The rural and urban proletariats believed that the Church was the ally and legitimizer of economic oppression. A factor that fed the notion was a deeply held conviction that priests systematically betrayed the secret of the confessional in the interests of the rich. It was believed that domestic servants were sent to confession so that the mistress might learn from the priest what the maid had been doing wrong and that crimes committed by the illegitimate children of clergymen were immune from prosecution. The religious orders were seen as parasites. Commenting on the ‘silent defiance’ of workmen, Rafael Shaw wrote: ‘For years past I have noticed that no member of the working classes salutes a priest or friar in the streets.’ Another factor in popular hostility was the fact that monasteries and convents undercut small tradespeople engaged in baking, laundry or needlework. Enmity was not one-sided. Through its press and pulpits, the Catholic Church carried out virulent and incendiary campaigns against lay education.22
There were two attempts on the life of the Prime Minister Antonio Maura in 1904, in Barcelona on 12 April and in Alicante two weeks later. Hoping to drive a wedge between Catalan Conservatives and the Republicans and anarchists, Maura had decided that it was time for King Alfonso XIII to visit Catalonia. For fear of terrorism, María Cristina had not been to Barcelona since 1888 and, since his coronation in May 1902, nor had her son. It was an adventurous gamble. On 4 April 1904, Lerroux wrote an article in La Publicidad, urging ‘the poor, the paralysed and the beggars’ to line the route of the King’s procession in their shabbiest rags: ‘Let them approach, let them see him at close range and observe how the monster of history has the face of a child and questioning eyes.’ Tramps and the disabled in rags thronged the centre of the city. The King made some pro-Catalan gestures, such as asking for the members of the landowners’ association, the Instituto Catalán de San Isidro, to address him in the language. Maura’s gamble paid off. Alfonso received a degree of public acclaim and the visit seemed to have passed off without major incident. However, on 12 April, as the royal party was leaving the Cathedral after a Te Deum, a nineteen-year-old anarchist stonemason, Joaquim Miquel Artal, jumped on the running board of Maura’s carriage, shouting ‘Long live anarchy!’ He leaned in and stabbed and slightly wounded Maura with a kitchen knife. He seems to have been acting, alone although he was carrying a copy of the newspaper with Lerroux’s article. He was given a seventeen-year sentence and died in prison in Ceuta in November 1909, allegedly as a result of a savage beating. Maura was not harmed in the second attack in Alicante two weeks later and the unknown assailants were never caught. The attacks and his survival massively consolidated Maura’s prestige.23
After the success of the Barcelona trip, Maura now decided that the image of Alfonso XIII could be improved even more by international visits. For Spanish revolutionaries, especially Lerroux, this constituted a threat to their efforts to present the Spanish monarchy as authoritarian and priest-ridden. It was also seen as an opportunity to kill the King and hasten the advent of a republic. By 1903, Lerroux, whose rhetoric was as radical as that of the anarchists, had managed to unite most republican groups into the Unión Republicana. Spanish revolutionaries exiled in Paris, led by the exiled republican Nicolás Estévanez, who had very briefly been Minister for the Army in the government of Pi y Margall, created a similar group, known as the Junta de Acción y Unión Republicana. Since early 1904, they had been publishing virulent pamphlets denouncing the monarchy as responsible for the tortures of Montjuïc and calling for Artal’s example to be followed. One of the authors was an anarchist medical student, Pedro Vallina, a protégé of Fermín Salvochea. He had suffered some months in prison, having been framed by the police for involvement in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Alfonso XIII during his coronation in May 1902. To avoid further police attention, Vallina had fled to France in October that year with a letter of introduction from Salvochea to Nicolás Estévanez. There, he had acquired some skill in bomb making.
Now, in response to news that Alfonso XIII was to make a state visit to France, the group began to plan his assassination. The mastermind and financier of the conspiracy was the fiercely anti-clerical educationalist Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the wealthy director of the rationalist Escuela Moderna and of a number of lay schools in Barcelona. Ostensibly bookish and respectable, Ferrer was using his fortune to sponsor major acts of terrorism. There were close links between the Paris and Barcelona groups of anarchists and radical republicans. Indeed, Vallina had visited Barcelona in February 1905 where he had persuaded Lerroux that the death of the unmarried and childless King would expose divisions in the army and facilitate a republican coup. To this end, Ferrer had paid for Vallina to set up a laboratory that could manufacture crude Orsini bombs in Barcelona. Lerroux and Estévanez made plans with sympathizers within the army. Lerroux also sent his friend Ricardo Fuente, the one-time editor of El País, to Paris, apparently to cover the royal visit but really so that he could telegraph him with the news of the outcome of the attempted regicide. The bombs to be used in Paris were prepared by Vallina. The bomb thrower was to be Mateo Morral Roca, the austere and highly educated son of a wealthy Catalan textile industrialist. Morral was a close collaborator of Ferrer, working as librarian and in the publishing section of the Escuela Moderna. He was also a devoted admirer of Estévanez whose pamphlet Pensamientos revolucionarios he had published and which Ferrer had paid for. On 25 May, the French police arrested Vallina and several other conspirators. Nevertheless, on the night of 31 May 1905, as Alfonso XIII and President Émile Loubet returned from the opera, Morral threw two bombs at the cavalcade as it passed down the Rue de Rohan. Only one exploded, injuring seventeen people, but the King and the President were unharmed.24
Morral escaped, but the planned coup in Spain came to nothing. The anarchists arrested alongside Vallina included an Italian, Carlo Malato, an Englishman, Bernard Harvey, and a Frenchman, Eugène Caussanel. Although Harvey was a teacher of English, his knowledge of chemistry had helped Vallina and Morral make the bombs. They were held for six months before eventually being put on trial in October 1906. Malato was a senior freemason and had influential political friends in the French establishment. A major campaign was mounted linking the trial to the scandal over the Montjuïc tortures and arguing that the assassination attempt had been a provocation prepared by the Spanish police in order to discredit the republicans in Spain. Among those who made eloquent speeches for the defence, as well as Lerroux and Estévanez, were the French Socialists Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand. Despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement in the assassination plot, Vallina and the three others would be found innocent.25
The first years of the twentieth century thus saw an explosive cocktail of intransigence on the part of landowners, industrialists and the military and subversion from a disparate array of anarchists, Lerroux’s Radicals, moderate republicans and regional nationalists. It was a period in which rapid albeit sporadic industrialization and increasing labour organization coincided with a resurgence of terrorism and post-imperial trauma in the armed forces. Disappointed by defeat in Cuba and subsequent budgetary restrictions, a resentful army turned inwards, determined to lose no more battles. Wounded pride turned into a neurotic sensitivity to perceived slurs on military honour. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, General Camilo García de Polavieja, the Minister of War in Francisco Silvela’s Conservative administration, blamed defeat on political incompetence and floated the idea of a military dictatorship.
The army’s inflated sense of its importance in domestic politics was exaggerated by Alfonso XIII who saw himself as a soldier-king. He had been educated as an officer cadet and, like his admired cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, he delighted in dressing up in uniform, presiding over parades and granting audiences to favoured officers. He encouraged senior generals to discuss problems with him directly rather than through the official channel of the Ministry of War. He exceeded his constitutional powers by interfering in military appointments, promotions and decorations, favouring his pet officers to a degree that smacked of corruption. According to one minister, the future President of the Second Republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, he behaved as if he was the