Conclusion

The military coup of July 1936 divided the country. It was successful in an arc of north-central Spain, from Navarra in the north-east through Castile to Galicia in the north-west, and also gained a foothold in the south in Cádiz and Seville. The coup failed in much of the south, east and centre of the country, as well as a strip along the northern coast consisting of the Basque Country, the province of Santander, and Asturias, which remained in the hands of the Republic. Aranda’s rising meant that Oviedo, however, lay in rebel hands and the city was surrounded until Francoist forces carved a corridor to relieve it in October 1936. The final offensive to end the war in the north began in spring 1937 when Francoist forces pushed through the Basque Country, moving westwards. Bilbao fell in June, Santander followed in August and the Francoist army entered Asturias in late summer. Resistance in the mountainous east of the province, particularly at the battle of El Mazucu, only served to delay the inevitable. On 21 October 1937, almost exactly three years after the defeat of the revolutionary insurrection, the last ships transporting Republican commanders, troops and citizens departed Gijón. The Spanish Civil War lasted another eighteen months, but military hostilities in the north had come to an end.

The military rebellion of July 1936 failed as a coup, but paralysed the Republican state, ‘shattering both army and police command structures’.¹ The centrifugal forces unleashed by the coup radically shifted the locus of political power to the locality or the neighbourhood. Republican and left-wing parties and unions formed local committees to control their town or village, which often entailed pursuing revolutionary policies, as they had done in Asturias in October 1934. Over the following months, the Republican state was slowly rebuilt and drew competing sources of authority under its control. Reconstruction in a civil war during the 1930s also entailed a sharper antifascist re-drawing of the Republic.

This recasting of the Republic along antifascist lines owed much to the radicalism of the pre-war years described in this book. This current of radicalism also explains why many activists took up arms to resist the rebellion. The number of volunteers who seized arms or wielded those provided by the reluctant Republican authorities to resist the rebellion should not be exaggerated, for the image of a spontaneous ‘people at arms’ was romanticized and a product of Republican war culture.² Yet the energetic initial response to the coup observable in Asturias is inexplicable without pre-war radicalism, which was central to the emergence of antifascism and to the defence of the Republic during the Civil War. Historians have emphasized that antifascism was a transnational movement and a ‘culture of exile’ during the 1930s, yet this book underlines that it also emerged from the political culture and social circumstances of small communities.³

These communities were not just the location of radicalism. This book has argued that ‘community’ is central to understanding the dynamics of radicalism. The lines of fracture at the local level and the politicized context of the Second Republic led to a fierce contest to capture the nature of the community and imbue it with a particular political character. Articles in the press, demonstrations and even episodes of violence were all ways of delineating the boundaries of the community. This process of policing was central to how politics was understood and, by extension, how the process of radicalization unfolded. Importantly, while the left was hegemonic in the Asturian coalfields during the 1930s, it did not monopolize politics and culture. Catholicism continued to play a role in coalfield communities, whether in the company schools, annual fiestas or the presence of churches and shrines, and the political right existed in the coalfields, even if it was much less organized and visible than the left. Moreover, even as the socialist SOMA was the dominant union, anarchism had thousands of followers and Communist influence outweighed its very small size. Common reference points and a shared political idiom provided the foundations for mutual understanding but also bitter antagonism.

The local community, whether imagined as left-wing, anticlerical or Catholic, was a vital reference point for the understanding of politics at the local level and this was related to the wider national and international context.⁴ Factors like anticlericalism, policing and fascism became drivers of radicalism because they were interpreted according to a combination of local, national and international frames of reference. The bonds between the local left-wing community and the wider state soured in the spring of 1934 and were embittered by the experience of the repression after the insurrection. These affective relationships shaped political understanding and were central to the emergence of radicalism. Terms like ‘alienation’ and ‘disaffection’ are common in interpretations of the crisis of liberal democracy in interwar Europe, but often limited to the realm of metaphor rather than embedded in the mechanics of political processes. This book has shown how the decisions of actors in the coalfields were shaped by how local political experience was perceived to align or diverge from the wider state. This underscores the importance of collective mental frameworks, fears and experiences of frustration and humiliation in the context of the Second Republic as interpreted through actions and language.

A variety of factors contributed to the radicalizing dynamic in Asturias. Radicalism first emerged in 1932 against the backdrop of a desire to see the local fruition of Republican secularizing policies, the re-emergence of the political right, the declining fortunes of the mining industry and intra-left rivalry. Importantly, the context of the Republic changed what it meant to be radical for the activists in the coalfields. In a democratic, secularizing regime buttressed by socialist support, the political playing field had shifted. Whereas socialists had been content to proclaim their moderation and sensibleness in 1931, the following year they attempted to wrest back the self-descriptor ‘radical’ from their political rivals and combine it with moderate political practice. Radicalism was therefore contingent and could be inflected with different qualities, even if the socialists were unsuccessful on this occasion. The socialist leadership also faced a challenging situation in the lines. Far from radicalizing into line with the rank and file as is frequently described, the SOMA only succeeded in alienating sections of the mining workforce, particularly younger workers as the economic situation in the coalfields deteriorated. The relationship between the union leadership and the membership continued to be fractious through 1933 and 1934.

These factors combined with other developments, including tenant activism and political tensions at the local level and anger at the attempted Sanjurjo coup, to create a wave of frustration. But this led to the crystallization of a socialist demand for a particular kind of Republic – a social Republic – as opposed to disaffection with the regime. The ‘social Republic’ that the socialists defined in 1932 and 1933 served to distinguish socialists from the Republicans and pointed to a reformist programme of government which would be much more uncompromising in its application. As this book has demonstrated, static notions of democracy and the Republic are unhelpful for understanding the period between 1931 and 1936.⁵ Sensitivity to the contested, shifting ideas of the Republic is essential to understanding the dynamics of political evolution during the Republic, including radicalism.

The factors outlined shaped the initial radical impulse in the coalfields, but do not explain how the revolutionary insurrection occurred in October 1934. Two further factors were crucial. The first was fascism. Nazism’s ascension to power in early 1933 sparked the emergence of fascism as a common frame for understanding the political right in the Asturian coalfields in 1933, yet the meaning of fascism and how it could manifest were unclear. Fascism was paradoxically believed to represent the traditional political right and a new, existential, hidden threat, especially in the coalfields, where fascists were difficult to locate. Nevertheless, the November 1933 election results appeared to prove that fascism did exist in the coalfields and heightened fears about the nature of the coalfield communities. Again, the elusive nature of fascism exacerbated anxieties further through 1934. While it is a commonplace to dismiss the role of fascism by pointing out the lack of actual fascists in 1933, this reasoning is insufficient for understanding political practice and neglects the interplay of local, national and international politics. The dark future augured by the perceived fascist threat conditioned politics in the coalfields in 1933 and 1934.

This threat appeared to become more real in the distinctive shift caused by the elections that delivered a conservative majority in the Cortes. Specifically, a more assertive policing strategy in 1934 brought home, quite literally, the change in the nature of the Republic to the residents of the coalfields. The frisking of workers and the searching of political and union centres stoked an escalating dynamic of protest and anxieties over the trajectory of the Spanish state: could authoritarianism or fascism be installed from above, as in other European countries? Avance was adept at capturing and driving the sense of humiliation among militants in the coalfields and the growing fissure between local left-wing communities and the wider state apparatus. The newspaper increasingly depicted the state – in terms of the government and the security forces – as belligerent, persecutory and, importantly, as a foreign force. Civil and assault guards invaded the coalfields, rendering resistance a legitimate form of community defence, which drew on existing ideas of the ‘self-policing’ pueblo. Even as this array of factors explains how men and women in the coalfields were motivated to participate in the insurrection, they do not explain its timing or the preparations for the movement, responsibility for which lies in the upper echelons in the socialist movement.

Like any revolution, the October 1934 revolutionary insurrection was paradoxical, multifaceted and contested. It was a reassertion and a recuperation of power and the radical left-wing self-image of the coal valleys after the humiliation and frustration of the previous months. But it was also a sincere attempt at revolution that should be understood as a process rather than simply as an event. Committees introduced measures that sought to recast social, economic and political relationships in the valleys. Together with the militias, they also attempted to define the nature of the revolution through policing its boundaries, including the role violence would play in shaping the new order. Through the proclamations they produced, the committees staked a claim to participating in a longer, wider tradition of revolution, stretching beyond the 1930s. It is this revolutionary impulse that sets the Asturian October apart from other episodes of left-wing protest and collective action in 1934.

The revolutionary insurrection and the harsh repression that followed were critical moments in the polarization of Spanish society. Much has been written on the importance of amnesty to the victory of the Popular Front, but little on the effects of the repression on the coalfields themselves. The long 1935 saw the inability of the right to take advantage of the opportunity to re-channel the Republic at the local level, due to a lack of interest, resistance from the underground left and a reliance on the threat of revolution combined with a dependence on the armed forces. For the left, the combination of torture, imprisonment, cancelling of work contracts and the removal of pillars of social and political life, such as union centres, had a profound and traumatic effect on coalfield society. Individuals tried to navigate the radically changed context of the long 1935 in different ways. Some concealed their beliefs, while others became informers or joined right-wing trade unions, whether due to opportunism, economic or social pressures, or a sincere damascene conversion.

The bitterness engendered by the repression and the different strategies employed to survive the long 1935 provided the fuel for a renewed wave of radicalism in 1936. The victory of the Popular Front shifted the political context locally and nationally and sparked a range of initiatives, including purges and boycotts, as left-wing militants grappled with the legacy of the revolution and the repression. This revealed a crisis of the community as the struggle to reassert radical left-wing hegemony retrenched to the communities themselves. The radicalism that these mechanisms generated had a harder, brittle edge. This radicalism combined with bellicose rhetoric and a profound distrust of the state police, which challenged the state’s monopoly on coercive power. Faced by right-wing violence in the streets, leftists, desperate for the regime to protect itself, saw no problem in assuming the role of policing the Republic in the streets, for they saw themselves as aligned with a militant, antifascist Republic – an understanding far removed from April 1931. Leftists had kept order on previous occasions, such as during funerals, and had contested the role of the state when demanding the release of detained comrades from jail. The willingness to undertake this task was due to the crisis of community in 1936, which saw the ‘balance of initiative’ shift to the level of the town, as Collier argued for Andalusia, but also drew on traditions of the ‘self-policing pueblo’.⁶ The demand for the community to police itself was not a question of the lack of state penetration or the weakness of state construction, but about how the social order was understood in moral and political terms.

Radicalization remains a touchstone in histories of the Republic and an important prism through which to understand the evolution of the Republic. This book has argued that radicalism requires redefining and relocating to capture fully the richness and dynamics of 1930s Spanish politics, and to understand the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934. Radicalism was a confrontational, militant style of politics shaped by the historical context of the 1930s and a combination of local, national and international political dynamics. Radicalism was not intrinsically linked to revolutionary politics, nor was it necessarily anti-Republican. Radicalism was located not only in press discourse, union instructions or Largo Caballero’s speeches, but also in everyday experiences on a personal and collective level. It manifested itself in an assertive, even aggressive, policing of political and geographical communities. Radical politics was entwined with the personal and private, from stabbings in and outside bars, to the effects of rumours and social pressures on individual reputations. Homing in on this micro-level of radicalism illuminates its gendered facet, including the mocking of the beatas and conflicts over religious marriages. Individuals were not the passive receptors of a radicalization process from above but active agents in pressuring their fellow citizens as activists, neighbours and colleagues at the workplace to conform to certain beliefs and behaviour.

The front page of Avance on 18 July was heavily censored to remove reports of the coup d’état underway in Spanish Morocco. The blanked-out headline should have read ‘ Cojones and dynamite’.⁷ Bellicose, macho and assertive, it underscored key characteristics of radicalism as a political style during the Second Republic. The figure of the radical, antifascist miner brandishing dynamite resonates with a mythical image of proletarian males fashioned by struggles in the depths of the mines and has proven to be an enduring mythical symbol of ‘red Asturias’. But radicalism was a more complex force, produced by a variety of conflicts and cleavages in the Asturian coalfields both in and beyond the mines, as men and women – citizens, neighbours and political activists – attempted to navigate the challenges facing them in the context of the Spanish Republic, the European 1930s and their own communities.

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¹ H. Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 79. To what extent the state collapsed is still debated. For a critical meditation, see R. Cruz, En el nombre del pueblo: república, rebelión y guerra en la España de 1936 (Madrid, 2006), pp. 247–8.

² The volunteers were a minority and over the course of the war, the Republic would have to rely on conscription. See M. Alpert, The Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, 1936 – 1939 (Cambridge, 2013) and J. Matthews, Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936 – 1939 (Oxford, 2012).

³ E. Traverso, Fire and Blood: the European Civil War, 1914–1945 (London, 2016), p. 262.

⁴ In a similar vein, see J. Häberlen’s emphasis on how German leftists understood the political options available to them in the early 1930s in ‘Scope for agency and political options: the German working-class movement and the rise of Nazism’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, xiv (2013), 377–94.

⁵ For a more nuanced and richer approach, see T. Buchanan, ‘Anti-fascism and democracy in the 1930s’, European History Quarterly, xxxii (2002), 39–57.

⁶ G. Collier, Socialists of Rural Andalusia: Unacknowledged Revolutionaries of the Second Republic (Stanford, Calif., 1987), p. 142. For a similar argument regarding the Weimar Republic, see P. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: the Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge, 2004).

⁷ J. A. de Blas et al., Historia general de Asturias: la guerra civil, primera parte, ix (Gijón, 1978), 18.