Creating Spaniards

The University of Wisconsin Press

Contents

Illustrations...........................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................ixIntroduction............................................................................................................3CHAPTER 1 The Center Cannot Hold: Intellectual and Social Roots of Republican Spain....................................16CHAPTER 2 "If These People Had Received but a Refrain of Poetry": Creating Consent through Culture.....................47CHAPTER 3 Theater as Secularized Religion: Return to the Golden Age....................................................79CHAPTER 4 Taming the Seventh Art: Battle for Cultural Unity on the Cinematographic Front...............................118CHAPTER 5 Cult of Reading: Literacy and Regeneration...................................................................143CHAPTER 6 Spanish Civil War: Culture on the Battlefield................................................................168Conclusion..............................................................................................................195Notes...................................................................................................................203Bibliography............................................................................................................235Index...................................................................................................................251

Chapter One

Intellectual and Social Roots of Republican Spain

IN SPAIN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY READS LIKE A FRENZIED CATALOGUE of wars, coups d'tat, and catastrophes. In the space of about one hundred years (1808-1898) Spain experienced foreign occupation; the ban, restoration, and final elimination of the Spanish Inquisition; scores of pronunciamientos (military takeovers); revolutions; three civil wars; a monarchical restoration supported by an intricate political system that institutionalized political corruption; and, finally, the loss of the last vestiges of its overseas empire. The opening decades of the twentieth century seemed no less chaotic. The working classes and rural laborers, long excluded from participating in Spain's political and economic spheres, registered their disaffection with the system through strikes and terrorist activity. Catalan nationalists clamored for autonomy, and the Spanish military fought tenaciously for control of Spanish Morocco. Even liberals lost faith in a system that purported to be democratic but served the needs of a minuscule elite. By 1923, when General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a pronunciamiento, many people welcomed his dictatorship as a balm for Spain's seemingly perpetual social unrest. This period saw many groups scramble to refashion a Spanish nation out of the wreckage of the dissolute Restoration System. To demonstrate the multitude of problems that Spaniards encountered, this chapter will unravel the various social, cultural, and intellectual threads that made up the fabric of Spain between 1875 and 1931.

In retrospect, much of the chaos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appears to be no different from that of the rest of the continent, especially France and central Europe. Like its counterparts, Spain had to adjust to the residual ideological and political ramifications of the French Revolution and the subsequent Metternichean restoration. Although steeped in a militantly Catholic and absolutist past, Spaniards could not help but be altered by the ideologies that emerged from the revolution to the north. Spain experienced immense dislocations in its attempts to transform itself from an ostensibly feudal society to a liberal, industrial one.

Spain was not alone in its quest for stability-witness, for example, the European-wide revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Many disenfranchised Europeans demanded their individual rights from revanchist monarchs, while the growing working classes agitated for better working conditions, political rights, and, sometimes, revolution. European statesmen did their best to quash rebelliousness by force, but they also tried to lessen their populations' disaffection with industrialization and other by-products of modernization by encouraging an allegiance to the nation. The communal ties that had been destroyed by industrialization and urbanization could be re-created through nationalism. But some of the people who were most affected by the dislocations wrought by the transition to capitalist economies, namely, the working classes and displaced rural laborers, sought their communal ties not in the nation but in class solidarity.

For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Spanish liberals attempted to transform Spain into their vision of a modern state, free from the encumbrances of absolutist monarchs and retrograde Catholics. The more radical liberals sought a constitutional representative government that gave sovereignty to the nation, the end of church authority in state affairs, the disentailment of land, the abolition of seigneurial privileges, and the development of a modern, capitalist economy. By 1840, much of the liberal program had been achieved, especially the creation of private property and, at least on paper, state centralization. But other qualities that scholars have used to judge the strength of the liberal state in Europe-universal primary education and an efficient transportation system to import and export goods and services-were sorely lacking in Spain at this time. The liberal state benefited only a small minority at great cost. For example, the liberals' disentailment policies transferred one-quarter to one-third of the national land surface to different hands, but the structure of land ownership changed little. The inability of Spanish liberals to spread the benefits of liberalism to the majority of the population also contributed to government instability and the numerous pronunciamientos that characterized nineteenth-century Spain.

The Restoration settlement of 1875, with its infamous turno pacfico (peaceful rotation), brought a measure of political stability for at least the next twenty years, but Spaniards paid a high economic and social price for this peace. Antonio Cnovas del Castillo developed the turno pacfico as a strategy to prevent the numerous pronunciamientos and civil wars that had threatened the Spanish state's stability. It allowed for the peaceful rotation of power between two groups, Liberals and Conservatives. When one party was deemed to be losing support, the king would dissolve the cabinet, appoint a new prime minister from the opposition party, and then that party would rule until the next crisis forced another change. This system achieved success through the machine politics known as caciquismo. Once the oligarchs in Madrid drew up their list of candidates, they would contact the local provincial and municipal notables who had ties with the local party bosses-the caciques. The caciques would then tell people in their districts how to vote, usually in exchange for...