Spain’s 19th Century: Regionalism, Nationalism & Labor Movements
ITEM 3. REGIONALISM AND THE NATIONALIST LABOR MOVEMENT
The liberal political system was born during a time of national rupture (1833-1840 civil war over succession to the throne after Fernando VII’s death). Its weakness was manifested by its control by military and political elites representing the most conservative liberalism. They created a centralized state model with territorial divisions in provinces, imitating French models, which was assumed to guarantee national unity.
Nineteenth-century Spain was a country of legal centralism, but with a strong local and regional reality. At this time, there was no national bourgeoisie, but rather different and separate regional bourgeoisies. The confluence of these particularities, the romantic spirit, and a cultural renaissance led to the spontaneous manifestation of regional or national diversity, especially evident in Catalonia and the Basque Country—the regions with the most economic independence.
§ The regional peripheral manifestations were originally from the small and medium bourgeoisie trying to regain their national identity through the historical defense of provincial peculiarities, uniting against the liberal state. This was in contrast to the high (industrial and financial) bourgeoisie, who were related to official policy interests and collaborated with their economic power to change state protectionist policies. As the phenomenon expanded and gained inter-class support, bourgeois leaders joined and used it as a political weapon against Madrid to gain advantages, especially in the economic field.
Throughout the nineteenth century, intellectual and political groups in Spain publicly highlighted the features characterizing the peripheral areas of the Peninsula, compared to the central unit. The factors behind the emergence of these nationalisms varied, but their origins included the presence of a language and customs. Added to this was a regional response to the centralized state model, the development of industrialization, the area’s economic wealth, and the degree of mass participation.
CATALAN NATIONALISM
§ In Catalonia, an initial provincialism focusing on literary and linguistic concerns emerged. In contrast to the Restoration, a cultural movement—the Renaissance—covered diverse fields of intellectual activity related to Catalonia, increasingly using the vernacular. This movement brought together the various interests of the bourgeoisie, industrial councils, decentralization, romantic, and even religious groups.
§ During the Revolutionary Sexenio, Catalan nationalism manifested itself through attempts to create a Federal Catalan State in 1873. The fall of the Republic and the defeat of the Carlists in 1876 forced both forces to abandon their doctrinal dogmatism and opt for a pre-national regionalism.
§ During the Restoration, Catalan nationalism established itself as a political movement under the influence of Valenti Almirall‘s work on Catalanism. He defended the need to respect and promote the “way of life and traditional customs” of the district councils and claimed “natural” divisions in contrast to the “artificial” Unitarian liberalism of the provinces. Through Catalan newspapers, he advocated for freedom and unity of action among all Catalan cities.
This organic vision of reality meant Catalan particularism was a transition point to nationalism, as its policies fit all variants: monarchical, republican, federal, and traditionalist. His approach was not about achieving autonomy and independence, but rather ensuring that the unity of peoples within the state was not imposed by force from the center, but resulted from industrial and commercial development.
Almirall founded the Centre Català in 1882, designed as a patriotic organization that would rise above existing parties and serve as a bridge between the federal and conservative bourgeoisie; however, the latter formed their own association.
§ In 1891, he founded Unió Catalanista, proposing to integrate all groups into institutions willing to promote regionalist ideas.
§ A year later, the Assemblea de la Unió approved the Bases de Manresa, written by Enric Prat de la Riba, a conservative Barcelona Catholic. He claimed a broad regime of self-government for Catalonia within the Spanish monarchy and proposed a division of responsibilities between central state power and autonomous regions, but offered no solutions to current problems nor indicated the process for implementation.
The text defined the basis for Catalan Regional Construction:
– Base 3: Use of Catalan as the official language.
– Base 4: Only Catalans can hold public office in Catalonia.
– Base 6: Catalonia is sovereign within its government.
– Base 7: Regional legislative power will reside in the Catalan Courts.
– In 1896, Enric Prat de la Riba presented a compendium of nationalist doctrine (a synthesis of his work and Catalan tradition) and the Catalan form of regeneration for the century.
The crisis of 1898 (the end of the colonial protectionist market) favored Catalan employers’ support for political action and requests for administrative autonomy for the regions. General Polavieja, with a strong sense of regeneracionismo, proposed reforms to end the caciquismo, reorganize the army, and decentralize the administration.
§ In 1901, Prat de la Riba, from the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, began a campaign to mobilize the Catalan electorate before the election call. At that time, he undertook an electoral pact for the formation of a new party that merged the Lliga Regionalista with several moderate Catalan nationalist groups, including the Unió Catalanista, Catalan clergy, and employers’ organizations.
This new nationalist party (distant from independence positions) was bourgeois, ultra-conservative, and Catholic. It was led by Francesc Cambó and Prat de la Riba, its most important ideologue.
The party claimed rights for Catalonia and its autonomy within the Spanish State and defended the region’s economic interests, calling for greater protection for Catalan industrial business activities. The proletariat never sympathized with Catalanism, describing it as a bourgeois, rightist, and clerical movement, which was criticized in the newspaper Solidaridad Obrera.
BASQUE NATIONALISM
Basque nationalism emerged in a climate of shared defense of privileges and had characteristics different from Catalan nationalism; it did not form from a supposedly modern bourgeoisie.
§ The repeal of historical laws, specifically the Royal Decree of July 21, 1876, ended tax and military exemptions (compulsory military service) that some had traditionally enjoyed.
§ This led to a profound crisis in Basque society, resulting in two types of reactions and philosophies that would carry into the twentieth century:
– The industrial bourgeoisie compromised with Madrid in exchange for economic concessions.
– Traditionalists (Carlists) who defended the full recovery of the fueros. They clung to traditional Basque agriculture and the defense of their fueros, which were the essence of Basque identity, and considered their abolition an injury inflicted by the central government.
– Historians and ideologues held a similar idealized past and longing for a lost “golden age.” The enemies of traditional Basque society were industrialization, immigrants, and the liberal Spanish government that had abolished the fueros.
§ The driver of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, starting from a traditional fuerista position, collected and gave coherence to ideas circulating in society in the 1890s:
– The Basque people are a people “different” in race and language.
– The total recovery of the fueros was to regain full sovereignty, meaning independence could only be achieved by returning to the Old Law, the historical essence of the Basque people.
– The Basque nationalist motto was God and Old Law, that is, privileges and traditions. Sabino Arana coined the term Euskadi to designate the common homeland of all Basques and promoted the rejection of the maketas (migrant workers during the Restoration), considered poor, racially inferior, and responsible for all the ills of Basque society. This was used by the dominant group concerned about workers’ affiliation with socialist trade unions.
– The Euskalerria Company of Bilbao (1876) recovered and taught the Euskera language, encouraged linguistic studies, and conducted propaganda through the Basque-Navarra Union daily press.
In 1893, Arana met with a group of friends, including Larrazabal, and presented his nationalist ideology: the Biskal-Buru-Batzar, the embryo of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). He was imprisoned for this, but later led the party to electoral victory in 1898. Afterward, he moderated his ideology, replacing his desire for independence with a request for greater autonomy.
On July 31, 1895, the first Basque Nationalist Party was founded with a solemn anti-Spanish declaration and a desire to restore the traditional legal order to the territory. However, the party, composed mainly of the traditionalist petty bourgeoisie of Bilbao, was forced to expand its base to include the more modern industrial bourgeoisie, essential for the party’s finances. These took control of the PNV and adopted a more autonomous approach, similar to the Catalan model. The party found a relative balance between both postures: a leadership that pressured the central government with radical arguments and a base that accepted the moderate policy of addressing Madrid as a gradual path that could lead to independence.
Since 1903, his successor, Angel Zabala, with new theoretical approaches, achieved strong party growth, the election of a mayor, openness to the world trade union “Solidarity of Basque Workers” in 1911, and parliamentary representation in 1915.
OTHER NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MOVEMENTS
Galician Nationalism at the turn of the century § showed a specific difference compared to Catalan or Basque nationalism. On the one hand, it failed in its attempt to build a homogeneous Galician political force, but on the other hand, it built a radically theorized ideology about the nature of Galicia as a national territory, race, language, history, and national consciousness. However, this galleguismo did not imply an independent state, not even federalism, but rather a legal-political model of decentralization designated by the term autonomy.
§ Andalusian regionalism began with the cantonalist movements of 1873. Blas Infante was instrumental in the formation of Andalusian awareness within a federal republic. A key Andalucist act was the Antequera meeting in 1883—the tenth anniversary of the Republic—which proclaimed a specifically Andalusian Federalist Constitution and requested a “sovereign and autonomous Andalucia.” However, a consolidated Andalusian bourgeois party was not achieved, possibly due to the Andalusian bourgeoisie’s links to central power or the labor movement’s drift towards Andalusian anarchism, contrary to any agreement with the bourgeoisie.
LABOR MOVEMENT
The emergence of a modern proletariat class consciousness emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the Catalan industrial world. By the end of the century, the development of other industrial, mining, and steel centers in Asturias and the Basque Country also increased the industrial proletariat.
§ Between 1820 and 1840, social unrest within the nascent labor movement fell into the so-called Luddite movement, involving the destruction of modern machines, which workers considered responsible for misery and unemployment. The best-known event is the burning of the fully mechanized Bonaplata factory in Barcelona in 1835.
§ From 1840, the labor movement adopted new forms of struggle and organization to meet the challenges of industrialization. The goal was to obtain the right to organize and strike. That same year, taking advantage of progressive legislation that allowed mutual support, workers formed local Weavers Societies and a mutual association of workers in the cotton industry. These posed the first occupational demands: reduced working hours, higher wages, regulation of the employment of women and children, and the establishment of joint commissions (employers and workers) for arbitration to resolve conflicts. But they were soon dissolved by the government.
§ In the six years of the Democratic period (1868-1874), the lack of genuine social reforms contributed to the estrangement of the labor movement from the Democrats and Republicans and its depoliticization. In 1870, the First Congress of the Spanish Regional Federation (ERF) of the AIT (International Workers Association or First International) was held in Barcelona. The anarchist thesis—apolitical and collectivist—won out against the Marxist one.
During the early years of the Restoration, under the Cánovas government (1875-1881), the FRE (Spanish branch of the First International) was banned, leading to secret meetings and illegal actions. Repression led to revolutionary radicalization and an underground movement. Workers viewed their leaders as defenders of urban industry patrons and rural landowners. Rural violence and terrorist attacks increased from 1881.
In the 1880s, under the liberal governments of Sagasta, liberalization measures were introduced that allowed the consolidation of labor organizations. The law legalized associations after 1887.
THE ANARCHISTS
At a conference of organizations affiliated with the International held in Zaragoza in 1872, most congress members opted for the anarchist line. This meant separating the working world from government policy, influenced by politicians’ failure to keep promises (social improvement and abolition of the quintos), which fueled workers’ hatred of the state, regardless of its nature.
§ The geographical area of the anarchists occupied the Mediterranean third of the peninsula, from the Pyrenees to the Guadalquivir, and especially Barcelona, Zaragoza, and the provinces of Lower Andalusia.
Spain, mostly rural, had very strong anarchist roots. Throughout the century, there had been numerous peasant revolts in the south, severely repressed. The arrival of anarchist ideas gave farmers better organization, emphasizing the need for direct industrial action over strikes, which would be repeated throughout the 1870s.
§ In 1874, the anarchist federal commission, due to the repression suffered, went underground and considered the possibility of revolutionary action to overthrow the state.
§ In 1881, Sagasta legalized anarchism, leading to the formation of the Federation of the Spanish Region (FRE) and the mass incorporation of new members.
The members of the Federation’s national committee—five from urban and industrial Catalonia—decided to abandon the idea of destroying the state and organize a united and peaceful resistance. This contrasted with the Andalusian sector, mainly peasant, which supported violence as the only effective means of change.
This led to the breakup of both groups, because the general strike and solidarity advocated by the industrial sectors of Barcelona and Madrid were ineffective in the Andalusian countryside due to the peasants’ dispersion and inability to sustain an organization.
Andalusian anarchists decided to act as subversive groups, supporters of direct action and violence in response to landowners’ negative responses to their demands (higher wages, not the cheapest piecework). They led several strikes and peasant revolts, with arson, theft, and assaults on shops, such as those carried out by the so-called Black Hand, a name given by the government and official media to a “secret terrorist organization whose actions disturbed public order and harmed Andalusian owners.” Cadiz jails were filled, and fifteen were sentenced to death in the trial held in Jerez. They were members of the FRE.
This comprehensive government campaign attributed all sorts of crimes to Andalusian anarchism and extended it to members of the Federation of the Spanish Region; it was said that the “Black Hand” depended on it. Government repression and infighting weakened the organization, so that by the end of the nineteenth century, the Spanish anarchist labor movement, like the rest of Europe, was reduced to small and uncontrolled terrorist groups.
At the turn of the century, a doctrinal and practical reform took place—anarcho-syndicalism—which shifted from all revolutionary action to collective action, framing the proletariat within a trade union.
Anarchist terrorist acts resurfaced in Barcelona, and their perpetrators were tortured, tried, and executed, as in the Montjuïc trials of 1896 and in retaliation for Cánovas’ assassination in 1896.
Socialist and anarchist groups reached agreement only sporadically in calls for strikes and demonstrations, such as those held on May 1, 1890.
SOCIALISTS
The socialist labor movement was limited in 1874 to about 250 followers of Marx’s ideas. They met secretly in the Art of Printing Association, headed by Pablo Iglesias, who, influenced by the ideological rigidity and tactical discipline of the French socialist leader Guesde, organized them into the Association.
§ Pablo Iglesias convinced his colleagues of the need to form a party, and on May 2, 1879, during a universal brotherhood feast held in a tavern on Tetuan Street in Madrid, they decided to form the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and create a commission to draft the program and regulations.
– In July, an assembly adopted the International agreements, emphasizing the need for working-class political participation, the formation of a workers’ party capable of confronting the political regime and the economic system.
THE PSOE proposed three bases as prerequisites for the triumph of the proletariat.
§ The first, introductory, brought together the essence of Marxist theory:
– The possession of political power by the working class.
– The transformation of private or corporate ownership of the means of production into collective, social, or common property (land, mines, factories, machines, capital, currency, etc.).
– The establishment of a society based on workers’ enjoyment of the means of production.
– General scientific and specialized education for each profession for both sexes.
§ The second contained what was later called the “Program’s ultimate goals or aspirations,” i.e., the abolition of all social classes and their conversion into one class of workers who own the fruits of their labor.
§ The third concerned the political and economic measures to achieve the intended purpose: the struggle for the rights of association and assembly, freedom of the press, universal suffrage, the eight-hour workday, equal pay for workers of both sexes, etc., and in general, “leading to the end of working-class slavery.”
Socialism would have a greater impact in Extremadura and New Castile, and especially in Madrid. From there, it spread to the mining and industrial centers of the periphery: Asturias, Bilbao, and Valencia. From its inception, it was confirmed as a working-class party that sought to confront bourgeois parties in the struggle for power through elections.
The emergence of clandestine workers’ associations in 1881 was used to widely disseminate the program. In 1884, the Jaime Vera Report, written by a doctor and friend of Pablo Iglesias in response to a government inquiry conducted by the Social Reform Commission, exposed the programs and goals of all proletarian organizations.
The Vera Report condensed the essence of Marxist ideology and stated that only the working class could be the architect of its emancipation. It was a broad critique of the capitalist system and concluded by noting that the first thing workers should ask the government was freedom to organize themselves so they could liberate themselves, and that, as class struggle was inevitable, only civilized struggle, not slaughter, was dependent on policymakers.
The Socialists launched their official party newspaper in 1886, which was the only means of interaction between different social groups in the country. The newspaper faced many difficulties in the beginning due to opposition from the official parties’ press and the strong anarchist press.
Since 1891, the PSOE concentrated its efforts on electoral politics and did not accept any alliance with bourgeois parties. After obtaining poor results, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it began working with Republicans, as the Republican and Socialist coalition increased its membership.
§ The economic crisis of 1887 brought factory closures, rising unemployment, etc., and led the Socialist Party to create an organization capable of acting in a coordinated manner against capital. Thus, in August 1888 in Barcelona, after the 1st Congress of the PSOE, the General Union of Workers (UGT) was created, aiming to outline the party’s organization.
The UGT was constituted as a body bringing together various trade societies and associations, which would enjoy autonomy in their particular areas:
– Its purpose was purely economic: improving workers’ living and working conditions.
– The means of obtaining specific demands would be negotiation, appeals to political power, and strikes.
With their ideological positions, the party (PSOE) would be the instrument of political action, and the union (UGT) the instrument for daily work demands.
In 1890, a series of international economic depressions had strong repercussions in Spain. That year, the first major labor mobilization took place, in which the newly created UGT played a key role.
The main causes of the strike were:
– The workday (twelve to thirteen hours), low wages, compulsory lodging in company barracks throughout the week, and the obligation to buy groceries in company stores or from overseers, the absolute lack of guarantees regarding dismissal or admission of workers, etc.
The objectives of the strike were stated in the notice that the committee presented to the employers and authorities:
– That the workday should not exceed ten hours.
– The abolition of company barracks, leaving workers free to manage their food.
– The reinstatement of individuals who had been fired from their jobs.
These were the resolutions adopted by the striking miners, who were determined to maintain them.
§ In 1877, women made up 40% of the workforce in Catalonia’s cotton textile industry, and overall, female participation was 17%. Their wages, which did not exceed 50% or 60% of men’s wages, were essential to family survival.
Trade unions were wary of paid work for women because it favored the reduction of men’s wages, thus encouraging women to devote themselves exclusively to housework. Despite this, women leaders emerged in the labor movement, such as Teresa Clarck (1862-1931), a textile worker from Sabadell, founder of the anarcho-syndicalist magazine La Productora and member of the Workers’ Federation. She was a prominent leader in the 1902 Barcelona general strike.
Spain managed to overcome the crisis of 1898 and pick up the crumbs of the colonial partition left by France and England through a process of peaceful penetration.
A Moroccan attack against the railway works linking the mining machinery with the port of Melilla needed to be protected by soldiers. The quintos system sent untrained farmers to war while exempting the children of the rich from military service through payment. This encouraged opposition cries of “They are Moroccans, but the government is the enemy of Spain” (Pablo Iglesias).
In July 1909, the so-called Tragic Week occurred in Barcelona when the government decided to call up the Third Brigade, composed of Catalan reservists of a certain age, married with children. The embarkation of the troops at the port of Barcelona provoked the first incident, which was soon augmented by socialist and anarchist propaganda. Leftist groups proclaimed a general strike, initially peaceful, which gradually spread to Sabadell, Manresa, Mataró, and Granollers. The authorities sent the army into the streets. For several days, Barcelona was isolated and subjected to uncontrolled actions by anarchists and radical Republicans; religious buildings, monasteries, schools, and churches were destroyed, barricades were formed, and the peaceful strike turned into widespread rioting. The army took a week to regain control of the city. The refusal to be drafted to fight in an unpopular war highlighted the conditions of working families who could not afford to lose any of their members if they wanted to maintain a minimum wage for food. The rebels hoped that the riots would be imitated in the rest of Spain, which did not happen because the city was cut off. The spread of reports on the official results—5 deaths among the troops and 100 civilians, 30 convents and 58 churches burned—was retaliatory.
In the search for responsibility for the Tragic Week, the government charged and shot Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist teacher who had opened a Modern School, an alternative to Catholic teaching, whose ideology advocated education, not bombs. This event had international repercussions, and in 1910, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) was founded in Barcelona as an apolitical union interested only in defending workers’ interests by the workers themselves.
The purely unionist CNT immediately attracted anarchists who refused participation in bourgeois politics. In the second decade of the century, they were similar in terms of means (general strike) and ends (improvement of working conditions and anarchist communism), allowing a merger between the two trends. The CNT became an anarcho-syndicalist organization, and its union was symbolized by the red and black flag.
THE CRISIS OF 1917 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
In the summer of 1917, a situation arose in Barcelona again where three major problems—military, political, and social—had fatal consequences for the survival of the constitutional monarchy.
During World War I, Europe’s war needs, while Spain’s neutrality led to an economic rebound. Increased product demand generated large fortunes for producers, but significantly increased the cost of living and created a real supply problem for many imported products, generating a subsistence crisis that severely affected the poorest sectors of society. After the Great War, the economic problem would extend to producers and traders, who would see their businesses drop dramatically.
§ Military unrest, caused by governmental instability, the new merit-based promotion law that benefited only the army in Morocco, and low salaries eroded by inflation caused by the impact of World War I, prompted the military to question the system, intervening in politics with the formation of Juntas defending the economic and professional interests of the military.
§ Political unrest against the government, then headed by Eduardo Dato, who, amid the climate of tension, ordered press censorship, the suspension of constitutional guarantees, and the closure of the Courts. This authoritarian attitude, and amid a wave of protests, led Cambó, a leader of the Lliga Regionalista, to convene a Parliamentary Assembly in Barcelona, which was attended only by the left opposition and some liberals. This led to demands for a Constituent Assembly and the implementation of a reform program that contemplated Spain’s multinational reality.
The ideological heterogeneity of the movement and the rejection of the Juntas, which sided with the government, facilitated the Assembly’s dissolution.
§ Social unrest. In 1916, the CNT reached an agreement with the UGT to promote a general strike, the first to be called throughout the national territory by both trade unions together, which would combine with the general malaise and show the strength of the labor movement.
Strikes and lockouts proliferated, fearing a large-scale national conflict. The railway strike, initiated by the Northern Railway Company in Valencia, announced a general strike by the sectorial union of the UGT Railway.
The strike did not produce the expected results, firstly due to the lack of unity between the two unions and secondly due to the lack of proper direction. The mobilization extended to the main cities of Asturias, the Basque Country, Madrid, and Catalonia, but was not supported by the parliamentary assembly, which defended the interests of the bourgeoisie, nor by the military, which harshly suppressed it, resulting in significant casualties, injuries, and arrests.
During the years 1918-1920, called the three Bolshevik years, influenced by the triumph of the Soviet Socialist Revolution, intense social conflicts took place. In Barcelona in 1919, a strike by the Canadian electricity company that supplied the city, in response to layoffs of workers for their union membership, led to Barcelona being plunged into darkness all night and transportation paralyzed for a week, becoming a general strike. The response of the workers, led by the CNT, was united, disciplined, and peaceful. A few weeks later, the government ordered the 8-hour work week.
Employers, alarmed by the progress of the association and with the support of the military authorities, decided to fight the CNT, creating groups of free trade unions and hiring gunmen and gangsters to kill more moderate trade unionists. The CNT’s union responded more radically to the killings, and the climate of violence and street killings turned Barcelona into the “Spanish Chicago” between 1919-1923, when Primo de Rivera’s coup took place. The CNT was virtually dismantled.
In 1921, a group of socialists broke away from the PSOE and founded the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), following the revolutionary model tested by Lenin.