Professor Roberto Villa’s practice is a prototypical example of historiographical revisionism designed to legitimize a certain political culture. First was the questioning of the democratic legitimacy of the Second Republic in 1936. Fraud and violence in the Popular Front elections, which he co-wrote with Manuel Álvarez Tardío. But since 1917. The Catalan State and the Spanish Soviet, published in 2021 and which already projected the distorting mirror of the Procés onto the past, his proposal is much more ambitious. The key is the construction of a mystifying story about the end of the Restoration that whitens the anti-democratic drift of Spanish reactionism by dressing it in a liberal dam that, alas, would have finally been overcome by revolutionary impulses – nationalists, communists and other ilk. — that questioned a supposedly liberal system. Commercial and media success is assured because the story is of much more interest to conservative Spanish readers and media than to progressive ones. Precisely for this reason, in this case, the public silence of the academy is more worrying. That 1923. The coup d’état that changed the history of Spain is going to be the reference book for the centenary is the most obvious proof of an intellectual surrender and I have no way to control the nostalgia for the rigorous authority exercised by the longed-for Santos Juliá.
To begin with, as he will do in various passages of a book that uses enormous amounts of documentation, Villa rereads the Congressional session diary. In this case, it’s a sneaky flashback. We are in August 1931. A commission of “political responsibilities” is established to prepare an opinion on the recent past whose purpose is to legitimize the republican regime under construction in opposition to the previous one. Because yesterday and today, whenever it can, politics does not resist the temptation to use history to impose as truth what, in reality, is a simplified and interested version. “They agreed on a ruling that presented the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera as the logical and natural outcome of Alfonso XIII’s execution throughout his reign.” If that was so, therefore, the monarchy was definitively delegitimized, but this political use of history by republicans and socialists, in the logic that Villa will develop throughout his study, implied hiding what the reign had been. because the Restoration, constitutionally, was: a liberal and democratic monarchy broken not by its failure but by the tensions—from Morocco to Barcelona—that had broken it.
The problem with this interpretation is that it does not inscribe the Spanish case in the crisis of the liberal states after the collapse of their empires (we did not exercise colonialism in Morocco, no matter what) nor with the difficulties after the First World War to synchronize the respective political regimes with the mass society and all the conflicts associated with it. By not inscribing it in this dynamic, as Alejandro Quiroga did in his biography on the populism of Miguel Primo de Rivera, it is normal for the author to ask this naive question: “How was it possible for a regime that lacked acute problems of legitimacy?”. But of course he had them. Because this is how it was perceived with fear by its elites, whose main bet in the face of the crisis was “the reactionary retreat” that Javier Moreno Luzón shows in his biography of Alfonso XIII: “The monarch threw himself into the arms of an increasingly conservative Spanish nationalism and Catholic, safe fortress against post-war revolutionary threats.” “Alfonso XIII was decisive in the triumph of the coup,” Moreno Luzón said. “General Miguel Primo de Rivera had carried out the pronouncement—sui generis, without movement of troops outside the barracks—that Alfonso XIII had been looking for,” Joan Maria Thomàs said.
Every time the regime had more and more problems of legitimacy, faced with the problems and the inability to resolve them, an attempt was made to preserve the economic and social order threatened by the revolution of those from below who no longer consented to the status quo. Preserve order, if necessary, blocking possible democratization that was possible from the government or Parliament and using institutional violence, exceeding the limits of the rule of law. An innovative and suggestive essay has been published on this dimension of the agony of the Restoration and its necessary inscription in the crisis of liberal systems: El fascio de Las Ramblas, by Xavier Casals and Enric Ucelay.
The thesis of the two historians is that between 1919 and 1923, in Barcelona, a first Spanish fascism developed. This process would have been the result of adapting in the Catalan capital, shaken by tensions and countertensions of the post-world war, the “Cuban Captaincy”: a repressive governance model that had been tested for the first time in colonial Cuba. The formula was this: “The assumption of civil power by the Captaincy in a dictatorial manner, with the support of local elites and an auxiliary civil militia.” Las Ramblas were the place where those first fascist plots were shown, which were a form of violent reaction to a deep crisis of legitimacy. Those who established this constitutionalized military dictatorship regime in Catalonia, with the support of local elites, were three captain generals: Milans del Bosch, Martínez Anido (“epileptic pig”) and Primo de Rivera (“royal goose and puppet”).
Those two elegant characterizations are by Miguel de Unamuno. As Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté tell in Unamuno contra Miguel Primo de Rivera, a book with a good idea documented in detail but poorly developed, the intellectual forced into exile considered that the last two soldiers plus the King were the “dictatorial trio” and He fought against him from Paris. Primo de Rivera counterattacked. Because Unamuno was not daunted nor did he doubt then as rigorous historians do not doubt now. Casals and Ucelay: “The royal endorsement of the dictatorship allowed the head of the ‘Cuban Captaincy’ to circumvent the Magna Carta and have a wide margin of discretion.” Alfonso XIII’s option was clear: “he left Primo free to articulate his plot.”
The Ramblas fascio. The Catalan origins of Spanish fascism
Xavier Casals and Enric Ucelay
Past & Present, 2023
595 pages, 29 euros
Unamuno against Miguel Primo de Rivera. A relentless challenge to tyranny
Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté
Gutenberg Galaxy, 2023
297 pages, 21.50 euros
1923. The coup d’état that changed the history of Spain
Robert Villa
Sword, 2023
768 pages, 23.90 euros
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2023-10-14 03:41:44
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