup, Pestaña and Peiró disbanded the committee and vainly ordered the Solidarios to follow suit. However, the Solidarios were looking to create a revolutionary group – the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) – and embarked on a series of daring robberies to finance it. To make matters worse for the moderates, there was a major escalation of strikes as workers tried to recoup their living standards after years of the CNT being illegal.71 After disputes in the construction industry, the biggest strike since La Canadiense, in this case of port workers, broke out in early May. Precisely to provoke a major confrontation, the employers responded with a lock-out of the dock workers. The Sindicato Único took the bait by calling a general strike of transport workers including rubbish collectors. As rubbish piled up in the streets and food distribution ground to a halt, middle-class opinion inclined towards authoritarian solutions. Primo de Rivera was seen by the upper and middle classes as the saviour lacking since the departure of Martínez Anido. He wanted to declare martial law and authorize the use of the Somatén. The efforts of the Civil Governor, Salvador Raventós, to resolve the strike were mocked as intolerable weakness. He resigned and was replaced by a Liberal deputy in the Cortes, Francisco Barber.72
The new Civil Governor quickly outraged the employers by continuing his predecessor’s efforts to settle the strike by negotiation. They went over his head and appealed for help to Primo de Rivera. It was a reprise of what had happened during the Canadiense strike. As Milans del Bosch had done then, Primo expressed his sympathy with their views. On 8 June, the funeral of Josep Franquesa, a murdered member of both the Sindicatos Libres and the Somatén, was attended by 5,000 members of the two organizations. Barber was threatened and jostled and had to be rescued by Primo. Alarmed by Primo’s support for the more extreme ambitions of the Catalan industrialists, and hoping to dismiss him, García Prieto summoned both him and Barber to Madrid. The King refused to sign the relevant decree replacing Primo. Already a broken man, Barber resigned after only three weeks in the post and, traumatized by his experience, died two months later. Primo used the time that he spent in Madrid to muster support for a military coup. He met a group of four generals, known as the Cuadrilátero (Quadrilateral), José Cavalcanti, Antonio Dabán, Leopoldo Saro and Federico Berenguer, brother of Dámaso, together with the Military Governor of Madrid, the Duque de Tetuán. Their concerns were that Morocco should not be abandoned and that the disorder in Barcelona should be resolved. All five were convinced royalists. Indeed, the King once told Alcalá-Zamora that neither Dabán nor Saro would move a muscle unless he ordered them to do so. Since the Cuadrilátero group was in regular contact with the King, he was fully apprised of Primo’s machinations and hesitated to give his approval because of doubts about Primo’s competence. Primo confessed his plans to Romanones, although he claimed that he would do nothing in the short term.73
Indeed, throughout 1923, Alfonso XIII received considerable encouragement for his inclination to lead a military coup. Indeed, at some unspecified point that year, he told Joaquim Salvatella, the Minister of Education and Fine Arts in the García Prieto government, that the only solution that he could see to the problems of the country was a government of colonels. There were deafening rumours that the man to lead a coup would be the 66-year-old General Francisco Aguilera y Egea, who had briefly been Minister of War under García Prieto in the spring of 1917. He enjoyed considerable support right across the army. As President of the Supreme War Council, Aguilera had accepted that the colonial high command should take responsibility for the disaster, but he was not prepared to see the civilian politicians get away scot free. In early July 1923, he had written an insulting letter to the Conservative ex-Prime Minister Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, accusing him of trying to ensure that the political establishment would not face equal censure. He refused to apologize and challenged Sánchez de Toca to a duel. At this point, Sánchez Guerra and Romanones tried to mediate. As tempers rose, Aguilera and Sánchez Guerra jostled and the General came off worse. The ensuing scandal put an end to his possible candidacy as the future dictator.74 In any case, Aguilera had already made it clear to Primo de Rivera that he thought the idea of a coup was madness.75
In August, Alfonso XIII discussed the idea of a coup with various people, including Gabriel Maura, who informed his father. Antonio Maura knew that the King, obsessed with Bolshevism and worried about the Picasso report, continued to toy with the idea of a dictatorship. He sent a note to the King with a devastating analysis: ‘All my conclusions derive from my long-standing and ever firmer conviction that the current parties, without exception, have shown themselves incapable of governing, although this collective ineptitude is not the result of the personal failings of their leaders.’ Maura stated that nothing was to be expected of yet another coalition government since the problem was to be found in the nature of the corrupt Restoration system. However, he believed that it would be suicide for the monarchy if the King took over the functions of government and assumed its day-to-day responsibilities. Accordingly, he believed that the answer lay in the army: ‘It would be less harmful for those that have imposed their will in critical situations to assume the full responsibility of government themselves.’76 This missive was interpreted by the King as Maura’s permission for him to let the army take over. He did not, however, respond to Maura’s prediction of disaster for the monarchy if he interfered in the subsequent dictatorship.
In the wake of his resignation, Barber was replaced by the immensely wealthy, trombone-playing, fifty-six-year-old Liberal from Galicia, Manuel Portela Valladares, a one-time member of the Foment de Treball Nacional. He immediately carried out a major crackdown on the CNT. He put troops on the streets by day and authorized the Somatén to patrol at night. The consequence was that Peiró lost control to García Oliver and the action groups, a development which worsened the sense that the social war was out of control and intensified middle-class desire for military intervention.77
Primo left Madrid convinced that his plotting had been discovered. He confided to a friend that he was amazed not to have been arrested during the journey back nor to have found news of his dismissal awaiting him.78 When Primo reached Barcelona on 23 June, there was a huge demonstration at the railway station to greet him. It had a considerable impact on his vanity. In private meetings, Primo was being urged by the major industrialists to become the longed-for iron surgeon. Even before he had gone to Madrid, the employers had sent an open letter to him setting out their demands for the defeat of the strike and the subsequent return to draconian work conditions. His response, on 28 June, was to have CNT headquarters searched and eighteen leaders arrested. This exceeded his jurisdiction but he argued that it was a military necessity since the CNT was about to launch a revolutionary uprising. Portela Valladares did not object. In the face of such action, on 12 July the CNT called off a strike that had involved around 140,000 workers and left twenty-two dead.79
The success of Primo’s tough action in ending the strike convinced the Catalan elite that more of the same was necessary to crush the CNT. Meanwhile, the action groups continued the social war with a series of bank robberies, the most spectacular of which was an assault on the Bank of Spain in Gijón on 1 September.80 A cabinet reshuffle two days later was widely regarded as evidence of the weakness of the government.81 Then, tension was ratcheted up by the