That the attack on the royal couple had been possible reflected the reality that the Spanish police were hardly more efficient than they had been at the time of the reforms introduced after the bomb attack in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous in September 1896. They lacked technical expertise and modern equipment and were generally undermanned. Moreover, they were underfunded and wages were so low that recruits tended to be uneducated.36 In 1903, La Cierva, recently named Civil Governor of Madrid, wrote in his memoirs, ‘The police force in those days was a foul and dangerous outfit of officers appointed and sacked at the whim of the Governor and the Minister. They had no tenure or any kind of guarantee, although no particular qualifications were required to join. With annual wages of 1,250, 1,500 or 2,000 pesetas, it was easy to imagine what those officers would do in constant contact with every vice and every corruption.’37 The chief of the Barcelona police, Antoni Tressols, nicknamed Vinagret, was virtually illiterate, corrupt and hated for his use of torture and for falsifying evidence against anarchists. Tressols had initially been employed as a rubbish collector before getting a job as a police informer. As he rose within the police force, he made a fortune by blackmailing criminals. A bomb was placed in his house on 18 October 1903 although it is possible that the culprit was not one of his victims but a rival officer who wanted his job. Tressol’s wife died of nervous shock as a result of the explosion.38
Barcelona remained the centre of terrorist activity. This was considered locally to be partly the consequence of the totally ineffective police service. The Catalan nationalist Enric Prat de la Riba wrote in December 1906: ‘The Spanish Police, like all the organs of the Spanish State, is powerless to function in areas of a high density of population. It is a primitive outfit, a useless fossil. To try to deal with the modern evil that Catalonia suffers – that is to say, anarchism – is like fighting with flint-head spears and stone axes against multitudes armed with Mausers and Krups. We cannot rely on the police because the State is incapable of organizing it any better.’ Prat’s complaint was merely one voice within an ever louder chorus of demands for the police to be restructured.39
It has been estimated that, in the streets of Barcelona, between April 1904 and the fall of the Maura government in October 1909 at least sixty-six bombs were placed, which either exploded or were found before they could do so. Eleven people were killed and a further seventy-one seriously injured. In February 1906, the Conservative Civil Governor of Barcelona, the Duque de Bivona (Tristán Álvarez de Toledo y Gutiérrez de la Concha), was approached by a twenty-five-year-old Catalan anarchist named Joan Rull i Queraltó who offered his services as a paid informer. Rull had recently been released from prison where he had been awaiting trial on suspicion of planting a bomb. Originally placed in a public urinal on the Ramblas on 4 September 1904, it had been taken by a policeman to the Palace of Justice where it exploded. The incident coincided with the return, the day before, of Alejandro Lerroux from a propaganda tour in Galicia, thus stimulating rumours that he was somehow involved. After fifteen months in prison awaiting trial, in December 1905 Rull was acquitted despite substantial evidence against him. The prosecution case had been badly drafted, a number of anarchist comrades had sworn that he was with them on the day that the bomb went off and, in addition, the jury had been intimidated. Despite being in prison at the time, Rull was also accused of responsibility for bombs that went off in November 1904 and May 1905.40
The subsequent career of Rull vividly illustrates the relationship between administrative corruption, political incompetence and social violence in Spain. In March 1908, awaiting trial for other subsequent crimes, Rull claimed that the years in prison had changed him, pushing him to conclude that anarchist terrorists were ‘hyenas thirsting for human blood’. Accordingly, he said, he had decided to devote his life to pursuing them. The truth was somewhat different. An acquaintance, Antoni Andrés i Roig, alias ‘Navarro’, had suggested to him that he could make money as an informer. ‘Navarro’ introduced him to the wealthy Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell. Güell reluctantly provided the pair with a letter of introduction to the Duque de Bivona. Wearing a suit bought with money provided by Tressols, Rull, accompanied by ‘Navarro’, went to see Bivona. They told him that they knew who was responsible for the most recent bombs and would be able to predict the time and place of their next atrocity and thus allow the authorities to catch them red-handed. Bivona handed over a substantial sum of money and, until he ceased to be Civil Governor on 28 June 1906, continued to pay Rull. During that time, only one bomb went off in Barcelona; placed on a tram, it harmed nobody. The lack of incidents could not be attributed to anything that Rull might have done – other, perhaps, than refraining from planting bombs himself. Since no actual perpetrators had been apprehended, Bivona was soon complaining about the lack of results. However, he was replaced before he could put pressure on Rull, and his successor Francisco Manzano Alfaro continued to pay Rull for some months.41
It was a period of growing tension in Catalonia. Six weeks before Rull’s initiative, the veteran republican Nicolás Salmerón, in response to the passing of the Law of Jurisdictions, had created Solidaritat Catalana, a coalition of Catalanist parties uniting the Lliga Regionalista, the Carlists, the republican federalists, other Catalan nationalists and part of Unión Republicana. Given Lerroux’s virulent anti-Catalanism, his followers left Unión Republicana and formed the Radical Party. On 20 May 1906, a crowd of around 200,000 people gathered in Barcelona to welcome home the Catalan deputies who had voted against the Law of Jurisdictions in the Cortes. Given its internal right–left contradictions, Solidaritat Catalana would last for barely four years. Nevertheless, its creation marked the beginning of effective Catalan nationalism. In the elections of November 1905, only seven Catalanist deputies had been elected, whereas in those of April 1907 they won forty-one of the possible forty-four seats. They had campaigned for both regional autonomy and national regeneration through honest elections. Lerroux lost his seat, which intensified his hostility to Solidaritat Catalana. Thereafter, the question of Catalan separatism became a much greater preoccupation of Madrid governments. Moreover, the Lliga’s leader, Francesc Cambó, was starting to be seen as a major player in Spanish politics.42
Those April 1907 elections were called by the now 54-year-old Antonio Maura after the collapse of General Azcárraga’s short-lived government. A formidable orator noted for his unflinching personal integrity, Maura had initially come to power in January with the ambition of sweeping away the corrupt electoral system of the Restoration and fostering widespread electoral participation. He planned to end political corruption by means of three laws: a law of municipal justice, an electoral law and a law of local administration. In order to have any chance of getting his projects approved, he needed a parliamentary majority. Given the challenges of the Catalans, the Socialists and the Republicans, that made him a hostage of the great electoral fixer, Juan de la Cierva, a master in the use of the methods that Maura was trying to eliminate. Thereafter, despite unflinching adulation of his boss, La Cierva would be an albatross around Maura’s neck.43 The first of Maura’s projects aimed to separate executive and judicial power and remove one of the most powerful weapons in the cacique’s armoury – the capacity to exert pressure on and even blackmail rival candidates via the ability to appoint judges and magistrates who would then pass sentences in the interests of their patrons.