Socialist and Fourierist ideas entered Spain in isolated, individual instances as early as the 1840's, and the first labor associations were formed in the thirties and forties. The organized working class movement, however, began with the organization of the Spanish Federation of the First International in 1868-1870. The core of the Spanish Federation was a clandestine, Bakuninist-anarchist Alliance formed in 1870. The Federation was, suppressed in subsequent years, though reorganized briefly in 1881 as the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region. The Federationist movement was avowed1y revolutionary from the start, eschewing economic reform and ordinary political action, conceiving of trade unionism as merely the organizational form of revolutionary action.
In the late nineteenth century only a small proportion of workers had been organized, and these mainly in the larger cities of the periphery. Their interests were primarily economic and not political, and the great mass of the workers were not attracted by revolutionary ideas.
Anarchist ideas flourished especially in small cells in Barcelona and a few other towns in the 1890s and found expression in "propaganda by the deed"-bomb-throwing terrorism-during the mid-1890s. It was only after 1900 that the formal idea of anarcho-syndicalism developed derived largely from French theory but also from the practical example of the older Spanish Federation. The National Confederation of Labor (CNT) was officially organized in 19 10 on the theoretical basis of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism. The CNT expanded into a mass organization only in 1917-1918, and it remained somewhat eclectic in its following. Completely anarcho-syndicalist ideas were espoused by only a minority within the movement. The rank and file were often much less militant, and only constant pressure and terrorism (from both revolutionists and their opponents) converted the major single arm of the working class movement somewhat ambiguously to anarcho-syndicalism. The early movements of the eighties and nineties had petered out, and the major strikes of 1903 - 1904 were also a failure. The success of the CNT was made possible only by the expanded industrialization of Catalonia during that time.
During the years before World War 1 the established parties had shown that they were unable to provide vigorous new leadership. This was due to a complex combination of their own disunity, factionalism, and status striving, the opposition of the most important middle class forces in the most active and modern region of country, and not least of al] the elimination of the two strongest leaders-Maura by organized ostracism and Canalejas by murder. The minority ministry of Eduardo Dato was unable to introduce any of the social legislation on which he had hoped to base an invigorated reformist Conservative party. Its main concern was to avoid pressures that might push Spain into the World War. When Dato reopened parliament at the end of 1915, he resigned rather than face a petition for economic and military reforms.
The chief Liberal leader, Romanones, then formed a ministry to conduct elections early in 1916. These revealed the extent of apathy and alienation, as well as the difficulties in civic mobilization, of much of the population. In 35 percent of the voting districts of Spain-located in Galicia and the south, west, and center-only one official candidate stood for office, and under the Article 29 electoral reform of the last Maura government was automatically selected without contest. In other districts where anarcho-syndicalists were exerting considerable influence-the antithetical regions of Barcelona province and the extreme south-there was widespread abstention. Somewhat less than half the electorate actually voted. Though the Liberals got a safe majority in parliament, they had received no national mandate.
During 1915 Spain had become the most important neutral country in Europe and hence a chief source of goods. Orders poured in to Spanish producers from the western allies, especially France. Industry expanded rapidly in northern Spain, and for the first time the value of industrial production exceeded 50 percent of the total value of goods and services in Catalonia. Great profits were made. To the capable new finance minister, Santiago Alba (leader of the subsequent Liberal Left fraction of the old Liberal party), this seemed an excellent opportunity to expand state income and begin a broad program of economic stimulation. He put through the Cortes bills reforming aspects of the tax system, establishing an agricultural credit program, and providing subsidies and credit facilities for new industries. However, the Cortes refused to approve his proposals for a surtax on surplus wartime business profits and for modest fiscal pressures on large landowners that would have encouraged moderate agrarian reform. Meanwhile the industrial labor force swelled greatly. Prices shot upward while wages fell farther and farther behind in the rate of increase. This brought the CNT and UGT together for the first time in their history, when a unity of action agreement was signed in December 1916 resulting in a twenty-four-hour general strike and threatening much more widespread stoppage in the future.
The middle classes were also restive. The first sector to revolt against the economic squeeze and the political deadlock were the peninsular garrison officers of the Spanish Army, whose meager purchasing power had been reduced to absurd depths by the inflation. During the winter and spring of 1917 infantry and cavalry officers set up a series of Military Juntas in most of the main peninsular garrisons, to protest 1 w pay and favoritism in promotion. The Juntas were formed of junior and middle-rank officers in opposition to the generals, some of whom owed their positions to political influence. The Romanones government was meanwhile succeeded in April 1917 by a weaker ministry under the Democrat Garcia Prieto. An attempt to dissolve the Juntas failed completely; the dissident officers imposed their privilege of sectarian organization and forced creation of a new government in June 1917 under the Conservative Dato. Though the Juntas spoke of reform and national regeneration, their concrete interests were higher pay and other professional perquisites. Nevertheless, their "barracks revolt" was greeted with great encouragement by most republicans, the Catalanists, and even some of the Socialists, who began to draw comparisons between the role that a rebel army might play in Spain and that of the dispirited and subverted Russian soldiery in the radicalization of the revolution that was taking place at the moment in Russia.
Since parliament remained closed and the representative system did not seem to be functioning, Cambó and the Catalan Lliga, together with some of the republicans, seized the opportunity to call a special "Parliamentary Assembly" of reformist deputies in Barcelona, center of the Junta movement. The plan was to use this assembly of a minority of Cortes members as the springboard for an alternate source of legitimacy. It was to cal] for elections to a new Cortes that would reform the Spanish constitution and limit the power of the crown and established groups. Yet neither Maura nor reformist Liberals from central Spain would have anything to do with this extraconstitutional assembly, which was immediately closed by police.
The initiative then passed to the revolutionary working class movements. The key role was played by the Socialists, but they were supported by Melquiades Alvarez's Reformist Republican party, which had rallied to the regime in 1913 when D. Alfonso XIII seemed to encourage an "opening to the left" but now despaired of further reforms within the system. Yet, though the Socialists had a working agreement with the CNT that vaguely proposed a joint revolutionary general strike, they could not gain the organized assistance of anarcho-syndicalists. The general strike-essentially Socialist in backing-began somewhat prematurely on August 10, 1917, after one railroad company refused to rehire a hundred or so UGT members following a local strike. The first revolutionary general strike in Spanish history was effective only in Barcelona, the Asturian mining region, and a few other centers, and then only partially. Martial law was enforced by the army, still basically loyal to the regime-at least when faced with a challenge from the revolutionary left-and the strike was ultimately a complete failure.
At the end of October, after further pressure from the Juntas, the Dato government was forced to resign. It was replaced by a "government of concentration" under García Prieto. In an effort to broaden representation, this ministry contained two Catalanist members, but it soon began to break down under the weight of internal dissension, strikes by government employees, and general hostility from the organized political factions. In a new effort to gain a workable majority, elections were held at the beginning of 1918. After decades of protest against the lack of full electoral freedom, García Prieto saw to it that the government, in large measure, kept hands off. The result of electoral democracy was complete fractionalization. Abstention was at least 35 percent. Dato's Conservatives, who raised the largest campaign fund won ninety-eight seats. García Prieto's Democrats, the most popular Liberal group, won ninety-two. No other party or faction returned more than forty. The new Cortes was a political mosaic, as democracy produced a situation of immobility in some respects more frustrating than that of caciquismo. There was nothing uniquely Spanish about this situation. In Italy, where many of the same problems existed, the result of new democratic elections in 1919 was rather similar, though Italy was at that time a more advanced nation.
The only solution was formation in March 1918 of a "National Government" of interparty union led by Antonio Maura, still the most prestigious; single figure. It contained 1 all the leading Conservative and Liberal leaders including the Lliga's Cambó, who as minister of development proved to he the most active member. During an eight-month tenure he prepared a new public works program, the beginnings of major railway reform, a new mining law, new irrigation and hydroelectric projects, and a modest plan of farm credit. Mean while the National Government disintegrated from internal dissension. The reformist Liberal Santiago Alba, whose earlier fiscal and development plans had been blocked in 1916, resigned because his colleagues would not support his proposals for educational reform. After yet another resignation, which coincided with the end of the World War, Maura decided that the time had come to present the resignation of the entire ministry.
At that point the crown appointed a strictly minority Liberal government under Romanones, charged with the goal of passing a workable Catalan autonomy statute so as to strengthen the Spanish system by reincorporating the most active middle class forces. At the close of 1918 Romanones appointed a special extraparlamentary commission to prepare a draft. Since nineteen of its thirty-three members had already expressed their public support for some form of Catalan autonomy, a favorable proposal seemed assured. Then the leftist Parties-republicans, Socialists, and Reformists under . Alvarez-intervened with left Catalanist leaders to urge them to reject any form of autonomy prepared by the constitutional monarchy, on the grounds that a proposal of this government would tend to strengthen the Spanish system rather than weaken ¡t. The left Catalanists pressured the Lliga to join them in walking out of the Cortes in January 1919 to dramatize their rejection of any autonomy statute not prepared exclusively by Catalans. Thus autonomy under the constitutional monarchy, the original goal of the Catalanist movement, was in essence rejected by the Catalanists themselves. Soon afterward the postwar social conflict reached fever pitch, leading the government to close parliament and impose martial law in Barcelona.
What the country desperately needed was a restructuring of the two-party system that would establish a viable, cohesive liberal progressive party on the one hand and a functional, unified conservative party on the other, to achieve reform while maintaining stability. The crown gave the first chance to a minority Conservative ministry under Maura, and ¡t held elections in June 1919 (the third in three years) to try to build a Conservative majority. Though the government did not observe the degree of noninterference followed by its predecessor in 1918, the results of the elections were much the same. After the Maura ministry was narrow1y defeated on a parliamentary technicality, another minority government was formed under the independent Conservative reformist Joaquín Sáncliez de Toca. ¡t instituted needed social reforms but could survive for only a few months. Yet another transitory Conservative ministry, this time under Manuel Allendesalazar, lasted long enough to pass the first regular budget bill in several years, after which Dato formed his third government in May 1920. In elections at the end of the year, Dato's Conservatives won 185 seats, and with the he1p of either the Maurist or Ciervist Conservatives (23 seats each) were able to form a working majority.
With much of the public apathetic or having lost confidence in political change, the last four years of the parliamentary system were dominated by two issues-the social struggle with the revolutionary movements, mainly the anarchists, and the disastrous military effort to subdue the native kabyles of the Moroccan Protectorate. As indicated above, the World War helped to produce a social crisis almost as great in Spain as in some of the belligerent countries. A large and rapid growth of the urban working class that pulled in many thousands of illiterate and semiliterate peasants, together with the greatly increased bargaining power of organized labor brought by wartime prosperity, swelled the CNT to 700,000 members by 1919. The multiple cleavages and tensions within Spanish fife, the clash of religious and political ideologies, the atmosphere of publicized violence during the war years, and finally, the revolutionary upheavals of eastern and central Europe between 1917 and 1919 all contributed to rapid expansion of the influence of the revolutionary elements within the CNT. By contrast, after 1917 the majority of the much smaller Socialist movement adopted a moderate, reformist attitude.
The CNT's offensive began at Barcelona in the spring of 1919 after a layoff workers at a power plant known colloquially as the Canadiense. The walkout mushroomed into a virtual city-wide general strike that achieved the biggest victory Spanish labor had ever seen. It won wage advances and recognition of the union shop in Barcelona, and helped prompt the government to legislation establishing an eight-11our working day. This merely whetted the ambition of CNT leaders, who attempted another general strike to win release of a dozen imprisoned comrades. That brought a crackdown against the CNT, followed by a Catalan employers' lockout. CNT syndicates formed squads of gunmen to murder employers, foremen, policemen, and most of all, dissident workers. Employers' security agents and the police replied, and a vicious circle of violence spiraled upward.
The last Dato government, which came to power in May 1920 when the labor struggle in Barcelona and elsewhere was well advanced, tried to institute a major reform policy. A ministry of labor was created inside the Spanish government and new rent and insurance regulations were established. Most trade unionists under arrest were set free, and the CNT was permitted to resume normal operations. But just as electoral democracy did not bring agreement on reform, so economic adjustments and renewed syndical freedom did not bring labor peace. Employers, particularly in Catalonia, had taken a hard line; by the summer of 1920 the largest strike wave in Spanish history had extended into Andalusia, the UGT was trying to negotiate another joint-action agreement with the CNT, and a small, incendiary Spanish Communist party had been set up. In Barcelona violence escalated rapidly; an anti-anarchist 'Tree Syndicate" was Supported by employers, and finally the local garrison commander, Martínez de Anido, ousted the regular civil governor and seized control himself to restore order by counter-terror. His conciliation policy having failed, Dato accepted the alternative of repression. In revenge, the prime minister was murdered by an anarchist firing from a motorcycle sidecar in March 1921.
By 1922 the CNT was in decline. Some of its syndicates lay in a state of complete disarray, many of the best leaders were arrested or dead, and there were sharp divisions between anarchist and syndicalist (revolutionary and reformist) wings of the movement. No longer supported by the impoverished syndicates, the squads of gunmen robbed banks and other facilities to finance their activities. They maintained a comparatively high level of politico-social disorder in the largest cities, but were in no position to attempt a revolutionary assault on the regime.