2. Building and contesting the Republic (1931–2)

To celebrate the proclamation of the Republic, the government declared 15 April a national holiday. That morning, a festive 1,200-strong column bearing Republican banners, flags and red, yellow and purple streamers set out to walk the fifteen kilometres from the arms-manufacturing town of Trubia to Oviedo. They were greeted by the political authorities and a municipal band on the outskirts of the capital before joining the crowds thronging the streets, mirroring celebrations that were taking place across Spain.¹ Two years later, another group of citizens from Trubia repeated the journey, although this time by train and for a different reason. On arriving in Oviedo, the crowd, which included many women, unfurled banners and marched through the centre of the city to the courthouse. Eighty of them entered and the remainder shouted ‘freedom for Josefa!’ outside. Josefa Álvarez, a twenty-three-year-old from Trubia, was on trial for stabbing and killing her ex-fiancé, who had abandoned her after she became pregnant with their child.² Whereas in 1931 the troupe of trubiecos celebrated the promise of the new Republic, in 1933 they demanded it uphold its promise of justice, which in this case meant advancing women’s rights. In demonstrations like these, citizens across Spain expressed their own vision of Republican reform.

The Republic was not simply rolled out from Madrid, but a product of the interaction of the conflicts and mobilization that occurred at a local level. Citizens and workers, energized by the new political context, presented demands to employers and municipal authorities that pursued the promise of justice associated with the Republic. This chapter examines arenas and forms of political practice in order to probe how the interaction of citizens and authorities gave shape to the Republic at a local level and the tensions and conflicts that emerged, such as over the use of the police force. Tensions over policing would be central to radicalism in 1934, but an examination of the aforementioned factors in 1931 and 1932 exposes the lack of radicalism at the beginning of the Republic. The episodes of conflict show a desire for moderation and the peaceful conciliation of interests.

Community was an important foundation for political action. Demonstrations and delegations of petitioners claimed to speak for and embody collectives, whether citizens, members of a political party or trade union, or residents of a given locality. Republican justice was also imagined through local frames of reference regarding community justice. Such an approach complicates the tendency to divide forms of collective action – or ‘repertoires’ – into so-called ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ categories or, as recently formulated by Cruz in the Spanish context, ‘communitarian’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Whereas the former focused on the local sphere of politics and involved ‘rigid’ and ‘violent’ tactics, the latter involved claims made on national and international politics and employed non-violent strategies like strikes, demonstrations and petitions.³ At the heart of such a classification of collective action is how politics is conceptualized, particularly whether the political is restricted to the more formal aspects of political participation or widened to the relationships of power within social relations. As Kaplan and Radcliff have shown in the context of Spain, mobilizing on behalf of the local community – the bread riots, for example – was an important form of political engagement.⁴ It was neither limited to rural areas, nor necessarily localist in focus. While the strike was the predominant form of collective action in the coalfields during the 1930s, the forms of political engagement were much wider, richer and resist reduction to categories of rural and industrial, pre-modern and modern. Casting the net wider and understanding the relationship between forms of action is necessary to understand the dynamics of radicalization.

The promise of the Republic

In early 1932, Avance, the Asturian socialist daily, commented that communities had ‘awoken’ under the Republic in an ‘explosion of sleeping desires and repressed impulses’.⁵ Energized by the new political context, citizens presented petitions and demands to municipal councillors. In so doing, they gave voice to community demands and attempted to wrest the Republic into being in their daily lives. Their demands tended to centre on improvements in infrastructure and services, such as roads, washhouses, schools or street lighting. The petitions were often framed in terms of the alleged neglect or abandonment of a neighbourhood or village, particularly when compared to the surrounding districts. Criticizing councillors for neglecting to bring certain villages into the light of scientific modernity could be a potent way for rivals to score political points by drawing on inter-town rivalries or harnessing anxieties about being left behind in the progress towards industrial modernity.⁶ The arrival of ‘Edison’s discovery’ could be a major source of local satisfaction. It was feted in Hueria de San Tirso (Mieres) with a ‘succulent banquet’, speeches and toasts.⁷ The combination of municipal councillors articulating their duty to represent their communities and the association of the Republic with progress and modernity meant that the demands presented by citizens tended to receive a sympathetic hearing.

The desire to represent the community’s interests led to municipal councils adopting a mediating role between citizens and the mining companies, for many of the demands concerned the effects of mining activities. Roads were often blocked by spoil heaps or the water supply suddenly disappeared. Republican and socialist councillors, who saw themselves as guardians and protectors of the local community’s interests, responded to complaints by groups of citizens by negotiating with the companies on the community’s behalf. Councils requested the assistance of the mining companies to mitigate the effects of the industry and contribute to improvements to infrastructure. This made sense in the light of the companies’ financial clout and the legacy of paternalism, but it was also a moral question. For socialist and Republican councillors, it was the companies who had created the problems that communities faced. In Mieres, councillors demanded that Fábrica de Mieres took responsibility for ‘depriving the local communities of water’ and reminded the company that the municipal authorities were not going to solve the problem.⁸ Councillors did not present an uncompromising attitude or seek to open up a front in the class struggle. There was nothing radical about the mediating role that they adopted. Instead, councillors, backed by citizens’ demands, attempted to maintain a fragile social contract whereby companies’ investment in infrastructure compensated for the damage industry caused to the environment of the coalfields.⁹

The Republic provided an opportunity for communities to link improvements with the wider project of Republican ‘justice’. A case from 1932 involving residents of Langreo and Laviana illustrates how defence of the community, ideas of the Republic and community justice were interlinked, and how the former could lead to frictions over the exercise of state authority. On 14 April 1932, a year after celebrating the proclamation of the Republic, residents of Sama joined politicians in the central square of the town. A jet of water spouted twenty metres into the air and was greeted with ‘delirious displays of enthusiasm’.¹⁰ The date of the inauguration was significant. It marked the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Republic, and the unveiling of the water supply formed part of the festivities held in Sama and across Spain. The Republic had delivered the town clean water via modern infrastructure. The political intent to link the supply with the regime was underlined by the fact that it was inaugurated before it was even ready. Engineers had made the ceremony possible in April, but only in July did the supply enter regular service.¹¹ The inauguration was the culmination of socialist councillor Enrique Celaya’s decades-long campaign for a new water supply. For Celaya, his campaign derived from his duty as both ‘a socialist and a citizen’. He had fulfilled the will and needs of the local community, as he had aimed to do since his election as a councillor eighteen years earlier.¹²

Construction of the new supply had not been without problems. The source of the water lay in Laviana and there had been friction between the councils since work on the pipeline began in 1930. Simmering tensions boiled over in early 1932. Civil guards had to be deployed to protect the construction workers and a strike was called in Laviana in protest.¹³ Twenty-three diverse organizations from Laviana, encompassing shopkeepers, socialist and anarchist groups, the Ateneo and musicians, united to send a telegram to the minister of the interior demanding that he remove the civil governor (his representative in the province), who bore responsibility for public order. The defence of community assets brought diverse associations and political groups together in an impassioned defence of a resource that they believed belonged to the local community. They should be justly compensated for access to a resource that was their inheritance as Laviana residents and they appealed to the government to recognize and negotiate with the local community as an entity in its own right. Their protest was motivated in particular by the deployment of the Civil Guard, a move they considered completely unwarranted.¹⁴

Municipal authorities were not simply a channel for responding to demands, arenas for party political squabbles or bureaucratic mechanisms for managing construction permits or local taxes. Councillors also assumed a proactive role in constructing the new Republic, which could even mean pushing the boundaries of legality, as occurred in the case of cemeteries. Burial grounds and funeral processions had long been a contentious issue and a focal point for Republican and anticlerical agitation prior to 1931. There were three kinds of cemetery in Spain in 1931: municipal, parish and private. While municipal cemeteries were notionally under public control, keys were usually in the hands of the parish priest, who controlled whether bodies were buried in the Catholic or civil area – the latter commonly a small, badly kempt zone adjoining the Catholic cemetery. Yet prior to the approval of a clear legal framework to deal with municipal and parish cemeteries in 1932, municipal authorities, emboldened by the publication of a bill to secularize parish cemeteries, removed the walls between Catholic and civil cemeteries in places that included Cuenca, Zaragoza and Barcelona. The council in Langreo ordered the removal of the wall between the Catholic and civil areas of the municipal cemetery even earlier – in October 1931 – after the parliamentary debate on the articles relating to religion in the Constitution, but prior to the publication of the cemetery bill in December. Enthusiasm for building the Republic was such that authorities enacted legislation faster than legislators worked, although councillors were careful to flex their muscles regarding municipal cemeteries rather than Church property. Tearing down the wall was a barometer of the progress of the Republican project. By removing barriers, they symbolically emancipated the dead.¹⁵

The secularization of public life across the country extended to the substitution of religious street names in favour of a nomenclature invoking the Republic, freedom, the Republican martyrs of the December 1930 rising, or even Karl Marx.¹⁶ Councils also attempted to tax church bells, as occurred in Langreo, although the decision was overturned.¹⁷ Even so, the self-appointed secularizing missions of municipal authorities were not an immediate frontal onslaught of the Church at the local level. Religious education and the display of religious images were no longer compulsory in primary schools from May 1931, but little changed in the Asturian coalfields despite the power Republicans and socialists wielded on municipal councils. Religious images initially removed from schools in Mieres were reinstated by October and religious education continued, while in Aller it simply moved to the end of the school day.¹⁸ This relative moderation in 1931 was the result both of a Republic that was still in the process of being defined and of municipal authorities that sought to balance the competing demands of different constituencies. The implementation and struggles over secularizing policy would be a critical factor in radicalization in 1932, as left-wing activists became increasingly frustrated at the lack of a tangible secular Republic in their everyday lives.

The politics of labour

Petitioning the municipal authorities was a common form of collective action in the 1930s, but the pre-eminent tool of working class political practice was the strike. Asturias – and the coal valleys in particular – was a hotspot for labour conflict during the Second Republic. The province led the country in total number of strikes in 1932 and 1933 and in the number of strikers in 1932.¹⁹ Strike action was a rich phenomenon; the workforce and the unions differed in their interpretations of what it meant and how it should be employed.

There were different kinds of stoppage in the coalfields during the 1930s. A fatal accident in a pit sparked an automatic stoppage as a collective gesture of mourning (and a chance to investigate the cause). Other spontaneous stoppages were quite different; workers downed tools in a wildcat strike if wages went unpaid or they considered a disciplinary action taken by foremen or the employer to be unjust.²⁰ Such strikes were not under union control and differed from planned strikes, which were officially declared with a list of demands and usually involved a union. Strikes were also accompanied by a range of ritualized activities, including propagandizing missions in the streets, articles in the press to win the battle for public opinion, and raising strike funds by visiting other places of work on payday.²¹

At the level of union ideology and strategy, there was a clear difference between the UGT and the CNT. The UGT placed its faith in the state. Socialist moderation and reformism focused on growing the UGT as an organization and using the state to do so; this had been the strategy followed by Largo Caballero during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and it continued under the Republic with Largo Caballero now minister of labour.²² The ‘mixed juries’ introduced by Largo Caballero – a new iteration of the 1920s arbitration committees – were intended to channel demands through the mechanisms of the state, thereby tying the masses to the system and increasing socialist prestige by growing the movement and confirming the efficacy of socialist strategy. The socialist position at the beginning of the Republic was thus to eschew strike action.

Cleaving the masses to the Republican system was also a way to undermine the CNT. The anarchist principles of the CNT meant that they preferred direct action, placing their faith in workers’ collective strength to force an employer’s hand, rather than channelling their demands through the state. Yet anarchists’ rejection of arbitration committees and preference for direct action did not preclude mediation. During a lengthy conflict at the Fondón pit in autumn 1932, striking anarchists were willing to negotiate via the mayor and civil governor; indeed, it was the former who found the solution to the strike.²³ As occurred elsewhere in Spain, the role of the mayor as a mediator was often central to the resolution of labour conflicts.²⁴ However, the 1932 Law of Associations made this task difficult, as it forced anarchist associations to seek legal authorization in order to operate. During a nine-month strike at the Duro-Felguera steelworks between 1932 and 1933, councillors were unable to mediate in a dispute between the CNT and the company because the civil governor refused to allow them to do so unless anarchists followed the requirements of the Law.²⁵

The first major strike of the Republic exemplified the differences between the socialists and anarchists and constituted the most important struggle between the SUM and the SOMA for hegemony over the workforce during the Republic. The root of the strike lay in a desire for the reinstatement of the seven-hour working day in the mines. The SUM called for its immediate, direct implementation while the socialists preferred government mediation. The SUM prepared a general strike for June 1931, which the SOMA criticized as an attack on the Republic. This set the scene for a test of their respective strength and influence at the beginning of the new regime. As a general strike, the stoppage failed. On the first day, 7,000 mineworkers followed the SUM’s call to down tools while 20,000 entered the pits. The conflict became deadlocked. In an attempt to extend the strike, SUM activists engaged in sabotage, and shootouts occurred between strikers and those still working.²⁶ The strike did not result in a clear victory or defeat for either socialists or anarchists. The SUM failed to achieve the immediate re-introduction of the shorter working day and at the end of the summer Largo Caballero, the socialist minister of labour, decided to impose it by decree.²⁷

The June strike was exceptional for its scale – as conflicts in 1931 tended to be localized and short – but not for its objectives. Improving working conditions and increasing wages tended to be the focal point of workers’ demands during the first year of the Republic, but as the economic situation evolved, so did the nature of the demands. From the beginning of 1932, the coalfields faced significant economic problems, which companies blamed on the high levels of unsold coal stocks, wage increases, the seven-hour day and the cost of Republican labour legislation, including holidays. A small number of mining companies closed or went bankrupt, including El Caudal, which owed its workers five months’ wages, and Hulleras de Riosa, which left 800 unemployed.²⁸ Others implemented short-time working and reduced piecework rates.²⁹ These were the first symptoms of problems that plagued the industry during the second half of 1932 and throughout 1933.

The SOMA hierarchy constantly exhorted its members not to strike in accordance with the socialist strategy of avoiding strike action so as not to undermine the Republic. Yet the socialist rank and file consistently went on strike in 1931 and 1932. On one occasion, a strike in Barredos (Laviana) was actually called by the local SOMA section, while on another, mineworkers refused to enter the Sotón mine in protest at accidents, a decision which was praised by a SUM official because it defied the exhortations of the SOMA officials.³⁰ SOMA leaders attributed such strikes to the ‘spirit of youth’, ‘irresponsible elements’ or ‘people of little or no responsibility’, who spread ‘confusion’ and deceived the rank and file.³¹ Socialist officials thus recognized that socialists did go on strike, even as they reinforced the anti-strike message and the self-image of socialists as moderate and sensible in their politics. In fact, the SOMA leadership had already shown concern at the prospect of rank-and-file militancy. At the SOMA congress in May 1931, the Executive Committee modified the union’s statutes in an attempt to restrict the ability of local sections to call strikes. In theory, they could no longer do so.³²

The unintended consequence of the SOMA’s anti-strike attitude was to encourage strike action. For socialists, strike action could be an expression of support for the Republic as mineworkers attempted to press for the social justice associated with the regime through higher wages, better working conditions and an assertion of working-class power. Condemnation of the rank and file for striking did not prevent SOMA officials intervening in disputes. Rather, the union quickly involved itself in strikes in order to accelerate their resolution.³³ Paradoxically, the combination of a socialist at the helm of the ministry of labour, the arbitration mechanisms fashioned by this ministry, and a socialist desire to avoid strikes, created the ideal opportunity for strike action.

The strike was the quintessential tool of political practice in the coalfields, but not everyone could strike. Across the country, unemployment was an increasingly pressing issue.³⁴ Unemployed workers in Oviedo and the coalfields held meetings and organized demonstrations in 1931 demanding ‘bread and work’, and in early 1932 a commission of women petitioned the municipal council in Aller to find work for the former employees of El Caudal.³⁵ These demands were targeted at the municipal authorities, which, along with the provincial deputation, organized public works that were the traditional solution to unemployment. Under the Republic, the ministry of labour also tasked councils with creating local labour exchanges to aid the placement of unemployed workers. Public works were initially forthcoming, but councils soon ran out of funding. The council in Mieres did not renew the contracts of its labourers and in Oviedo public works halted. Over 200 workers from the 250-strong workforce of temporary workers were laid off.³⁶ The acuteness of the situation was compounded by a rise in the price of bread to its peak in 1932, sparking protests in Mieres and further afield.³⁷

One solution to unemployment and rising prices was to labour illegally. The case of the chamiceros, who extracted coal from surface mines [chamizos] on mining companies’ property, provides an insight into how mineworkers imagined the local economy. In the summer of 1932, the Civil Guard increasingly harassed a number of chamiceros operating in San Martín del Rey Aurelio, with some cases ending up in court.³⁸ The chamiceros responded by organizing assemblies and electing a committee to defend their interests, with which the socialist-led council refused to engage, despite there being a socialist member on the otherwise Communist-dominated committee.³⁹ The chamiceros offered a solution to the problem they themselves posed. They offered to sell the coal they mined to the company for an agreed fee.⁴⁰ In essence, they sought to formalize their activities such that they would be, in effect, freelance workers.

The chamiceros’ solution was underpinned by a particular notion of a moral economy at the local level.⁴¹ In the face of material urgency, they argued that the market should be remoulded in order to afford an equitable distribution of work for miners. The imperative of employment justified the chamericeros’ infringement of property rights. This was a moral economy in its broadest sense of attempting to change the priority of the market to the employment of local workers over the profit margins of businesses. There was a moral and economic imperative to make the best use of natural resources for the collective good of the local community. The chamiceros demanded the social justice promised by the Republic, whether sincerely or, from a Communist position, in an attempt to place the authorities under pressure using maximalist demands to unmask the bourgeois nature of the Republic. In any case, there was little radical in how the chamiceros acted. They attempted to reach a negotiated settlement that did not fundamentally disturb the relationship between capital and labour. Rather than socializing the means of production, they were willing to pay the mining company a fee for the right to mine coal.⁴² For the mining companies, however, it was an attack on their right to manage their property as they wished.

The underlying logic in the moral economy of the chamiceros paralleled practices in rural areas in other parts of Spain where peasants undertook agricultural tasks without the consent of the landowner and demanded payment afterwards.⁴³ From autumn 1931, these incidents increased, with ‘[a] n astonishing number of occupations and “illegal cultivations” of properties [taking] place in provinces such as Huesca and Teruel’. In Puebla de Valverde (Teruel), groups entered an estate and ploughed the land, cut trees and collected wood. They stopped when the mayor appeared, ‘on condition that the authorities agreed to obtain the title deeds from the proprietor, as the locals believed that the village had a rightful collective claim to the property’.⁴⁴ Sometimes the demands were more radical, as citizens opened up a new front in decades-long local conflicts over the sale and privatization of common land. This distinguishes the cases of the land invasions from the chamiceros, even if both formed part of a longer tradition of transgressive actions that reordered the market in line with a local understanding of a moral economy.⁴⁵

Cases of poverty-stricken workers undertaking direct action to gain food were not unheard of in interwar Europe and consumer protests were particularly in evidence at the end of the First World War. In Weimar Germany, hungry citizens engaged in direct action during periods of economic distress, such as forcing the ‘sale of foodstuffs at lower prices’ during the early 1920s or plundering fields during the Great Depression.⁴⁶ Therein lies a key difference between Germany and Spain. Spanish agricultural workers operated in the favourable political and legal context offered by the Republic, rather than the crises of the early 1920s and the Depression. Under the Republic, ‘for the first time the balance of legal rights swung away from landowners to the rural proletariat’.⁴⁷ Invading estates responded to hunger and a desire for land, but also the opportunities opened up by the creation of the Republic.

The solution proposed by the chamiceros was not the only one sought by workers within the existing framework of capitalist relations in the coalfields. As the coal companies struggled with falling demand for coal, workforces proposed collective contracts to avoid the closure of mines.⁴⁸ Under collective contracts, mineworkers took charge of the labour and extraction process and sold the coal back to the company. Such a solution located industry’s woes in the organization of production rather than market forces. Removing the company’s representatives – the foremen and deputies – would allegedly resolve the company’s economic problems. As with the chamiceros, there was little militant in these proposals. Instead, rank-and-file discontent at the SOMA’s response to the problems in the coal industry would give rise to radicalism in labour matters at the end of 1932.

Property

Trespassing onto private property in times of economic need, whether to extract coal or plough land, was not the only way in which property was at the centre of conflict during the 1930s. The distribution of land was one of the central preoccupations of the Republican–socialist government. The nature of agricultural property and farming practices in Spain meant there were a large number of landless labourers on the latifundia of the south, who struggled to subsist thanks to seasonal underemployment and low wages. The Republican–socialist government planned a substantial land reform for fourteen provinces across Extremadura, Castile, Andalusia and La Mancha, in which land would be subject to compulsory purchase and distributed to peasants. The September 1932 law was limited in practice and by the end of 1933, only 4,399 families had settled on 24,203 hectares of land.⁴⁹ Spain was not the only European country to enact land reform ‘to bolster … legitimacy and stave off social unrest’, nor was it the only one to fail. In eastern Europe, the Baltic and the Balkans, governments failed to address ‘the power and influence of large [land]owners’ or ‘establish a group of moderately prosperous peasants who would have been the lynchpins of social and political stability’.⁵⁰

Access to land was one facet of the struggle for property. A further problem was posed by housing. Housing shortages had long been a problem in cities and industrial areas across Europe, from the Ruhr industrial region to Barcelona, where housing was insalubrious and overcrowded.⁵¹ In Europe, the lack of housing became particularly acute at the end of the First World War, thanks to a number of factors, including migration to the cities, the removal of rent controls, lack of construction during the war and an increase in marriages in its aftermath.⁵² In Asturias, the quality and adequate supply of homes was a long-running issue.⁵³ The Jesuit Sisinio Nevares heaped praise on the SHE for the homes it built in Aller, but the thirty-three ‘cuarteles’ containing 465 dwellings and the fifty ‘single-family houses’ were clearly insufficient for 4,000 miners.⁵⁴ The situation was so desperate that those who migrated to the coalfields to work had to sleep in barns and hórreos (traditional Asturian granaries).⁵⁵

During the Republic, discontent and agitation over housing in the coalfields centred on rent, rather than the supply or quality of housing stock. Struggles over rent occurred across Spain during the first year of the Republic, including in Barcelona, Huelva, Cádiz and Seville. In the Catalan capital, agitation against rents had surfaced prior to the Republic and, under the stewardship of anarchist activists, mushroomed into a strike in the summer of 1931.⁵⁶ The dynamic was different in the Asturian coalfields, where there was no strike but a significant wave of activism in 1932 that emerged in response to a government decree in December 1931. The new legislation allowed tenants to petition for a reduction in rent. Tenants’ leagues (Ligas de inquilinos) emerged in the coalfields – as they did across the country – to press for reductions.⁵⁷ Some of the leagues predated the Republic, such as in Oviedo and Gijón, but the new political context facilitated their creation and growth. By May 1932 an Asturian regional federation had been formed, with the participation of seven coalfield leagues (Turón, Boo, Moreda, Pola de Lena, Mieres, Sama, Laviana), along with Trubia, Gijón and Avilés.⁵⁸ The coalfield leagues featured prominent socialist involvement and were often based at the local Casa del Pueblo. The speedy organization of the leagues, along with the mobilization and results they achieved cannot be understood without a look at the pre-existing traditions of community activism and organizational frameworks in the coalfields.

The leagues provided a new vehicle for citizens to fight for the social justice they identified with the Republic. As banners held aloft by demonstrating members of the league from Muros del Nalón, a town near the coast, proclaimed: ‘We demand justice’ and ‘The law must be fulfilled’.⁵⁹ Activism in Asturias attempted to exploit the opening provided by legislation in contrast to protests against evictions in post-First World War Paris or the Communist-organized rent strike in 1930s Germany, which were defensive reactions to a quickly deteriorating economic situation.⁶⁰

Women played a prominent role in rent activism both as organizers and as a target for support. At league meetings in Trubia and Oviedo most of the audience was made up of women and two women were appointed to a neighbourhood committee in the provincial capital.⁶¹ In Aller and Trubia, organizers spoke in the name of and appealed to working-class mothers: ‘As women, as proletarian mothers, it hurts us to see our children barefoot and poorly fed because of the excessive RENT THAT WE PAY [sic]’.⁶² Women’s activism drew on pre-existing traditions of women mobilizing at the local level in defence of community-based justice.⁶³ Nevertheless, orators at meetings were men, reflecting male predominance in positions of power in local politics.

Whereas CNT activists in Barcelona favoured direct action due to their lack of ‘faith in Republicans’ and the ‘notoriously intransigent landlord class’, coalfield leagues instead emphasized their desire for the harmonious conciliation of interests through reaching ‘friendly’ agreements between tenants and property owners.⁶⁴ The league in Mieres declared its pride at having negotiated lower rents while maintaining good relationships with the owners. They preferred to channel tenants’ demands through the courts if an agreement was not possible. The league in Aller took pride in having ‘triumphed in every case dealt with by the justice system’.⁶⁵

If the leagues were moderate in practice, the language was often bullish and asserted the collective power of the working class. The league in Mieres scoffed at landlords who ‘badly counselled … think justice will not be done’ and warned that the league would make sure that it was.⁶⁶ The problem lay in the fact that reaching ‘friendly’ agreements was not easy. Landlords defended their interests and even fuelled conflict by evicting tenants or raising rents.⁶⁷ Tensions ran high in some areas. One league leader was arrested in Pola de Laviana for punching a landlord who had insulted him. The landlord in question was accused of refusing to respect both the legislation and the ‘correct instructions’ of the league. Instead, he had announced an increase in rents. The league protested at the arrest by gathering outside prison before assembling in front of the landlord’s home in a menacing manner. The landlord took refuge in the home of the socialist deputy mayor. Ironically, it was the secretary of the tenants’ league who protected the landlord from the crowd by personally escorting him home.⁶⁸

Rent activism was an arena in which citizens – and women in particular – mobilized to construct the justice they associated with the Republic in their everyday lives, through their own actions. For landlords, the wave of requests for rent reduction could be symptomatic of how the Republic meddled in their affairs and destabilized the traditional social order. Resistance to rent reduction meant that tenants also became very aware of the limits of Republican reform. In 1932, tenant activism was moderate and conciliatory rather than radical, although disputes over rents would become increasingly bitter over the next couple of years.

Governance

The state was a key actor in the dynamics of conflict. It did not exist as a monolithic entity, but a network of channels and institutions, formed by different layers of administrative responsibility and power.⁶⁹ The policing of society lay in the hands of multiple levels of the state, including the mayor as the immediate authority at the local level, the civil governor (the government’s delegate in the province) and the state security forces themselves. The Spanish state security force’s actions played a key role in the dynamics of collective action. The state security forces were often an agent that escalated protest to the point of violence, thanks to the particular political culture and training of the security forces, even as they attempted to uphold law and order.⁷⁰

Historically, the Spanish left had had an uneasy relationship with the principal arm of law enforcement, the Civil Guard, which had been created in 1844 as a rural gendarmerie to deal with brigandage. The Civil Guard was not well equipped to police mass protests and strikes, even as it was increasingly called upon to do so. Far from neighbourhood police officers, civil guards were stationed in municipalities away from their place of origin and housed in barracks with their families that were isolated from the community, although they often maintained ties with the local elite.⁷¹ In the Asturian coalfields, the SHE had paid for the construction of Civil Guard barracks and many company security guards were ex-civil guards.⁷²

The corps itself cultivated a strong sense of ‘honour’ and closely identified with its mission to protect the patria and the social order, which was imagined in terms of traditional social hierarchies.⁷³ The Civil Guard had not been willing to intervene to prevent the fall of the monarchy, but there was nevertheless ‘an underlying sensation that the corps was incompatible with the new political order’ due to its ‘ultraconservative’ mentality.⁷⁴ At the beginning of the Republic, the Mieres municipal council agreed to solicit the dismissal of civil guards stationed in the district for their ‘many crimes’ and to draft regulations for a new ‘republican guard’ with a ‘civic character’.⁷⁵ There was also an immediate campaign in Asturias for the removal of Lisardo Doval, a Civil Guard commander in the province, for the torture and mistreatment of prisoners during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. At the first council meeting in Gijón, councillors agreed to demand his transfer out of the province – a move that was supported by a motion from their counterparts in Mieres – and they later organized a commission to collect denunciations of Doval’s conduct. The provincial press published a flurry of letters denouncing his behaviour or else springing to his defence.⁷⁶ Doval was removed from Asturias, but he would return to direct the police operation in the province after the revolutionary insurrection.

The government had recognized the potential problems posed by the Civil Guard at the beginning of the Republic, but had little choice but to rely on it. Tentative plans for a people’s ‘civic guard’ were finally shelved in favour of creating a new corps – the Assault Guard – to supplement the Civil Guard.⁷⁷ Envisaged as a more modern force for policing urban disorder that would show ‘hardness without brutality’, the Assault Guard was modelled on other European forces, including the German Schutzpolizei and the French Garde Republicaine Mobile. Assault guards operated in squads, as opposed to in pairs, were trained in crowd control and armed with truncheons and machine pistols. Despite the prestige and money invested in the Assault Guard – who numbered 12,000 by the end of 1932 – they failed to offer a fundamentally different policing strategy to the Civil Guard.⁷⁸ The government also developed legislative measures to protect the Republic, namely the Law for the Defence of the Republic that was promulgated in October 1931. The law authorized restrictions on civil liberties in order to defend the constitutional order. Over the next couple of years – before the Law of Public Order replaced it in July 1933 – the law was deployed against those agitating against the Republic, including the conspiring monarchist right and the rebellious left, particularly the anarchist movement.⁷⁹

The policing of Spanish society in the new Republic constituted a thorny matter for the state, as underlined by a number of violent clashes that occurred between the security forces and crowds at the end of 1931 and beginning of 1932. While these episodes did not happen in Asturias, they are important for what they reveal about the exercise of state power at the local level in Spain in the 1930s. The most emblematic occurred in Castilblanco and Arnedo. In both cases violence erupted when security forces attempted to break up a demonstration. In Castilblanco, a remote, poverty-stricken village of 3,000 inhabitants located in Badajoz province, socialist-authorized marches took place on 30 and 31 December 1931 in the context of a strike. When the mayor ordered the dissolution of the demonstration, a tussle led to a shot being fired by the four civil guards present which killed a member of the crowd. Demonstrators jumped on the guards, beat them to death, mutilated them and destroyed their weapons.⁸⁰ Days later, on 5 Januaury – and before public consternation had receded – civil guards opened fire on demonstrators in Arnedo, in La Rioja province. There had been a lengthy prelude to this, consisting of friction between Faustino Muro (a shoe factory owner), workers and trade unionists in 1931. Muro had encouraged votes for the monarchist slate in the April municipal elections and sacked workers for political reasons. After the proclamation of the Republic, workers had repeatedly protested about the working conditions and dismissals at his factory. An arbitration committee found in the workers’ favour, but Muro refused to acknowledge the ruling. The sacking of a worker led to a general strike in January 1932. A peaceful demonstration was held in the town to celebrate an agreement reached between governor, socialists and local bosses. The shouting, dancing protestors converged on the main square. A shot was fired wounding a civil guard, and his fellow guards opened fire without warning. Eleven were killed and thirty injured, from a one-year-old child to a man in his sixties.⁸¹

The violence in Castilblanco and Arnedo contributed twelve of the 103 deaths caused by the Civil Guard between 14 April 1931 and 5 January 1932.⁸² Explanations of these episodes tend to focus on two factors. First, the culture of the Civil Guard, namely its rigidity and emphasis on upholding its honour and the unsuitability of its weaponry for crowd control.⁸³ Second, the rapid politicization of rural areas that posed a challenge to municipal and provincial authorities in managing competing interests and demands at the local level. In many areas of Spain, councillors who had never exercised political power before occupied council chambers. This dramatic shift in municipal politics, particularly in rural areas, coupled with the massive growth in unionization translated into a formal politicization of towns and villages across the country. As new forms of politics and a new balance of power emerged in the countryside due to the politicization engendered by the Republic, rural elites responded with force.⁸⁴

In narratives of the Second Republic, episodes like Castilblanco and Arnedo often appear as localized phenomena that punctuated national political life. Such a view overlooks the tensions over state power at the local level and the importance of community as a framework for making sense of political developments and as a framework for action. The strength of feeling invested in the local community combined with the historically weak articulation of the Spanish state meant that local communities tended towards ‘self-policing’ or self-governance. This extended beyond remote areas of Badajoz. As a socialist councillor in Langreo said when discussing a proposal for the council to stop paying the Civil Guard’s telephone bill: ‘[we] socialists are those who need the Civil Guard the least’.⁸⁵ In a similar manner, when the different organizations in Laviana united to telegram the government to protest against the construction of the water supply in early 1932, they singled out the deployment of the Civil Guard for particular criticism. They expressed indignation in the name of the community at the threat of force. The government was acting in a ‘dictatorial’ manner that was completely unwarranted.⁸⁶ Over the coming years, this principle would be asserted even more strongly. While the socialists believed in participating in the state and using the levers of state power to implement reform, this could coexist with traditions of the self-policing pueblo at the local level. The following years saw frequent assertions that the local left could better police public order, and this rhetoric turned into reality, as the coexistence of the state security forces and the left became increasingly difficult in the coalfields.

Such uneasiness, if not opposition, at what was considered to be the intrusion of the state into working-class communities was a sentiment not limited to the coalfields or Spain. In Berlin, residents of working-class districts ‘universally’ regarded police with ‘suspicion’.⁸⁷ In the Ruhr and South Wales, cuts in welfare or intrusion into the family home to assess a family’s claim to benefit payments triggered a ‘rising cycle of protest’, exacerbated by mass unemployment in these industrial areas.⁸⁸ The state was an active player in the unfolding dynamics of protest. In Spain, the promise of Republican justice and corresponding investment of moral authority in the state meant that allegations of ‘betrayal’ by agents of the state were keenly felt, particularly in 1934. This was not just a question of Republican reform, but also a dispute over the reach and exercise of state power.

The construction of the Republic at a local level occurred through the interaction of pressure from competing interest groups, administration of laws and orders emanating from Madrid by the municipal authorities, and oversight and policing from the civil governor and Civil and Assault Guard. Between 1931 and 1932, the Asturian coalfields saw increasing agitation as citizens and residents seized the opportunity to assert the interests of their community and other groups with whom they identified. The Asturian coalfields proved to be an area with a high capacity for organization and struggle, thanks to the political traditions forged over many years and, in particular, the dense network of political and union institutions, such as Casas de Pueblo and neighbourhood associations. These institutions and associations were foundations for projecting claims about the community.

There were moments of tension in strikes, tenant activism and over the actions of the police forces, but there was little radicalism in these episodes. Radicalism emerged from friction between rival groups on the left and the cleavage between left and right as moulded by the context of the Republic, namely the way it reconfigured the place of religion in Spanish society. If the classic view proposes that radicalization was a frustrated response to employer and right-wing intransigence in the face of Republican reform, the story requires greater sensitivity to the shifting political context of the Republic during the 1930s, as well as the dynamics of politics at the local level.

______________

¹ La Voz de Asturias, 16 Apr. 1931; El Noroeste, 16, 17 Apr. 1931.

² Josefa was acquitted and was greeted by applause on leaving the courthouse. N. Aresti, ‘El crimen de Trubia: género, discursos y ciudadanía republicana’, Ayer, lxi (2006), 261–85.

³ R. Cruz, Protestar en España (Madrid, 2015), p. 18.

⁴ See T. Kaplan, Red City, Blue Period: Social Movements in Picasso’s Barcelona (Berkeley, Calif., 1992) and P. Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War: the Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge, 1996).

⁵ Avance, 14 Jan. 1932. Councillors in Aller were inundated with demands by July 1931 (La Aurora Social, 10 July 1931).

⁶ E.g. El Noroeste, 30 Jan. 1932.

⁷ El Noroeste, 4 Aug. 1931.

⁸ Archivo de Mieres (AM), Actas municipales, 8 Aug. 1931 to 10 March 1932, fo. 4.

⁹ E.g. Archivo de Langreo (AL), Actas municipales, 29 Jan. 1931 to 10 Sept. 1931, fo. 62; Archivo de Aller (AA), Actas municipales, 2 Oct. 1930 to 3 Oct. 1931, fos. 184–5.

¹⁰ Avance, 15 Apr. 1932.

¹¹ El Noroeste, 1 July 1932.

¹² Avance, 15 Apr. 1932. See also the interview with Celaya, Avance, 23 July 1932.

¹³ Región, 15, 16 March 1932; Avance, 15 March 1932. A. Fernández García, Langreo: industria, población y desarrollo urbano (Gijón, 1980), pp. 266–7; A. R. Felgueroso Durán and A. Fernández García, ‘La gestión de los socialistas en el Ayuntamiento de Langreo entre 1909 y 1936’, in Historia del socialismo en Langreo 1897–1997, ed. A. Fernández García and J. Girón (Gijón, 1997), pp. 168–9.

¹⁴ Telegram from Laviana to the minister of the interior, 14 March 1932, Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Gobernación (A), folder 7A, file 19.

¹⁵ For a detailed discussion, see M. Kerry, ‘The bones of contention: culture wars and the secularisation of cemeteries and death practices in the Spanish Second Republic’, European History Quarterly, xlix (2019), 73–95. For details of Barcelona, see ABC, 8 Dec. 1931. For background, see J. Jiménez Lozano, Los cementerios civiles y la heterodoxia española (Barcelona, 2008 [1978]) and M. Martorell Linares, ‘“The cruellest of all forms of coercion”: the Catholic Church and conflicts around death and burial in Spain during the Restoration (1874–1923)’, European History Quarterly, xlvii (2017), 657–78.

¹⁶ E.g. J. M. Macarro Vera, Socialismo, República y revolución en Andalucía (1931–1936) (Seville, 2000), p. 250; A. L. López Villaverde, El gorro frigio y la mitra frente a frente: construcción y diversidad territorial del conflicto político-religioso en la España republicana (n.p., 2008), p. 204; M. Thomas, The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931–1936 (Eastbourne, 2013), p. 52.

¹⁷ AL, Actas, 24 Dec. 1932 to 30 Sept. 1933, fos. 9, 95. For Aragón, see M. P. Salomón Chéliz, Anticlericalismo en Aragón. Protesta popular y movilización cívica (1900 – 1939) (Zaragoza, 2002), pp. 356–9.

¹⁸ El Noroeste, 21 Oct. 1931. See also M. del M. Pozo Andrés and B. Hortañón González, ‘El laicismo en la escuela pública’, in Laicismo y catolicismo: el conflicto político-religioso en la Segunda República, ed. J. de la Cueva Merino and F. Montero García (Alcalá de Henares, 2009), pp. 296–7.

¹⁹ A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution in Spain: the Coal Miners of Asturias, 1860–1934 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), p. 149.

²⁰ For a similar desire to assert control of the labour process in Wales, see L. James, The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: the Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890–1926 (Manchester, 2008), p. 27.

²¹ For different forms of stoppage, see R. Church and Q. Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1889–1966 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 10–13.

²² See P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London, 1978), pp. 7–9 and J. Aróstegui, Largo Caballero: el tesón y la quimera (Barcelona, 2013), pp. 259–99.

²³ M. Castejón Rodríguez, ‘La patronal hullera asturiana en la Segunda República’ (unpublished UNED PhD thesis, 2009), pp. 380–1.

²⁴ F. Cobo Romero, De campesinos a electores: modernización agraria en Andalucía, politización campesina y derechización de los pequeños propietarios y arrendatarios: el caso de la provincia de Jaén, 1931–1936 (Madrid, 2003), p. 225.

²⁵ Negotiations were also hamstrung by Duro-Felguera’s intransigence (Región, 25 Feb., 26 Apr. 1933).

²⁶ Telegram from the civil governor to the minister of the interior, 1 June 1931, AHN, Gobernación (A), folder 7A, file 7; El Noroeste, 3, 5, 11 June 1931; La Aurora Social, 5 June 1931.

²⁷ El Noroeste, 27, 29 Aug. 1931; Castejón Rodríguez, ‘La patronal’, p. 351.

²⁸ Avance, 3, 17 Jan., 19 Feb., 14 Apr. 1932; Región, 10 May 1932.

²⁹ Región, 19, 20 Feb. 1932.

³⁰ El Noroeste, 1, 3, 15 July 1931.

³¹ Avance, 10, 11 May, 7 Sept. 1932.

³² Región, 8 May 1931; Shubert, Road, pp. 143–4; El Noroeste, 26 May 1931.

³³ E.g. conflicts at the Llamas and Mariana pits and in Olloniego (La Aurora Social, 6 Nov. 1931; Avance, 20 Nov., 4, 5, 6, 13 Dec. 1931).

³⁴ Interwar unemployment in Europe has been the subject of a recent wave of scholarship, e.g., M. Perry, Prisoners of Want: the Experience and Protest of the Unemployed in France, 1921 – 1945 (Aldershot, 2007) and Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention, ed. M. Reiss and M. Perry (Oxford, 2011).

³⁵ E.g. Región, 28 Apr. 1931; El Noroeste, 30 July 1931; letter from Aurora García (and others) to the municipal council of Aller, 19 June 1932, AA, box 532, folder: Asuntos obreros 1932; Avance, 3 Jan. 1932.

³⁶ C. Benito del Pozo, El ayuntamiento republicano de Oviedo, 1931 – 1936 (Oviedo, 1989), pp. 88–9; El Noroeste, 22 July 1932.

³⁷ Región, 30 Apr., 4 May 1932; Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil War, p. 39; J. Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain (1931–1939) (Abingdon, 2004), p. 23.

³⁸ See AHPA, AP, box 78434, files 174, 176, 177, 183 (1932).

³⁹ El Noroeste, 15 Oct. 1932; Avance, 18 Oct. 1932.

⁴⁰ Avance, 8 Oct. 1932.

⁴¹ The foundational text is E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, l (1971), 76–136.

⁴² Avance, 8 Oct. 1932.

⁴³ E.g. in Bujalance (Córdoba) (R. Cañete Marfil and F. Martínez Mejías, La Segunda República en Bujalance (1931–1936) (Córdoba, 2010), p. 177). E. Majuelo Gil traced the process in Navarra through the Republic in Luchas de clases en Navarra (1931–1936) (Pamplona, 1989).

⁴⁴ Casanova, Anarchism, pp. 21–2.

⁴⁵ See P. Radcliff, ‘Women’s politics: consumer riots in twentieth-century Spain’, in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. V. Lorée Enders and P. Radcliff (New York, 1999), pp. 301–23.

⁴⁶ Schumann argued these acts were simply direct action prompted by material need rather than necessitating an explication based on sophisticated notions of a moral economy (D. Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (New York, 2012), pp. 11–4, 238–9).

⁴⁷ E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 1970), p. 170.

⁴⁸ E.g. at Industrial Asturiana (Avance, 13, 21 Sept. 1932); Carmona mine in Mieres (Avance, 13 May 1932).

⁴⁹ Malefakis, Agrarian reform, p. 281. For recent reflections, see J. Carmona, J. R. Rosés and J. Simpson, ‘The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932’, Economic History Review, lxxii (2019), 669–90.

⁵⁰ L. Boswell, ‘Rural society in crisis’, in The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914– 1945, ed. N. Doumanis (Oxford, 2016), p. 253.

⁵¹ J. R. Shearer, ‘Shelter from the storm: politics, production and the housing crisis in the Ruhr coal fields, 1918–24’, Journal of Contemporary History, xxxiv (1999), 19–47; C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Abingdon, 2005), p. 5.

⁵² For Vienna and Paris, see H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991), pp. 45–73 and T. Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 36–48, 193–212. For Berlin, see E. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communist Party and Political Violence, 1929 – 1933 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 10–11.

⁵³ See J. M. Jove y Canella, Topografía médica del concejo de San Martín del Rey Aurelio (Madrid, 1923).

⁵⁴ S. Nevares, El patrono ejemplar: una obra maestra de Acción Social (Madrid, 1936), p. 211.

⁵⁵ Fernández García, Langreo, p. 262.

⁵⁶ Ealham, Class, pp. 93–5, 100; N. Rider, ‘The practice of direct action: the Barcelona rent strike of 1931’, in For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice, ed. D. Goodway (London, 1989), pp. 88–94; Cruz, Protestar, p. 86.

⁵⁷ Gaceta de Madrid, 30 Dec. 1931. The decree was later modified (Gaceta de Madrid, 12 March, 18 June 1932). Leagues existed across Spain (e.g., see details in Noticiero de Soria, 16 June 1932).

⁵⁸ Región, 23 May 1932.

⁵⁹ La Voz de Asturias, 22 June 1932.

⁶⁰ P. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: the Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 45.

⁶¹ Avance, 15, 21 July 1932.

⁶² Avance, 10 July 1932. For the same phrasing in Trubia, see Avance, 15 July 1932. French tenants framed their demands in terms of wartime sacrifice (Stovall, Paris, p. 202).

⁶³ See Radcliff, ‘Women’s politics’, pp. 301–23 and T. Kaplan, ‘Female consciousness and collective action: the case of Barcelona, 1910–1918’, Signs, vii (1982), 545–66. For women’s prominence in Berlin rent strikes, see Swett, Neighbors, p. 45.

⁶⁴ Ealham, Class, p. 101.

⁶⁵ Avance, 1 June, 10 Oct. 1932.

⁶⁶ Avance, 1 July 1932.

⁶⁷ E.g. Avance, 28 May, 2, 10 July 1932.

⁶⁸ Avance, 2 July 1932. The league later protested at the landlords’ ‘campaign’ against the leaders (Avance, 12 July 1932).

⁶⁹ My approach to the state is influenced by M. Mann, e.g., his ‘The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms and results’, European Journal of Sociology, xxv (1984), 185–213. For a sociological perspective on the state in relation to collective action, see Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged, ed. J. M. Jasper and J. W. Duyvendak (Amsterdam, 2015).

⁷⁰ E.g. Cruz, Protestar, pp. 89–90; Casanova, Anarchism, p. 18; E. González Calleja, En nombre de la autoridad: la defensa del orden público durante la Segunda República española (1931–1936) (Granada, 2014).

⁷¹ See F. Chamberlin, ‘Honor-bound: the military culture of the Civil Guard and the political violence of the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936’ (unpublished UCSD PhD thesis, 2017).

⁷² Nevares, El patrono, pp. 29, 23.

⁷³ On these themes, see G. Blaney, ‘The Civil Guard and the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1936)’ (unpublished University of London PhD thesis, 2007) and Chamberlin, ‘Honor-bound’.

⁷⁴ Blaney, ‘Civil Guard’, pp. 105–6, 110; González Calleja, En nombre, pp. 90–1.

⁷⁵ AM, Actas, 16 May 1928 to 1 Aug. 1931, fos. 104, 112.

⁷⁶ Región, 17 Apr., 12 May 1931; AM, Actas, 16 May 1928 to 1 Aug. 1931, fo. 104; El Noroeste, 19 Apr., 2, 22 May 1931.

⁷⁷ González Calleja, En nombre, pp. 131–3.

⁷⁸ González Calleja, En nombre, pp. 140–6. On France, see J. M. Berlière, ‘The difficult construction of a “Republican” police’, in Policing Interwar Europe: Continuity, Change and Crisis, 1918–1940, ed. G. Blaney (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 14–30.

⁷⁹ Discussion in González Calleja, En nombre, pp. 190–9. On implications for the anarchists, see Ealham, Class, pp. 69–70.

⁸⁰ On Castilblanco, see M. Baumeister, ‘Castilblanco or the limits of democracy – rural protest in Spain from the Restoration monarchy to the early Second Republic’, Contemporary European History, vii (1998), 1–19; R. Trullén Floría, ‘Castilblanco como sinécdoque: el discurso contrarrevolucionario de interpretación de la Segunda República’, Historia social, lxxxiii (2015), 55–71; González Calleja, En nombre, pp. 98–105.

⁸¹ This summary is based on C. Gil Andrés, La República en la plaza: los sucesos de Arnedo de 1932 (Logroño, 2002).

⁸² Figures from González Calleja, En nombre, p. 113.

⁸³ As argued by Chamberlin, ‘Honor-bound’, particularly pp. 167–73.

⁸⁴ The dynamics also reflect longer traditions of rural revolts and riots (Baumeister, ‘Castilblanco’, pp. 11–17).

⁸⁵ AL, Actas, 17 Sept. 1931 to 21 Apr. 1932, fo. 118.

⁸⁶ Telegram from Laviana to the minister of the interior, 14 March 1932, AHN, Gobernación (A), file 7A, document 19.

⁸⁷ Swett, Neighbors, p. 215.

⁸⁸ A. Zukas, ‘Explaining unemployed protest in the Ruhr at the end of the Weimar Republic’, in Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention, ed. M. Reiss and M. Perry (Oxford, 2011), the quotation at p. 160. For Britain, see S. Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain: the Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-East England (Manchester, 2013).