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Overview
Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691612164 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #455 |
| Pages: | 380 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Workers and the Right in Spain, 1900â"1936
By Colin M. Winston
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05433-9
CHAPTER 1
THE SOCIAL FAILURE OF THE CATALAN CATHOLIC ELITE
Modern Spanish history begins with a holy war. The Church, which later became identified with capitalism and the bourgeoisie, started the nineteenth century as an intensely popular institution that enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Spain's masses. When Napoleon invaded the peninsula in 1808 he was confronted by a mass insurrection inspired, organized, and often led by the clergy. Defense of religion and traditional values, not xenophobia, stimulated this response. When the French — tellingly dubbed the "100,000 sons of Saint Louis" — returned in 1823 to rid Spain of liberalism and restore her Church and Catholic monarch they were greeted as liberators by the bulk of the population.
The Church's opposition to liberalism climaxed in 1813 at the Cortes of Cadiz. Although the enlightened reformers who dominated the parliament were only tepidly anticlerical and even included a significant number of liberal priests, they were unable to reconcile the Church to the abolition of the Inquisition and the idea of freedom of expression. The hierarchy remained devoted to the Holy Office, the "myth and symbol of the popular religious conception of Spain." The bulk of the clergy and the leading bishops abandoned the Cortes and looked to the exiled Ferdinand VII as their savior from the liberal revolution. Rivalry between anticlerical liberalism and clerical absolutism, often seen as the core of the struggle between "the two Spains," had begun.
On the ideological level this conflict has lasted almost to the present day. Only during the twilight of the Franco era did the Spanish Church cease to view liberalism as a mortal enemy. For over 150 years the attitude of Spanish Catholicism toward the ideas of the French Revolution was summed up by the title of one of the most widely read religio-political tracts of the nineteenth century: Félix Sardá i Salvany's Liberalism Is Sin. Even so-called liberal Spanish Catholics (derisively dismissed as mestizos by their Integrist colleagues) seldom defended the ideal of a free Church in a free state; they simply recognized that compromise with secular authority was necessary, that an imperfect "hypothesis" must suffice since the perfect "thesis" of a state fully subordinate to the Church was unrealizable. So central is this conflict to Spanish history that the labels of the chief antagonists, liberals and Integrists, have crossed the Pyrenees to become part of the West's political vocabulary.
Although the Church and Catholic opinion never accepted liberalism in theory, they arrived relatively quickly at a modus vivendi with the liberal powers that were. The material and spiritual battering suffered by the Church during the first third of the nineteenth century sapped it of the resources needed to confront liberalism. Ferdinand VII died in 1833, but the clergy did not flock to his brother Don Carlos's camp. Despite the Carlists' determination to restore old-style Fernandine absolutism and maintain the alliance of throne and altar, the bulk of the Church sided with the liberal monarchy represented by Ferdinand's daughter, Queen Isabel II. Even the massive disentailment of Church property and the sweeping exclaustration of the monks ordered by the liberal regime in its struggle with Carlism provoked no fall-scale rebellion by the Church. Most bishops complied with the decrees to suppress their institutions with almost servile obedience.
There is no doubt that the Church was radically opposed to liberal policies that directly undermined its traditional structure. However, in contrast to what happened during the Napoleonic Wars and the Liberal Triennium of 1820–1823, this hostility was not translated into mass clerical participation in the counterrevolution. The Church looked to the Moderate party leader Narváez, not to the Carlists, to save it from the excesses of the Progressive Espartero regime. The suppression of the sale of Church property by the Moderates in 1844 was the first step in the Church's reconciliation with conservative liberalism and the social and economic order that liberalism was creating.
The central event in this process was the signing of the Concordat between the Bravo Murillo cabinet and the Vatican in 1851. The Concordat reflected a new reality in Church-state relations: far from being enemies Moderate liberals and the Church needed each other. The state agreed to contribute to the expenses of the secular clergy, and the Church, although it did not explicitly legitimize the disentailment of its property, promised not to challenge past purchases in the courts. Raymond Carr's evaluation of the Concordat is especially perceptive. "Unsatisfactory and ungenerous though the Concordat was as a compromise, it gave the Church a legal basis for its activities ... as long as liberalism maintained the Catholic unity of Spain and undertook to pay the clergy, the hierarchy would grudgingly accept the liberal state. In a Church based on the Concordat it was unlikely that the Bishops would be subversive." In fact the hierarchy would discover that it could live almost as comfortably with liberal as with absolutist regalism.
The Catholic revival in Spain is usually dated from the Bourbon Restoration in 1874, but the Concordat is perhaps a more crucial turning point. The economic situation of the clergy improved, and for the first time in a century the absolute numbers of clergy began to rise. The Church's conduct during the revolutionary upheavals of 1868–1874 confirmed that it had assimilated the need to make peace with the liberal authorities. Though the radical liberal First Republic violated the Concordat, severed relations with the Vatican, and proclaimed religious liberty, the hierarchy did not blanketly condemn that short-lived regime or flirt seriously with resurgent Carlism. As during the 1830s, the Church recognized the need to maintain a low profile that would not harm its chances of reestablishing a close relationship with the conservative liberals once the revolutionary storm had blown over. Thus the Church tacitly recognized that, without accepting liberalism doctrinally, it had become an integral part of the liberal system. To achieve a similar degree of influence over the great social forces unleashed by the industrial revolution would prove to be a far more difficult challenge.
Any discussion of Spanish Catholic responses to the social question in the nineteenth century must be centered on Catalonia, for only in that region was there sufficient industrial activity for new social and economic patterns to emerge at an early date. Spain's first trade union — the Mutual Association of Spinners — surfaced legally in Barcelona in 1840, and textile workers formed the heart of the region's organized proletariat for the remainder of the century. But even in Catalonia the new forms of labor association spawned by industrialization only surfaced intermittently, most often during periods when the Church was preoccupied with defending itself from radical liberalism. Not surprisingly the clergy, still fearing a traditional anticlerical onslaught, largely ignored what must have seemed a distant and marginal problem.
A partial exception to general clerical lack of interest in the social question was Jaime Balmes, undoubtedly the most important and original Spanish Catholic thinker of the nineteenth century. Part of his massive oeuvre was an attempt to come to grips with the changing social and industrial conditions of his native Catalonia. Balmes realized that the modern social problem was not the same as the age-old conflict between the rich and the poor, but stemmed from the growth of a propertyless proletariat called forth by the new productive techniques of modern capitalism. Balmes's prescriptions for solving the social problem, however, did not match the originality and insight of his diagnosis of its causes. His suggestions for worker banks and labor-management mixed committees were overshadowed by his essentially other-worldly, charity-based, and paternalistic approach to social reform. For Balmes the poor deserved charity, not justice, which only a revived Christian moral order could supply. He summed up his outlook in his famous command to the rich concerning their responsibilities to the poor: "hacerlos buenos y hacerles bien" (make them good and do them good). For nearly a century most Catalan social Catholics would consider this to be the last word on the social question.
Although his solutions were inadequate, Balmes at least evinced a lively interest in social questions and correctly pinpointed their origins. The same cannot be said of his contemporaries in the Catalan Church. The first Catalan (and Spanish) ecclesiastical document to treat a labor dispute in any detail — a pastoral letter issued by the bishop of Vic regarding a textile workers' strike in 1854 — simply urged the strikers to return to work and embrace Christian resignation and suffering in exchange for more satisfactory recompense in the life to come. A study of the Barcelona Catholic press in the years prior to the revolution of 1868 has revealed that there existed virtually no conception of the social problem as divorced from a simple matter of public order. Strikes should be crushed immediately with all necessary force. Any attempt at state arbitration would only create new problems. Raising wage levels would cripple industrial competitiveness and stimulate worker idleness. This rejection of reform was linked to a closed defense of the status quo:
These Barcelona Catholics showed themselves also to be enthusiastic partisans of the established order. To defend it they did not hesitate to declare repeatedly that it was the social order desired by providence. The best manner to convince those who saw the need to change the social order was to tell them that human society had achieved perfection with Christianity and that, therefore, society was only properly constituted if everyone occupied the place in which he had been situated by Divine Providence — a society that revered property rights, maintained order at all cost, and in which everyone was content with his lot because the duty of a Catholic people ... is none other than resignation.
Only after the revolutionary experience in 1868–1874 and the discovery that the conservative liberal social system it so ardently defended was less stable than it seemed would major sectors of the Church decide that some things had to change so that most could remain the same.
Catalan Catholicism only began to pay heed to social problems during the final decades of the nineteenth century, when both industrialization and the growth of the labor movement picked up speed. This process coincided with the nationwide Catholic revival made possible by the restored Bourbon monarchy. The growth of the male regular clergy provides striking evidence of the Church's recovery after 1876. On the eve of the 1868 revolution there were an estimated 1,506 monks and 14,725 nuns in Spain. By 1898 the male orders had grown sevenfold to 10,745 and the female to 40,188. In Catalonia the restoration of the massive monastery of Poblet, which had proceeded in fits and starts since the 1850s, sped up, and in 1880 the mountaintop sanctuary of Montserrat, spiritual heart of the region, was restored as a monastic community.
The Catholic revival is best viewed as the culmination of the Church's slow reconciliation with liberal society, begun with the 1851 Concordat. After some initial squabbles concerning liberty of cults and education in the Constitution of 1876, the Church and the liberal state became partners in the Restoration system. The arrangement gave the Church an ideal socioeconomic and juridical position from which to launch a program of reorganization and expansion. The scant available evidence concerning the nature of the Church's post-1875 resurgence, however, indicates that the Catholic revival, in Catalonia and elsewhere, was largely an elite phenomenon that did not extend to the lower orders of society.
Not that there was an immediate need to stem a rising tide of disbelief. Before the Restoration era there are few traces of widespread dechristianization, even among the urban working class. The sporadic monastery burning and monk killing of the first half of the century did not necessarily reflect mass disaffection with religion. The number of individuals involved in the actions was small, and recent studies have emphasized the manipulative political function of anticlerical riots. Twentieth-century anticlericalism, especially the events of the Barcelona Tragic Week, may have stemmed from a far deeper and more authentic popular hatred of the clergy. Dechristianization might be presumed to have made its greatest inroads among the Barcelona proletariat, yet it has long been known that the third anniversary of the foundation of the Mutual Association of Spinners in 1843 was celebrated with a solemn mass. Even the Barcelona labor movement during the Progressive Biennium of 1854–1856 was in no way dominated by non-Christian ideologies, and vaguely Catholic worker mutual aid societies sprang up all over Catalonia in the final decades of the century.
Yet dechristianization did go forward. In the absence of any rigorous studies of religious sociology it is possible to use electoral results as a very rough indicator of attitudes toward the Church. For Barcelona this is facilitated by the existence of the Radical Republican party, led by Alejandro Lerroux, which played on primitive anticlerical sentiment to a much greater extent than other parties of the left. Although a vote for Lerroux did not necessarily signify acceptance of violent anticlericalism, it certainly indicated a degree of alienation from the Church consonant with dechristianization. The geographical distribution of the Radical vote reveals that the party was firmly entrenched in Barcelona's worker districts. In the parliamentary by-elections of July 1908 the Radicals won over half the vote in three out of the city's four predominantly working-class municipal districts, achieving nearly a 70 percent total in the almost exclusively worker-populated Barceloneta quarter. Lerroux's party triumphed in only one non-proletarian area: the mixed petty-bourgeois–working-class District V. The lowest Radical totals corresponded to Districts III, IV, and VI, a central city area populated by Barcelona's middle and upper classes. These results were repeated in municipal and parliamentary elections during 1909 and 1910 respectively. Lerroux consistently obtained absolute majorities in from two to three of the working-class Barcelona districts, while barely garnering 20 percent of the vote in such bourgeois bastions as District III.
Issues other than clericalism versus anticlericalism were at stake in these elections, but the political contrast between the middle- and upper-class quarters and the worker suburbs is very similar to the observations of contemporaries on specifically religious matters. Jacques Valdour noted the difference between "the churches of the central city, so lively during the week and overflowing on Sundays, and the churches of the worker faubourgs, nearly deserted workdays and so empty on Sundays." The more observant of Barcelona Catholics realized that the nominal Catholicism of the masses — their recourse to the Church for baptism, marriage, and internment — reflected a lack of secular alternatives, not deep religious belief. The Carlist Juan Maria Roma estimated in 1909 that at most 10 to 15 percent of the city's inhabitants were practicing Catholics. A study undertaken by the Barcelona diocese in the years before 1910 concluded that barely 30 percent of the city's population complied with the minimum requirements of attendance at Sunday mass and annual confession. Most Catholic commentators salvaged some optimism by claiming that only a small portion of the working class or of the city's entire population (15 percent according to Roma) was actively anti-Catholic. Lack of interest in and perhaps mild derision toward the Church, but not dogmatically antireligious postures, were thought to be the norm among the proletariat. Still, Valdour admitted that although "the great worker masses are utterly indifferent, they can easily slide toward hostility under the influence of violent and intense propaganda, especially if there is no contrary proselytism."
This theme of worker disaffection and the lack of an adequate Catholic response was echoed by some clerics. In this respect the 1915 testimony of José Ildefonso Gatell, a Barcelona parish priest who began his ministry in 1859, is especially illuminating:
The people of Barcelona in the beginning of my life ... could still be called a Christian people. Everyone was a member of a Brotherhood, all of which had a patron saint whose nameday was celebrated; mutual aid societies, guilds, all were placed under the protection of a saint. On Saint Anthony's day our woodworkers filled one of our largest churches, Saint Augustine's; on Saint Pancratius's day, patron of the spinners, the textile workers filled the church of Saint Mary of the Sea; on Sundays during Lent the confessionals were surrounded by a multitude of workers; and not only on festivals but also on days of the half cross, as were called those days that commemorated some apostle but were working days, the factories closed a half-hour before the last mass, and for that mass the churches were full of men in workclothes. When I began my ministry I preached in an industrial town, and all the workshops closed a half-hour before my sermon began. ... And there came a day that this same people, which up till then had seemed so Catholic, slowly began to abandon Catholic practices. Other Brotherhoods were created, other federations of a very different character. The candles that previously had burned before the patron saints of the guilds were allowed to blow out. [Religious] processions were forgotten. The people began to desert the Church. It did not follow our religious and moral directions. And it ended by rising up against her. Other directors gained the people's loyalty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Workers and the Right in Spain, 1900â"1936 by Colin M. Winston. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Maps. Illustrations, pg. ix
- Tables, pg. x
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Abbreviations, pg. xiii
- Bibliographic Abbreviations, pg. xv
- Introduction, pg. 1
- 1. The Social Failure of the Catalan Catholic Elite, pg. 12
- 2. The Spanish Volksverein: Accion Social Popular, pg. 38
- 3. Carlism in Barcelona, 1909-1919, pg. 65
- 4. The Birth of Sindicalismo Libre, 1919-1923, pg. 108
- 5. Under the Dictatorship: The Libres' Social Function, pg. 171
- 6. Under the Dictatorship: Politics and Ideology of Proletarian Fascism, pg. 226
- 7. To the Eighteenth of July, pg. 293
- Conclusion, pg. 323
- Bibliography, pg. 331
- Index, pg. 349