The Spanish revolution of 1934

On 5 October 1934 the Spanish Socialists called a nationwide revolutionary general strike against a new government that included ministers from the Catholic right. Across most of Spain the strike collapsed within a few days, and in Barcelona the “Catalan State” proclaimed by the Catalan government lasted a single night. In the mining region of Asturias, however, a genuine armed uprising broke out, known as the Asturian revolution: some 30,000 workers seized the coalfield and most of Oviedo, proclaimed a proletarian revolution and fought the army for two weeks. The government of the Republic sent colonial troops from Morocco against them, and the operations were directed from Madrid by General Francisco Franco. Estimates of the dead range from around 1,300 to 2,000. Many historians call October 1934 the first battle, or the prologue, of the civil war that broke out less than two years later.

A divided Republic

The Second Spanish Republic was born in April 1931, when King Alfonso XIII left the country after the monarchists’ defeat in municipal elections. For its first two years it was governed by a coalition of left-wing republicans and Socialists led by Manuel Azaña. It separated Church and state, curtailed the role of the religious orders in education, reformed the army, granted Catalonia autonomy and began land reform. To some this was the long-delayed modernisation of a backward country; to Catholics, landowners and a large part of the officer corps it was an attack on faith and the social order. At the same time the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) refused to recognise the bourgeois state and periodically launched risings, which the government suppressed bloodily.

In the elections of November 1933, the first in which women voted and which the anarchists urged their followers to boycott, the left suffered a heavy defeat. The largest number of seats went to the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups (CEDA), the Catholic party of José María Gil-Robles. President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora did not trust it, however, because it had not declared its loyalty to the Republic, and he entrusted the government to the centrist Radicals of Alejandro Lerroux. For almost a year CEDA supported these governments from outside, and in return the reforms of the first two years were rolled back. The left called this period the “black two years” (bienio negro).

The left, above all the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and its affiliated trade union, the UGT, saw CEDA as a Spanish variety of fascism. It had its reasons: Gil-Robles spoke of a “totalitarian state”, his youth movement held rallies on the Italian model and greeted him with cries of “Jefe!”, and the party openly announced its intention to revise the constitution. The Socialists had foreign examples before their eyes. In January 1933 conservatives had brought Hitler into government, and in February 1934 the Catholic Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, had crushed Austrian social democracy by force of arms. The leader of the Socialists’ radical wing, Francisco Largo Caballero, whom his supporters called “the Spanish Lenin”, announced that CEDA’s entry into the government would be the signal for revolution. From the spring of 1934 a special committee prepared an insurrectionary strike, and the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto took charge of obtaining weapons. In September the police in Asturias intercepted part of a cargo being smuggled in on the yacht Turquesa. Many historians, including those sympathetic to the Republic, stress that this was a rising against a government formed in accordance with parliamentary rules – and, at the same time, that the fear of CEDA was not imaginary.

The strike and Barcelona

On 1 October 1934 CEDA withdrew its support from Ricardo Samper’s government and demanded seats in the cabinet. On 4 October Lerroux formed a new government in which three ministries, including agriculture and labour, went to Gil-Robles’s men. That same night the UGT called a general strike from 5 October.

In Madrid the strike paralysed the city for a week, but attempts to attack government buildings and barracks ended after a few hours of shooting. The revolutionary committee had neither weapons nor the support in the army that it had counted on. In most of the country the CNT did not join an action that had not been agreed with it beforehand, and the farm labourers of the south were exhausted after the harvest strike crushed in June. There were clashes in the Basque Country, where around forty people were killed, in the mining districts of León and Palencia, in Cantabria and in a few other places, but within days the government was in control everywhere except Asturias. Largo Caballero and other Socialist leaders were arrested; Prieto fled to France.

On the evening of 6 October in Barcelona, the president of Catalonia’s autonomous government, Lluís Companys, proclaimed from the balcony of the Generalitat palace the “Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic” and called on the opponents of the “monarchists and fascists” to form a provisional government of the Republic in Barcelona. The commander of the military region, General Domènec Batet, remained loyal to Madrid, declared martial law and shelled the seat of the Catalan government with artillery. Early on 7 October Companys surrendered. Around forty people were killed in the fighting, several thousand were arrested and Catalan autonomy was suspended. Azaña, who happened to be in Barcelona and had nothing to do with the rising, was also detained.

The Asturian Commune

In Asturias everything was different. In its mining valleys Socialists, anarchists and a handful of Communists had for months been working together in the Workers’ Alliance, and the miners knew how to handle dynamite, which they called “the artillery of the revolution”. On the night of 4–5 October armed groups attacked posts of the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard in Mieres, Sama de Langreo and other settlements. Within three days the insurgents had taken the entire coalfield, the industrial town of La Felguera and most of the provincial capital, Oviedo, where only a few barracks were still holding out. From captured arms factories and arsenals they seized thousands of rifles and machine guns. Revolutionary committees proclaimed a proletarian revolution, money was abolished in some places, and men aged eighteen to forty were drafted into a “Red Army”.

Moderate Socialist leaders such as Ramón González Peña and Belarmino Tomás tried to curb the violence, but did not always succeed. The insurgents killed several dozen priests and members of religious orders – among them eight De La Salle Brothers and a Passionist from Turón, shot on 9 October – as well as many guardsmen and people regarded as class enemies. Churches and monasteries were burned, as were the bishop’s palace and the University of Oviedo with its priceless library, and the Cámara Santa, the Romanesque chapel of the cathedral that held its relics, was blown up. Some 15 million pesetas were looted from the banks. The right later used these events as proof that revolution in Spain meant the murder of priests.

The Legion and the Regulares against the miners

The War Minister, Diego Hidalgo, entrusted the coordination of operations to two experienced generals, Manuel Goded and Francisco Franco, who had been promoted to major general in the spring of 1934 and had been acting as the minister’s informal adviser since the autumn. As a young officer in 1917 Franco had taken part in suppressing a strike in Asturias and knew the region. On his recommendation the government brought over from Morocco the Foreign Legion and the Regulares, units of Moroccan soldiers hardened in a brutal colonial war. Hidalgo explained that he did not want to send young conscripts against their fellow countrymen. Many contemporaries were struck by the paradox that the government of a republic whose symbol, for the right, was the Reconquista should be sending Moors against Spanish workers.

President Alcalá-Zamora was unwilling to give Franco command in the field and appointed General Eduardo López Ochoa, who was regarded as a republican, to command the troops in Asturias. Legionaries and Regulares under Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe landed at Gijón, the cruiser Libertad shelled the coast, and aircraft bombed the coalfield and Oviedo. After several days of fierce street fighting the army retook Oviedo, and the insurgents fell back into the mining valleys. On 18 October Belarmino Tomás negotiated a surrender with López Ochoa, and by 19 October the rising was over. The colonial troops committed looting, rape and summary executions; López Ochoa had several of his own soldiers shot for killing prisoners.

Victims and repression

The number of victims is still disputed, because strict censorship was in force. According to official figures from the Directorate General of Security in early 1935, 1,335 people were killed across Spain, including some 1,050 civilians and insurgents and some 280 soldiers and members of the security forces, and nearly 3,000 were wounded. Hugh Thomas estimated the dead in Asturias alone at 1,500–2,000; Julián Casanova at around 1,100 insurgents and around 300 soldiers and police, plus 34 clergy. Across the country, according to various figures, between 15,000 and 30,000 people were detained.

After the surrender the investigation in Asturias was conducted by the Civil Guard commander Lisardo Doval. Prisoners were beaten and tortured, and several died. The journalist Luis de Sirval, who had been collecting accounts of the army’s crimes, was arrested and shot in prison by a Legion officer. Courts martial handed down several dozen death sentences, but the President, despite pressure from CEDA and the monarchists, pardoned almost all of those condemned. Only two sentences were carried out: on a sergeant who had gone over to the insurgents and on a worker accused of several killings. Companys and the members of his government each received thirty years in prison. Constitutional guarantees were suspended, left-wing newspapers and workers’ centres were closed, and hundreds of municipal councils were removed. The right called for the insurgents to be punished without mercy; the monarchist José Calvo Sotelo reminded the Cortes that the shooting of tens of thousands of Communards had given France decades of peace, and called the army “the backbone of the fatherland”.

Prologue to the civil war

October 1934 poisoned Spanish politics. The left regarded the Asturian prisoners as martyrs, and an amnesty for them became the chief promise of the Popular Front, which won the elections of February 1936. The right had proof that the Socialists were prepared to overthrow the Republic by force, and came increasingly to believe that only the army could save Spain. The historian Gabriel Jackson wrote that every form of fanaticism and cruelty that would later characterise the civil war had appeared in Asturias: a utopian revolution punctuated by bursts of red terror, and systematically bloody repression by the “forces of order”.

For Francisco Franco it was a dress rehearsal. He told journalists in Oviedo that this was a “frontier war” whose fronts were socialism and communism attacking civilisation. In 1935 he became commander of the troops in Morocco and then Chief of the General Staff. In August 1936 Juan Yagüe led the same Legion and Regulares units against Badajoz. The republican General López Ochoa was dragged from a hospital in Madrid by a mob in August 1936 and murdered as “the butcher of Asturias”, and Companys, handed over by the Gestapo after fleeing to France, was shot by the Francoists in Barcelona in October 1940. Asturias also showed Europe that Spain, a country on its periphery, had become one of the battlegrounds in the conflict between left and right that ran through the whole continent in the 1930s. When the generals rose against the Republic in July 1936, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s aircraft and Stalin’s tanks soon followed.