A People Betrayed. Paul Preston

1836 by the Liberal Prime Minister Juan de Dios Álvarez Mendizábal. He had changed his name from Álvarez Méndez to hide the fact that he came from a Jewish family that sold second-hand clothes in Cadiz. He was a self-made businessman who had acquired a reputation as a financial genius as a result of having made a fortune in London. He saw the expropriation, and sale, of the lands of religious orders as a way of resolving royal financial problems created by the Carlist Wars of the 1830s. Mendizábal believed that he was thereby laying the basis for the future prosperity of Spain by creating a self-sustaining smallholding peasantry, ‘a copious family of property owners’.29 However, in the interests of the crown, the confiscated properties were sold at auction in large blocks, which meant that they were far beyond the means of even existing smallholders. Moreover, the fact that the lots were sold well below their market price, and often on credit which could be obtained only by the wealthy, ensured that one of the consequences was the consolidation of great estates. The other was that the privatization of property brought into cultivation land that had previously been idle or poorly cultivated. However, this was not enough to meet the needs of a steadily growing population, especially in the south.30

In 1841, General Baldomero Espartero extended the expropriations to all Church properties. Huge tracts of entailed ecclesiastical and common lands were liberated to pay for the Liberal war effort. This process was intensified after 1855 by the Ley Pascual Madoz which opened the way to the acquisition of common lands by private individuals, often simply by a combination of legal subterfuge and strong-arm tactics. The landed aristocracy benefited because their lands were taken out of mortmain but not expropriated. Thus they could buy and sell land and rationalize their holdings. By 1875, three-quarters of land that forty years previously had belonged to the Church or municipalities was in private hands. This not only diminished any impetus towards industrialization but, by helping to expand the great estates, also created intense social hatreds in the south. The newly released land was bought up by the more efficient among existing landlords, and also by lawyers and members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie who were attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and, unlike their inefficient predecessors, the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment and saw land as a productive asset to be exploited for maximum profit. Having said that, neither the old nor the new landowners were prepared to invest in new techniques. The judgement on the ‘general dilapidation’ made by Richard Ford in the 1840s would still be valid ninety years later: ‘The landed proprietor of the Peninsula is little better than a weed of the soil; he has never observed, nor scarcely permitted others to observe, the vast capabilities which might and ought to be called into action.’31 One obvious consequence was an increase in thefts of domestic animals and assaults on bakeries and other shops. That is not to say that all crimes of violence were responses to social deprivation. Many others were sexual and honour crimes.32

The capital of the merchants of the great seaports and of Madrid bankers was diverted away from industry and into land purchases both for speculative purposes and also because of the social prestige that came with it.33 Investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy weakened their commitment to reform. The weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was exposed during the period from 1868 to 1873, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. Population growth in the middle of the century had increased pressure on the land. Unskilled labourers from country districts flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who survived on the edges of society. This was especially the case in Barcelona, in large part because of the collapse of the wine industry as a result of the phylloxera crisis after 1880. Its population more than doubled between 1860, when it constituted an eighth of the Catalan total, and 1900, by which time it had swelled to more than a quarter. The living standards of the urban lower-middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers were almost as wretched as those of the unskilled labourers. One of the most explosive areas was the Catalan textile industry where the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding in insanitary living conditions and starvation wages – produced acute social tensions and, soon, anarchist terrorism. When cotton supplies were choked off by the American Civil War in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment was exacerbated by a depression in railway construction that saw the urban working class pushed to desperation. Until well into the twentieth century, Madrid governments, representing as they did agrarian interests, had little or no understanding of the problems of a growing and militant industrial proletariat in Catalonia. Consequently, the social problem was dealt with entirely as a public order issue. Of the eighty-six years between 1814 and 1900, for sixty of them Catalonia was under a state of exception, which effectively meant military rule. Moreover, a quarter of the nation’s military strength was stationed in Catalonia, a region containing approximately 10 per cent of the Spanish population. This was directed as much at rural Carlism as at urban anarchism.34

      In 1868, growing working-class discontent linked with middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy as well as financial and sexual scandals involving Queen Isabel II. In September 1868, a number of pronunciamientos culminating in one by General Juan Prim coincided with urban riots. This led to the overthrow and exile of the Queen. The two forces driving the so-called glorious revolution were ultimately inimical. The liberal middle classes and army officers had aimed to amend the constitutional structure of the country. Now, they were alarmed to find that they had awakened a mass revolutionary movement for social change and opened the way to the six years of instability known as the sexenio revolucionario. To add to the instability, between 1868 and 1878 Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba, was riven by a rebellion against the metropolis. In November 1870, Prim finally offered the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a son of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Amadeo had neither the political nor even the linguistic skills to cope with the problems that he faced. On 30 December, the very day of the new King’s arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated. From the beginning, Amadeo faced opposition from republicans, from supporters of Isabel II’s thirteen-year-old son Alfonso and from the Carlists. In 1872, there began the third Carlist War. A successful rebellion across the Basque Country and Catalonia saw the establishment of a kind of Carlist state, disorganized and based on religiously inspired banditry.

In the Catalan countryside, the majority of small landowners and farmers were Carlist, not just because of the movement’s clericalism but also because of its commitment to local freedoms and ultimately devolution. Thus in Catalonia, and also in the Basque Country, the Church’s links to the Carlists fed into support for independence movements in both regions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a revival of Catalanist sentiment, of Catalan literature and of the language whose official use had been banned since the eighteenth century. This was intensified by the federalist movement from 1868 to the collapse of the First Republic. Nowhere was federalism as strong as in Catalonia. Another factor was almost certainly resentment of the lack of Catalan influence on the central government. Between 1833 and 1901, there were 902 men in ministerial office. Only twenty-four of them, 2.6 per cent of the total, were Catalan. In consequence, Catalanism was to be found not just in the rural areas but also in Barcelona, where it found enthusiastic adherents among the wealthy upper-middle classes. A loose federation of middle- and upper-class Catalanist groups formed the Unió Catalanista in 1892. Its programme, known as the Bases de Manresa, called for the restoration of an autonomous government, a separate tax system, the protection of Catalan industry and the institution of Catalan as an official language. With the exception of a brief period from 1906 to 1909, from 1868 until the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920s Catalan nationalism would be a largely conservative movement.35

      Faced with civil war, a colonial revolt and a deeply divided political establishment, Amadeo abdicated in despair on 11 February 1873. With the establishment divided, elections in May saw a republican victory and the proclamation of the First Republic on 1 June. Under the presidency of the Catalan Federalist Francesc Pi y Margall, a decentralized structure was adopted and Spain was divided into eleven autonomous cantons. A series of bold reforms were proposed, including the abolition of conscription, the separation of Church and state, the provision of free compulsory education for all, the eight-hour day, the regulation of female and child labour, the expropriation of uncultivated estates and the establishment of peasant collectives. The combination of rapidly