2024-01-04 14:14:20
Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, a liberal Catholic with conservative roots who had been a monarchist minister, was one of the men who worked hardest for the Second Republic to come to fruition. He did so convinced that Spain needed order and democracy to definitively overcome the shackles of the Old Regime. And he was also, tragically, one of the first to realize that the system was doomed to failure. “He thought that the Republic had a serious problem after the burning of convents in May 31. There were two Spains, an anticlerical Spain and a Catholic Spain, and he knew that the system was not going to work,” explains the historian. Javier Arjona García-Borreguerowho has just published the biography ‘Niceto Alcalá-Zamora: the man who dreamed of the Republic’ (Almuzara).
Despite being a traditional monarchist, he came to the conclusion after Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état that we had to move towards ‘a centered bourgeois republic’ or, as the author of the biography expresses, dreaming of ‘this attempt to raise ourselves to the bandwagon of modernism, of a European liberalism similar to that of other countries, which led to the problem of wanting to cover in five years what Spain must have covered in several decades. “He was chosen as president among the republican forces because he was the right person to, in a regime that is very groundbreaking, bring together other sensitivities and not leave half of Spain behind,” considers the former director of the Aula de Cultura.
Despite his efforts, the first and main problem that the president noticed is that the new Constitution It was built precisely with its back turned to one of those Spains, which in 1931 was barely represented in Congress. «The right somehow retracted, the Catholics were scared and the first elections produced courts biased towards the left that prevented the creation of a Constitution for everyone. Something he complained bitterly about,” Arjona defends.
History has been cruel to the figure of the Cordoban, subjected to a ‘damnatio memoriae’ for his enmity with both the left and the right. The former considered him a Catholic obsessed with protecting the interests of the Church, while the latter never forgave him for his marriage of convenience with Azaña and his persistent opposition to CEDA, despite his electoral victory in 1933, achieved the presidency of the country. «He did not want to assume something that was absolutely democratic: it was his turn to govern the center right. He never acknowledged it as a mistake. “I thought that Gil Robles was very young, malleable and that he could end up being at the service of a right that, at that time in Europe, was beginning to have somewhat dangerous overtones,” says the author of this biography, which was originally the thesis of his doctorate. .
Archive image by Javier Arjona. Maya Balanya
In his memoirs, characters such as Miguel Maura, José María Gil-Robles, Manuel Azaña or Alejandro Lerroux coincided in the efforts to ignore and mistreat the former president of the Second Republic from its foundation until April 7, 1936, when he was rudely evicted from office by the Popular Front. «His dismissal is for many historians the beginning of the Republic’s downfall. He suffered a lot because he did not think he deserved to be thrown out like that, twisting an article of the Constitution with deceit, after everything he had done for the Republic. And he, especially he, hurt in his soul, as if he had been stabbed, the one who the socialist Julián Besteiroa person with whom he had very good dealings, voted against him.
Arjona identifies the man from Córdoba as a pioneer representative of what has been called the Third Spain, someone who tried like Adolfo Suárez in the Transition to convince from the center that moderation was the only way to overcome the wounds of the past. “He had the dream of creating a political center that would flag the ship of the Republic, but the polls were never favorable to him,” he warns. Precisely the lack of voters was one of the few things that united him with Azaña, his most intimate enemy: «It is a constant argument with Azaña, who sidelined him and kept him completely on the sidelines. the Councils of Ministers. They never liked each other: Azaña thought of him as a redneck and Alcalá-Zamora thought of him as a ‘coward’, a somewhat stupid guy in the sense that he remained hidden for several months before the proclamation of the Republic and that even then “He was terrified at the Government Palace.”
«On the Republican side, he refused to receive any type of help, as others in exile did receive; and of the national, he never wanted to return to a non-democratic Spain »
Before becoming a monarchist politician, Alcalá-Zamora was a leading intellectual, a prominent member of three academies, the author of 36 books and a jurist of recognized prestige, with one of the best law firms in Madrid. «He is a person of impressive intellectual stature. He did not belong to a wealthy family by any means and, in fact, He could not study a degree in Granada due to lack of money. A humble person even when he is President of the Republic, so humble as to stand in line at the cinema and refuse to live in the Royal Palace as Azaña would later do,” the historian describes a personality full of strength and personal courage.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Alcalá-Zamora He had fallen into disgrace and got along as badly with groups on the left as with those on the right. The beginning of the conflict surprised him in Germany, where he began a miserable exile that he always maintained despite the mediation of his father-in-law Queipo de Llano so that Franco would accept his return to Spain. «He was not out because he had fled or because he knew what was going to happen, as some insinuated, the proof is that he did not take a penny and had a good asset that he was never able to recover. On the Republican side, he renounced receiving any type of help, as others in exile did receive; and of the national one, he never wanted to return to a Spain where there was no democracy,” Arjona recalls.
He died in exile and it was not until 1978, just when the remains of Alfonso XIIIwhen he could be buried very discreetly in the Almudena cemetery.
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