The shadow of the Civil War is long and, as can often be seen, it continues to hang over the present in Spain. It is a past that refuses to pass. His interpretation, over the years, has made rivers of ink flow. Was it the inevitable product of the confrontation between two irreducible camps, the conservative and the progressive? Was the catastrophe coming or did it catch the public by surprise?
No one expected such a long and bloody conflict, but since the proclamation of the Republic, the possibility of a civil strife has not ceased to be in the air, as reflected in the press of the time.
On April 18, 1931, with the monarchy recently fallen, the writer Luis Bello stated in a newspaper article in Crisol his conviction that hostilities would break out sooner or later.
The best thing, therefore, was for the fight to begin when the defenders of the people's cause had an advantage: "The King's message, Mr. Bourbon's farewell, opens a period in the history of Spain, perhaps it is the portico of another civil war. But in any case, we already had it, inevitable, and it is better that it arise while the people are in Power, because it will be difficult for those who did not know how to defend it to recover a favorable position”.
In Navarre, meanwhile, rumors were circulating about a new Carlist uprising. A journalistic chronicle by Ezequiel Enderiz in La Tierra, from Madrid, at the beginning of September 1931, assured that, in Pamplona, the capital of that region, the Republican majority smiled skeptically at the possibility of a civil war.
If his version of events was believed, there was no reason to worry about the fanaticism of a minority: "The two or three times that the villagers have come to Pamplona, after the priest, to shout 'Long live Christ the King', we have given it to hair. The day of the rally in the Plaza de Toros, we broke more than six flags and more than thirty heads. Where, then, are these unfortunates going to make a war?
Those who speak are liberals and urbanites. The rural world, which they refer to with the derogatory term “village”, is for them synonymous with backwardness and clericalism. The problem of the extreme right does not seem serious to them: everything can be solved by giving a few sticks that serve as a lesson, without the need to resort to the public force.
However, underneath this optimistic account, the same individuals report some disturbing details. In many towns, supporters of the regime do not exist or are a meager minority that lives under permanent harassment: "In Valcarlos there is not a single Republican... In Zugarramurdi, neither... In Isaba, there are two, they have to sleep with the gun under the pillow... In Puente la Reina they had to throw stones at them”, says Enderiz.
Navarrese society was fragmented. It was said that, as soon as the Constitution of the Republic was approved, the war would start immediately. The Carlist pretender, Don Jaime, would then present himself as savior. In the media of fundamentalist Catholicism, Enderiz reports, there was talk of taking armed action before it was too late: "Now or never."
From the progressive ranks, religion was perceived as a serious threat to national stability, as a divisive factor capable of legitimizing a solution of force. In June 1931, a piece of news in Republican Segovia reported the complaint that the governor of San Sebastián had received against a priest, who was accused of announcing to his parishioners the upcoming outbreak of the civil war. The Catholics had to intervene in the fight, according to the priest, whom they compared to the priest Santa Cruz.
The memory of the Carlist conflict, judging by the reference to the famous nineteenth-century reactionary guerrilla, continued to exist. At least, up to a certain point, because there were also those who saw in Carlism such an anachronistic phenomenon that it was surprising that it still existed.
From an optimistic perspective, a new fratricidal war, in the middle of the 1930s, had no chance of going too far: "The only thing that Spain needs is a new civil war, which it would surely abort because times have changed a lot" , publishes The Meridional Chronicle in August 1931.
With the existing problems, such as unemployment and the currency crisis, the future appeared uncertain. It was not the moment to initiate warlike adventures. The Carlists, therefore, would do better to respect the ideas of the opponent and curb their warlike enthusiasms. The interest of Spain demanded it this way: "First of all is the Homeland", concludes the newspaper from Almeria.
El Pueblo, a republican newspaper from Valencia founded by the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, also warned in August 1931 against the danger of fundamentalist Catholicism. Forceful measures had to be taken because, otherwise, the consequences could be disastrous: "If the Republic does not face the clerical problem in a brave, iron-clad way, we are headed for a new civil war that would destroy Spain." Where did the solution go? In the opinion of the newspaper, for "a virile and patriotic pruning."
Along similar lines, the Santander newspaper La Región warned on the same dates that the Church constituted a power capable of provoking a new civil war as soon as its privileges were diminished. Clericalism might have lost its material power after the republican reforms, but it retained a still formidable spiritual influence.
The allusions to a hypothetical conflict did not stop multiplying, as if the sword of Damocles of war did not stop threatening the Republic. In May 1933, El Noticiero Caditano reflected the statements of Alejandro Lerroux, who, during a Radical Party banquet, warned that a new war could break out in Spain if the left-wing government, then in power, did not completely rectify its policy. .
Blood could flow from a right-wing uprising as well as from a left-wing revolution. In December 1933, a manifesto of the Independent Socialist Radical Republican Party was published, signed, among others, by Marcelino Domingo, Victoria Kent or the priest Luis López Dóriga, which rejected any type of dictatorship, including that carried out in the name of the proletariat. .
This opposition to the violent revolution should not be interpreted as capitulation, but rather as a clear desire not to promote "a new civil and social war." The party thus manifested a decided preference for legality as an instrument for the revolution. Except if there came a day when this legality ceased to exist. Then the time would have come to embark on "making the illegal revolution with all its consequences."
The polarization continued to grow. In January 1936, close to the general elections, the Huesca newspaper La Tierra stated that fighting the left did not mean promoting a civil war, but defending peace, since the progressive forces, according to this medium, represented chaos: “ Fighting against criminals cannot be called civil war, but defense of order and of life”.
The Earth, in this way, represented a paradigmatic case of what some historians call the "brutalization" of politics. It had reached a point where the enemy was no longer a human being on the same level as everyone else, but an insect that had to be crushed in the name of a supposedly superior good.
The nightmare of a confrontation between Spaniards, more or less nebulous, would come true in July 1936. The bloodshed then became a tangible reality, not a tremendous hypothesis from which to take advantage in the political combat.
