From the end of April to the beginning of July, the Socialist Ministers of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, and of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, issued a series of decrees which aimed to deal with the appalling situation in rural Spain, shattered by a drought during the 1930–31 season and thronged by returning emigrants. De los Ríos rectified the imbalance in rural leases which favoured the landlords. Eviction was made almost impossible and rent rises blocked while prices were falling. Largo Caballero’s measures were much more dramatic. The so-called ‘decree of municipal boundaries’ prevented the hiring of outside labour while any local workers in a given municipality remained unemployed. It struck at the landowners’ most potent weapon, the power to break strikes and keep down wages by the import of cheap blackleg labour. In early May, Largo Caballero did something that Primo de Rivera had tried and failed to do – he introduced arbitration committees (known as jurados mixtos) for rural wages and working conditions which had previously been subject only to the whim of the owners. One of the rights now to be protected was the newly introduced eight-hour day. Given that, previously, the braceros had been expected to work from sun up to sun down, this meant that owners would either have to pay overtime or employ more men to do the same work. Finally, in order to prevent the owners sabotaging these measures by lockouts, a decree of obligatory cultivation prevented them taking their land out of operation. None of these decrees was applied ruthlessly and nothing was done about the owners who refused to pay hours worked over eight hours. However, together with the preparations being set in train for a sweeping law of agrarian reform, they alarmed the landowners who began to complain loudly of agriculture being ruined.
The response of the right was complex. At a local level, landlords simply ignored the new legislation, letting loose their armed retainers on the trade union officials who complained. The implementation in the countryside of the reforming decrees would depend on the efficacy and commitment of the civil governor of each province. In general terms, however, the Republican government faced enormous difficulty in finding competent and experienced personnel for its ministries. The problem was most acute at a local level. Miguel Maura wrote later of his despair at finding suitable governors for forty-nine provinces. The men recommended to him by his fellow ministers were often comically inadequate – one he rejected was a shoeshine boy who had lent money to Marcelino Domingo in harder times. In his memoirs, he wrote ‘Governors! After thirty years, just thinking about them still gives me goose flesh.’ Many governors were thus not up to the job of standing up to the landowners who openly flouted legislation. In their weakness, they often ended up as more loyal to local elites than to central government.
In terms of national politics, the powerful press networks of the right began to present the Republic as responsible for all the centuries-old problems of the Spanish economy and as the fount of mob violence. More specifically, there were two broad responses, known at the time as ‘accidentalist’ and ‘catastrophist’. The ‘accidentalists’ took the view that forms of government, Republican or monarchical, were ‘accidental’ as opposed to fundamental. What really mattered was the social content of a regime. Thus, inspired by Ángel Herrera, the leader of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (the ACNP), the ‘accidentalists’ adopted a legalist tactic. The ACNP was an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about five hundred prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions – a predecessor of Opus Dei. Herrera, who would end life as a Cardinal, was the editor of the most modern right-wing daily in Spain, El Debate. From within the ACNP a clever and dynamic leader, the lawyer José María Gil Robles, created an organization called Acción Popular by welding together a general staff from the ACNP and the Catholic smallholding masses from the old Catholic Agrarian Federations. Its few elected deputies used every possible device to block reform in the parliament, or Cortes. Massive and extraordinarily skilful efforts of propaganda were made to persuade the smallholding farmers of northern and central Spain that the agrarian reforms of the Republic damaged their interests every bit as much as those of the big landowners. The Republic was presented to the conservative Catholic smallholders as a godless, rabble-rousing instrument of Soviet communism poised to steal their lands and dragoon their wives and daughters into an orgy of obligatory free love. With their votes thereby assured, by 1933 the legalist right was to wrest political power back from the left.
At the same time, the various ‘catastrophist’ groups were fundamentally opposed to the Republic and believed that it should be overthrown by some great catastrophic explosion or uprising. It was their view which was to prevail in 1936, although it should not be forgotten that the contribution of the ‘accidentalists’ in stirring up anti-republicanism among the smallholding peasantry was crucial for Franco’s war effort. There were three principal ‘catastrophist’ organizations. The oldest was the Traditionalist Communion of the Carlists, anti-modern advocates of a theocracy to be ruled on earth by warrior priests. Antiquated though its ideas were, it was well supplied with supporters among the farmers of Navarre and had a fanatical militia called the Requeté which, between 1934 and 1936, was to receive training in Mussolini’s Italy. The best financed and ultimately the most influential of the ‘catastrophists’ were the one-time supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera. These Alfonsine monarchists, with their journal Acción Española and their political party Renovación Española, were the general staff and the paymasters of the extreme right. Both the rising of 1936 and the structure and ideology of the Francoist state owed an enormous amount to the Alfonsines. Finally, there were a number of unashamed Fascist groups, which finally coalesced between 1933 and 1934 under the leadership of the Dictator’s son, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as Falange Española. Also subsidized by Mussolini, the rank-and-file Falangists supplied the cannon fodder of the ‘catastrophist’ option, attacking the left and provoking the street fights which permitted other groups to denounce the ‘disorder’ of the Republic.
Among the Republic’s enemies two of the most powerful were the Church and the army. Both were to be easily drawn into the anti-Republican right, in part because of errors made by the Republic’s politicians but also because of the actions of the Church’s own hardliner fundamentalists, or integristas. They were committed to the necessity of a ‘Confessional State’ that forcibly, by civil war if necessary, imposed the profession and practice of the Catholic religion and prohibited all others. Among this group were to be found the Cardinal Primate of All Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo, Pedro Segura, and the Bishop of Tarazona in the province of Zaragoza, Isidro Gomá. They formed a semi-clandestine group within the Church, whose members communicated with one another in code, a fact revealed when left-wingers found the secret archives of Isidro Gomá in the Archbishop’s palace at Toledo in July 1936. On 24 April, a mere ten days after the proclamation of the Republic, Spain’s bishops received a letter from the Apostolic Nuncio informing them that ‘It is the wish of the Holy See that Your Eminence recommend to the priests, religious and faithful of your diocese to respect the constituted powers and obey them in the interests of public order and the common good.’
In response, on 1 May, Bishop Gomá wrote an intransigent pastoral letter which passed virtually unnoticed in comparison with the scandal provoked by that of the ambitious and irascible Archbishop Segura. Segura spent much of his life attempting to prohibit any modern dancing in which the couples touched and his pugnacity in matters theological led the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán to compare him to ‘a bullfighter in doctrinal and pastoral issues’. Now, Segura’s