For decades, in Spain it has been assumed without any discussion that the Second Republic came on the shoulders of enthusiastic and unanimous republican citizens. The famous photograph of Puerta del Sol, with its thousands of Madrid residents celebrating the arrival of the new regime, helped to support this perception, as did other similar images taken in Barcelona on April 14, 1931. King Alfonso XIII himself declared in his farewell letter to the Spanish: “The elections held on Sunday clearly reveal to me that I do not have the love of my people today.”
Was this statement true? Was the Spain of 1931 really republican? Did the majority of Spaniards really want Alfonso XIII to go into exile? Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar, the last President of the Government in the reign of Alfonso XIII, reflected the abrupt change of regime with this famous and repeated sentence in reference to the municipal elections that led to it: «The Spaniards, who on the eve had gone to bed monarchists, they woke up the next day republicans».
The truth is that prior to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the republican parties lacked importance in Spain, except in Catalonia, where the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux held the hegemony. The Federal Democratic Republican Party and the Partit Republicà were also more or less important, the latter with a more nationalist character. In addition, the old republican-socialist conjunction of the beginning of the century had already died out on its own. After the coup d’état of 1923, it is true that this alliance was revitalized when all the parties came together in the Republican Alliance, which later led to the Republican Action of Manuel Azaña.
Although the Republicans grew little by little during the 1920s, Bautista Aznar was right to focus on that sudden change in the mentality of the Spaniards, since the municipal elections of April 12, 1931 were called to elect councilors and, nevertheless, led to an unexpected change in the form of State. «No one asked, but with the votes it was understood that the people had rejected not only Alfonso XIII, but the Monarchy, and that they had declared themselves in favor of the Republic. The cunning interpretation imposed at the right time weighed more than millions of votes », points out Alejandro Nieto in his last essay, ‘Between the Second and the Third Republic’ (Comares, 2022).
A group of workers with the tricolor flags, in the proclamation of the Second Republic in Madrid
The votes
The former president of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) also warns in his book: «It is one thing for them to officially declare themselves Republicans and quite another for them to be. Even more precise, it is difficult to determine the degree of sincerity of their positions, which in fact were very different as can be seen in a quick review of the different social political groups. From myth to average reality there was a long way and it is better to serenely abide by this one than blindly let yourself be dragged by that one».
However, the impression of a unanimously republican Spain in 1931 has endured over the decades, in part, because the Second Republic has always been treated, with few exceptions, in a biased manner. Nieto even speaks of a “caricatural” version, whether this is the idealized incarnation of all the virtues, whose success was abruptly cut short by some evil fascist generals, or the infernal one, a compendium of all the evils and rectified at the last moment by some soldiers who saved the homeland.
For the moment, the results of the municipal elections did not agree with Alfonso XIII, since it is known that the number of monarchist councilors exceeded that of the republicans, although the latter triumphed in most of the provincial capitals. Above all, in the aforementioned Madrid and Barcelona, which led them to think that it legitimized them to overthrow the Monarchy. According to data from the historian Javier Tusell, they obtained 34,688 councillors, to which must be added 4,813 from the Socialists and 67 from the Communists. The monarchists, for their part, surpassed the sum of all the previous ones with 40,324.
Strike in Valencia during the Second Republic
The “deficiencies” of the system
Nieto refers in his book to the “deficiencies in an electoral system that the new politicians accepted thinking, each one, that the resulting distortions were going to benefit their group, but the consequences were disastrous.” He also gives as an example the general elections of February 1936, in which the Popular Front obtained 263 seats with 4.7 million votes and the Right Bloc, 210 seats with 5.7. In other words, the left took 53 more seats with one million fewer votes than its opponents.
The historian Julio Gil Pecharromán recalls in his recent work, ‘Los años republicanos, 1931-1936’ (Taurus, 2023), that the results of the April 1931 elections were only partially made public and that their consequences «have been subject of a long and passionate controversy. “With only a part of the results in their possession – he adds – the Government believed itself defeated […]. When the first reports in the press confirmed the ‘moral triumph’ of the Republicans, they took to the streets in many cities, opening the way for a genuine popular revolution».
When the new system was established and the King had already left Spain, other qualifications can be made regarding the truly republican character of many of its protagonists. The Socialists, for example, made it clear from the start that their ultimate goal was revolution and that they would get rid of the Republic as soon as they could. In fact, that was what they attempted in the famous rebellion of 1934, which the newspaper ‘Avance’ explained as follows: «The Asturian proletariat rose up in arms to overthrow the Government and replace it with the power of the workers; not to replace a republican government with another republican government.
socialism
For Largo Caballero, Minister of Labor between 1931 and 1932, democracy was what the historian Santos Juliá defined as the “transit station towards socialism”, and not towards democracy. Nieto’s essay includes in the group ‘disinterested’ in the new regime, in addition to the Alfonsino monarchists and traditionalists, also Catholics, farmers, conservatives, a large part of the middle classes, anarcho-syndicalists and Even the Falangists, who expressly declared that the question of one form of government and another did not affect them in the least.
«Those who brought the Republic and took care of directing it affirmed that they were supported ‘by all the people’ and that they limited themselves to expressing ‘the complete national will’. The statement is absolutely false, because the disaffected immediately appeared, when not declared enemies. There were so many that Azaña had to declare that the Republic was only for Republicans and that there was no place in it for the opposites or for the indifferent, “explains the former CSIC president.
However, the opponents were so many that, upon establishing the Law for the Defense of the Republic of 1932, hundreds of newspapers critical of the regime were temporarily or permanently closed.