Fourteen The Assassination of Calvo Sotelo

the extreme political tension of the summer of 1936 obscured the fact that the vast majority of Spaniards were leading normal lives and even spending an unusually large amount on entertainment. Movie theaters—with greater proportionate seating capacity than in any other European country—were full, and there were numerous summer festivals and special athletic events, the most unusual of which was the international “People's Olympics,” scheduled to open in Barcelona on 19 July, in antithesis to the regular Olympics being held in Berlin that summer.¹Close The People's Olympics had strong political overtones, but elsewhere millions were simply trying to enjoy themselves and to forget political and social strife.

The final and conclusive round of violence began in Madrid on 2 July, when JSU gunmen fired on a bar frequented by Falangists, killing two Falangist students plus a third customer. On the following night, Falangist gunmen sprayed with gunfire a group of workers leaving a neighborhood Casa del Pueblo, killing two UGT workers and seriously wounding others. One day later two corpses were discovered outside the city. The first was identified as that of an eighteen-year-old student and son of a local businessman, not a Falangist but a friend of Falangists, who had evidently been held prisoner for several days and then shot. The second was that of a thirty-year-old retired infantry officer, either a member or sympathizer of the Falange, who had been kidnapped and stabbed thirty-three times. The government responded, as usual, not with a vigorous search for the perpetrators but with further arrests of Falangists, as though they were responsible for killing their own members and sympathizers. During the next three days it announced the arrests of 300 Falangists and rightists in Madrid province alone, though as usual no Socialists were arrested.²Close Any pretense of reconciliation had long since been abandoned, and the government's policy seemed to be to try to push the right ever further until the latter either surrendered completely or came out in a revolt that could be directly repressed.

The climactic events took place that weekend. At about 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, 12 July, the Assault Guard officer José del Castillo was shot and killed on a street in central Madrid en route to reporting for duty on the night shift. Castillo was a former army officer and ardent Socialist who had transferred to the Assault Guards and then been arrested for his mutinous participation in the insurrection of 1934, in which he was to have helped seize the Ministry of the Interior. The Azaña government had reassigned him to active service, and he had distinguished himself for his zeal in repressing rightists, having severely wounded a young Carlist during the mayhem of 16 April, as well as having engaged in various actions against Falangists. A militant of the UMRA and a leader in the Socialist militia, he apparently also helped to train the Communist MAOC on Sunday afternoons, and had for some time been a marked man.³Close

His killing immediately provoked intense reactions among his comrades in the UMRA, Assault Guards, and Socialist and Communist militias. Two months earlier, on 8 May in Madrid, Falangists had murdered Captain Carlos Faraudo, an army officer on active duty and also a leading figure in the UMRA and the Socialist militia. Though two Falangists had soon been arrested for Faraudo's killing, his UMRA comrades had vowed to exact vengeance if another of their comrades were killed, and had let it be known that they would not merely take the life of another Falangist, but would carry out a reprisal against a rightist political leader.⁴Close Soon after learning of Castillo's death, a group of Assault Guard oªcers went directly to the Ministry of the Interior to demand action. They were received by the left Republican undersecretary Bibiano Ossorio Tafall, who was being assiduously courted by the Communists and would later reveal himself to be a leading fellow traveler.⁵Close He quickly took them to see Juan Moles, who approved their demand that a further extensive list of Falangists be arrested. The Assault Guard officers refused to allow the arrests to be made by the armed police in the normal way and insisted on the right to make the arrests themselves, to which the minister feebly assented.

The Pontejos barracks of the Assault Guards, only a block behind the ministry, was dominated by leftist officers who had been specially selected by the government. That night it was frequented by a bizarre mix of Assault Guards (some not on official duty), some leftist Civil Guards, leftists from other kinds of police units, and various Socialist and Communist militiamen. It had generally been the government's policy to reinstate leftist police personnel irrespective of past behavior and to encourage politicization of police functions, including the intermittent inclusion of civilian political activists, such as the Socialist militia deputized as delegados in Cuenca and elsewhere. Thus when arrest orders were made up at the Pontejos barracks that night,⁶Close the Assault Guard squads that set out were made up of a lawless mixture of Assault Guards, Civil Guards, off-duty police from other units, and Socialist and Communist activists.⁷Close

The Dirección General de Seguridad had apparently made up lists of names of Falangists and rightists, but the insubordinate Assault Guard officers were not satisfied with these, and added names from other political lists, partly confected by the MAOC militia leader Manuel Tagüeña.⁸Close It was also decided to seize key rightist leaders such as Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo, even though they enjoyed parliamentary immunity and such arrest was prohibited by the constitution, now a dead letter at least for these Republican police. Whether the police conspiracy by the revolutionaries planned from the beginning to murder the rightist leaders, as well, is something that can probably never be determined.

Gil Robles, as it turned out, was not in Madrid, but the squad that left to deal with Calvo Sotelo was a motley crew of Assault Guards, policemen, and Socialist activists, led by the Civil Guard captain Fernando Condés. Like the slain Castillo, Condés was a former army officer (decorated in the final Moroccan campaign) who had passed to the Civil Guards, where he was one of the minority of leftist officers. He had played a role in the abortive insurrection of 1934 in Madrid, for which he had been sentenced to life imprisonment and then reprieved by the Popular Front victory. His mutinous betrayal in 1934 had been so overt that even the left Republican government did not restore him to duty until 1 July, with promotion to captain as a reward for his earlier subversion. In the meantime he helped to train the Socialist militia of Prieto's “La Motorizada” unit and apparently still had not fully returned to Civil Guard service. He was dressed in civilian clothes when he led his mixed squad, containing four Socialist activists from “La Motorizada,” to the home of Calvo Sotelo at about 2:00 a.m. on 13 July.

Calvo Sotelo remained in Madrid to participate in a major debate on the problem of public order scheduled to take place in the Cortes on the fourteenth. Though he had been given to understand that the army would soon rebel, neither he nor the other rightist leaders were part of the conspiracy itself. He had taken a bold position in parliament and had even publicly urged the army to intervene—albeit in slightly Aesopian language—because, as he said privately, the military needed to know that there were civilian groups that encouraged them and would support them. Calvo Sotelo saw no solution to Spain's problems other than the imposition of an authoritarian regime, and the fact that he was willing to espouse this position publicly made him the principal target of the left. Twice Communist and Socialist spokesmen in parliament had publicly referred to assassinating him, an action that had undoubtedly been discussed many times informally among revolutionary activists. The monarchist politician himself had a strong sense of patriotic duty and the need to fulfill what he saw as his responsibilities. Not long before, he had had the police authorities change the bodyguards assigned to protect him (as in the case of other major figures), when he had learned that their chief responsibility was surveillance more than protection, but really had no idea whether the new ones were more reliable. Beyond that, there was no special security. As of 12 July, neither Calvo Sotelo nor anyone else knew for sure what would happen in Spain. Despite reports he had received about the progress of the conspiracy, he could not be certain when the military would rebel, or indeed if they would rebel at all. Hence to that point he continued his normal political and personal life.⁹Close

The bodyguards at the entrance to the building accepted the professional identity cards of Condés and others, who proceeded unhindered to the apartment of the monarchist leader. Calvo Sotelo was shown Civil Guard identification by Condés and was able to verify through his window that a regular Assault Guard truck was waiting under a street light in front of his apartment building. Condés assured him that he was not being made subject to an illegal arrest but was simply being taken in the middle of the night to an emergency meeting in the Dirección General de Seguridad. Calvo Sotelo insisted on taking a small overnight case with him, should he be detained longer, but was in no position to resist once the squad of revolutionaries had gained entrance to his building.¹⁰Close The Assault Guard truck had proceeded only a few blocks when one of the Socialist militants, Luis Cuenca (an earlier police delegado in the corrupt Cuenca elections), abruptly shot the monarchist chief twice in the back of the head, killing him almost instantly. Some members of the squad would later allege that this had not been planned, but was a sort of “accident,” though such testimony is not altogether credible, since the whole operation had been designed as an illegal act of revolutionary vengeance from the very beginning. The corpse was dumped at the door of the morgue of the Almudena, Madrid's main cemetery.

Within a short time the director general of security, José Alonso Mallol, was informed by Calvo Sotelo's family and friends of the illegal arrest—that is, kidnapping—which he denied ever having ordered (a claim that was undoubtedly true). A desultory investigation then began around 7:00 a.m., but the location of the corpse did not become known until midmorning. There was no response from the government except, as was often the case, from Martínez Barrio, president of the Cortes, who privately declared his solidarity with the slain leader's colleagues, and who spoke with the irresponsible Moles, minister of the interior, who had just presided over a disaster and seemed not to know what was going on.¹¹Close Somewhat similarly, Felipe Sánchez Román, a friend of Azaña but a former classmate of Calvo Sotelo, is reported to have said that “the Republic has just dishonored itself forever” and left his card at the victim's home as a sign of condolence.¹²Close

Since the murder was led and executed by prietista Socialists, it was not surprising that leaders of the latter group were the first to be informed, apparently by the murderers themselves. Julián Zugazagoitia, director of El Socialista, later wrote that, on receiving the news at about 8:00 a.m., he immediately exclaimed, “This assassination means war!”¹³Close The Socialist leaders showed no concern to maintain Republican constitutionalism, now almost fatally broken. Consistent with the attitude that Prieto had taken for the past fortnight, they assumed major conflict—a military or rightist insurrection, or civil war, or both—was now inevitable and that the murder would serve as a catalyst. The assassins were told to go into hiding, and Condés moved into the home of the revolutionary Socialist Margarita Nelken,¹⁴Close who in the Cortes had publicly called for the expansion of violence and disorder.

Though it promised to investigate, the government made no effort to conciliate. It imposed immediate censorship to conceal the truth,¹⁵Close and prepared for armed confrontation by initiating yet another round of arrests of Falangists and rightists, as though they had been responsible for the murder. No effort was made to apprehend those directly responsible for the crime, though Calvo Sotelo's widow was able to identify Condés from police photographs that same day. The Casares Quiroga government had in effect already come very close to becoming a government of civil war, though it still recognized certain outward forms of constitutionality.

The principal exception to this policy, though only momentarily, was the work of the investigative judge Ursicino Gómez Carbajo, who recognized the seriousness of the crime and actively took up the case within just a few hours. By the following day he was beginning systematic interrogation of Assault Guard personnel when the government, with its customarily arbitrary procedure, took the case out of his hands, apparently out of concern that he was an honest and politically independent judge. Though a number of Assault Guards were arrested, Condés and Cuenca remained at liberty. A few days later, when the fighting began, the investigation came to an abrupt end, and those few who had been arrested were released. Both Condés and Cuenca were killed in combat in the mountains north of Madrid during the first days of the Civil War. Several Socialists involved in the assassination, such as Francisco Ordóñez and Santiago Garcés, later played major roles in the Republican forces.

The first political response came from leaders of the Communist Party, almost certainly pursuant to the standard Comintern instructions. They decided that very morning that this newest crisis provided a stimulus for advancing the long-announced agenda of forming the “new type of republic.” The afternoon after the murder, Communist deputies submitted the following legislative draft, which immediately appeared in Mundo Obrero, to the other Popular Front groups:

Article 1: All organizations of a fascist or reactionary nature, such as Falange Española, Renovación Española, CEDA, Derecha Regional Valenciana, and others with similar characteristics, will be dissolved and their properties confiscated, as well as those of their leaders and inspirers.

Article 2: All persons known for their fascist, reactionary, or anti-Republican activities will be arrested and prosecuted without bond.

Article 3: The newspapers El Debate, Ya, Informaciones, and ABC and all the reactionary provincial press will be confiscated by the government.

This sweeping, totally unconstitutional proposal was a major feature of the plan to introduce the “new-type” all-leftist Republic, but the government's postponement of parliament—another of Casares Quiroga's arbitrary policies—made its formal presentation impossible before the fighting began, after which its provisions were carried out in a maximally violent and revolutionary manner in what would be termed the “Republican zone.”

The council of ministers met twice on the thirteenth, agreed to suspend the next session of the Cortes, denounced the murder in a brief statement, and promised a full public investigation and prosecution, neither of which was ever carried out. Instead, the murderers would be promoted to positions of greater responsibility. Having sidestepped parliament, the council did nothing to reassure the ever-more-vulnerable opposition, but instead proceeded with its standard policy of blaming the victim. In the spirit of the new Communist proposal, it announced the decision to close the centers of the monarchist Renovación Española and of the CNT in Madrid, even though it was obvious that neither of these had been involved in the murder, and to arrest many more rightists. On the fifteenth the director general of security announced that another 185 provincial and local leaders of the Falange had been seized in recent days, in addition to the several thousand already in prison. On the morrow, in line with the government's new strategy of intensified polarization, all rightist centers in Barcelona were closed.

Meanwhile Marcelino Domingo had talked to Martínez Barrio, who agreed to urge Azaña to replace the Casares Quiroga administration with a more conciliatory and effective government. The president refused. While conceding that Casares would ultimately have to go, he alleged that to replace him immediately would be equivalent to making him responsible for the assassination.¹⁶Close

Whereas the UMRA saw the Castillo killing as one in a sequence of several murders of leftist officers, rightists had no doubt that the Calvo Sotelo assassination represented some sort of organized conspiracy, even though not necessarily by the Republican government itself. Many linked it with the two kidnap-murders by the left the preceding weekend as part of a new leftist tactic to sequester and then murder their victims. The slain monarchist was buried in a public funeral on the afternoon of the fourteenth, a ceremony attended by several thousand rightists, many of whom gave the fascist salute, a gesture that infuriated the police. Immediately afterward, hundreds of younger rightists decided to march back into the center of the city in a political demonstration. They were stopped by a police barricade, which searched each demonstrator to be sure that all were unarmed before permitting them to pass. As the unarmed group moved nearer the center of Madrid, Assault Guards and other police opened a general fusillade of gunfire to prevent them from proceeding further. Between two and five were killed, according to varying newspaper accounts, and many wounded.¹⁷Close Three Assault Guard officers who protested this deliberate police aggression against unarmed demonstrators were temporarily arrested, while some of the personnel in Castillo's own Pontejos barracks felt that the honor of their corps had been tarnished by the assassination and vigorously protested, demanding a fuller investigation on both the fourteenth and sixteenth. Several were briefly arrested before being released. At least two Assault Guard units seemed on the verge of mutiny against the government's arbitrary policies and could scarcely be controlled.¹⁸Close Meanwhile the government's action against the CNT encouraged further hostilities between the CNT and UGT, and in another affray in Madrid on the fourteenth a cenetista was killed.

The government could not avoid convening a meeting of the Diputación Permanente of the Cortes at 11:30 a.m. on 15 July. Though its nominal purpose was to approve another thirty-day extension of the state of alarm, this final session of a branch of the Republican parliament inevitably became a debate on the state of public order, the assassination, and its consequences. Debate was opened by the monarchist Conde de Vallellano, who charged: “This crime, without precedent in our political history, has been made possible by the atmosphere created by the incitements to violence and personal assault on the deputies of the right repeated daily in parliament…. We cannot coexist one moment longer with the facilitators and moral accomplices of this act.” The rightist and centrist deputies pointed out that this was merely the most flagrant and decisive confirmation of their previous charges concerning the partisan and politicized administration of public order. Never before in the history of parliamentary regimes had a leader of the parliamentary opposition been kidnapped and murdered by a detachment of state police. They did not charge that the government itself had planned or ordered the murder, but they did assert that it had been responsible for encouraging the circumstances that made it possible.

Gil Robles presented another statistical résumé of disorders, which he said included sixty-one deaths from politically related acts between 16 June and 13 July. He observed that every day he read in leftist newspapers phrases such as “the enemy must be smashed” or one must “practice a policy of extermination.” “I know that you are carrying out a policy of persecution, violence, and extermination against anything that is rightist. But you are profoundly mistaken: however great may be the violence, the reaction will be greater still. For everyone killed another combatant will rise up…. You who are today fostering violence will become the first victims of it. The phrase that revolutions, like Saturn, devour their own children is commonplace, but no less true for being so. Today you are complacent, because you see an adversary fall. But the day will come when the same violence that you have unleashed will be turned against you.”

Portela Valladares declared that he would abstain from the vote on extending the state of alarm, since the Casares Quiroga government had shown that it lacked the honesty and objectivity to administer a state of constitutional exception. “The government has said that it is belligerent, and the extreme recourse to suspension of guarantees, which must be exercised with calm and measure, without passion and with equality, we cannot give to a government that declares itself belligerent.” Juan Ventosa of the Lliga Catalana agreed with Portela and also declared his abstention, saying that the present government was completely unfit to deal with the crisis because of its self-avowed partisanship and refusal to apply the law equally to all, Casares Quiroga being “a man more likely to touch off civil war than to restore normalcy.”

Prieto's response was very weak, emphasizing that Calvo Sotelo had been slain in revenge for the killing of Castillo. This merely repeated the feeble logic of the government's original statement two days earlier, which made the same point. Neither the government nor Prieto seemed to grasp that their argument placed the Republican state security forces on the same level as political assassins, thus virtually conceding the charges by the right.

Neither the government nor the prietista Socialists, intimately involved with the assassins, made any move to rectify the situation. Their policy had become one of armed civil conflict, which they believed inevitable and were confident of winning. On 14 July Prieto merely urged in El Liberal the union of the left rather than reconciliation with the right, whom he threatened with total destruction if they dared initiate any new violence of their own. As he put it, “It will be a battle to the death, because each side knows that if the enemy triumphs, he will give no quarter.” This grim prophecy proved correct. Meanwhile Prieto personally shielded the assassins, and there is testimony that he intervened directly to prevent the government from going forward fully with appropriate arrests and investigation.¹⁹Close Since the killer was one of Prieto's own bodyguards, the Socialists considered it indispensable to veto any full investigation, which would inevitably expose the dominant role of the Socialists in the political violence in Spain.

The executive commission of the Socialist Party did call a meeting of its own members, of the Communist leaders, and of the JSU chiefs, all of whom signed a manifesto promising complete support for the government. This move was not, however, officially endorsed by the UGT, whose leaders did not recognize the legitimacy of the PSOE executive commission; but one UGT representative did attend the meeting and signed the manifesto as an individual.

For some time the caballerista strategy, like that of Mola, had been based on the need for a very brief civil war, which would be touched off by a military coup that would be quickly defeated by a revolutionary general strike of organized labor. The caballeristas had no direct plan to seize power themselves, a weakness of their strategy being that it left the initiative to the rightist military, but they held to the belief that a military revolt could not possibly be so strong that it could not be crushed by a general strike. Largo Caballero “believed blindly [a pies juntillas]”²⁰Close that the combined effect of these two actions—military revolt and revolutionary general strike—would completely undermine the left Republican government, opening the way for the Socialists to take over. When Largo Caballero returned from an international trade union meeting in London, Claridad complacently ranted on 15 July, “They don't like this government? Then let's substitute a leftist dictatorship for it. They don't like the state of alarm? Then let there be all-out civil war.” The editors would very soon get more “all-out civil war” than they had bargained for.

On the following day Claridad published an article titled “Technique of the Counter–Coup d'état” to explain how to defeat the revolt that was not merely expected, but ardently desired and ceaselessly provoked, by the extreme left. This defeat could be readily accomplished, according to the article, by dissolving rebel military units and freeing their soldiers from military discipline, handing over arms en masse to “the people”—meaning not of course Spanish people in general but the organized revolutionary groups—and then combining the resulting revolutionary militia with loyal sectors of the army to defeat what was left of the rebellion.²¹Close The revolutionaries would then also replace what was left of the left Republican government.

One of the leading advocates of revolutionary civil war was Luis Araquistain, the editor of Claridad. Like Maurín, he had earlier opined that the left could easily win such a civil war and that the tense international situation precluded foreign counterrevolutionary intervention. After the killing of Calvo Sotelo, he wrote to his wife that an attempted armed revolt by the right was now likely, the result of which would be “either our dictatorship or theirs.”²²Close This assessment was correct. The democratic Republic had virtually, but not entirely, ceased to exist.

The executive commission of the Socialist Party called another meeting on 16 July of representatives of all the worker parties of the Popular Front to agree on a joint policy. This time the UGT did send official representatives, but at the meeting the latter declared that they could not agree to anything without first taking it back for consultation with the UGT leadership, and therefore abstained from the final decision. Representatives of the other Popular Front worker parties agreed to organize new committees throughout Spain to begin creation of an armed militia, and to petition the government for arms for such a militia and for a decisive purge of the military. They also agreed to offer a place for government representatives in the joint committees of all the political forces that supported the Casares Quiroga government, as a kind of armed soviet.

This proposal was too complicated and limiting for the caballeristas, who simply wanted arms to be handed directly to the worker syndicates, without any complex Popular Front structure. The UGT leaders therefore responded by asking who would guarantee the future political behavior of such multiparty militia committees, why such committees should take upon themselves military responsibility for fighting a rightist coup, how they could be sure that the government itself would not try to dissolve such committees, and why these should not rather be authorized by the government itself, which would guarantee that it would not subsequently try to disarm them.²³Close

A situation had been reached in which the prietistas and Communists were now willing to form a multiparty militia to wage civil war, though theoretically in support of the government rather than as a direct rival, while the UGT proposed no initiative other than to receive power for such military committees from the government itself, awaiting the direct arming of the syndicates. Despite all their talk of Bolshevization, the revolutionary strategy of the caballeristas remained passive, first awaiting outbreak of the revolt, then waiting for the government to hand over to them a share of armed power, something that the Casares Quiroga government still refused to do. Its successor three days later would not be so squeamish.

The spectacle of preparation for civil war set alarm bells ringing at Comintern headquarters in Moscow. The Comintern bosses demanded stringent measures to disarm the right and avoid civil war, which they did not regard with the same complacency shown by Maurín, Araquistain, and other theorists. Not since 1919 had so favorable a situation existed for the extreme left in any European country as presently in Spain. The Popular Front formula had given the left almost total legal control of Spanish institutions. Such nominally legal power must be employed as vigorously as possible, and civil war averted. The Comintern leaders had had much more experience with revolutionary civil war than their Spanish counterparts, and did not want to see the present leftist domination in Spain placed at risk by a civil war that the left might not necessarily dominate so easily.

On 17 July, only a few hours before the military revolt would begin in the Moroccan Protectorate, Dimitrov and Manuilsky sent an urgent telegram to the PCE's politburo, insisting on immediate exceptional measures to thwart “the fascist conspiracy” and avoid the danger of civil war. Communist leaders were ordered to encourage maximum unity of the Popular Front and to press ahead vigorously with their program of using government powers to arrest large numbers of rightists, purge the army, police, and administration, and suppress the rightist press altogether. In addition, they should press for introduction of a special “emergency tribunal” with revolutionary plenary powers to apply maximum penalties to rightists and confiscate their property, while the party should also move rapidly to form and expand worker-peasant alliance groups as active liaison units of the Popular Front.²⁴Close These proposals, unconstitutional and revolutionary or prerevolutionary, were not at all part of the “moderate” program with which the Communists are often credited, but were fully consistent with the basic Comintern strategy of using government, as distinct from subversive or insurgent, powers to achieve total leftist domination. After the assassination, the last chance to avoid civil war had arrived. It could have been achieved in one of two ways. The first would have been immediately to adopt something like the Comintern proposal, which was not that far from Prieto's position at this time, though it would probably have had to have begun at a somewhat earlier date in order to be completely successful. The other would have been to announce an immediate reversal of course, a new policy of constitutional law and order, and a serious effort to conciliate the right. Indeed, Mariano Ansó, the Socialist who chaired the military affairs committee of parliament, received a visit immediately after the assassination from Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, an emissary of Mola, who told him that the general requested an immediate interview.²⁵Close Ansó refused the request. On the assumption that his memory is correct, it may be conjectured that the head of the conspiracy sought to determine if the leftist leaders were finally willing to change course, or whether he must quickly go through with his long-planned but highly uncertain revolt.

The government adopted neither clear-cut alternative but continued with its policy of harassing the right, without the slightest gesture to rectify the situation. Portela Valladares would later charge in his memoirs that “Casares viewed the outbreak of military revolt with confident satisfaction, intending to present himself to parliament afterward to receive the victor's applause.”²⁶Close Santiago Carrillo, leader of the new Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, has testified that he, Prieto, and the PCE secretary general José Díaz went to talk with Casares in these final days to urge him to give arms to the new worker committees being planned. According to Carrillo, “That frail, sickly man with feverish eyes tried to convince us that the government was in control of the situation and that the danger was not that great. He even said that he hoped for a revolt in order to crush them completely.”²⁷Close

This calculation might have been correct even as late as 12 July. Mola had continually encountered major obstacles in developing the conspiracy. Most officers did not really want to rebel, relations were strained with the Falangists, and even the Carlists refused to cooperate on Mola's terms. The projected date for revolt had been postponed several times, and on 9 July, after an apparently decisive rejection by the Carlists, Mola was in despair, lamenting to the Carlist leader Fal Conde that “we turned to you because in the barracks we have only men in uniforms who cannot really be called soldiers…. Of all those who have participated in this adventure, the only victim will be me.”²⁸Close At that moment he could foresee only a failed insurrection or perhaps none at all, followed by his own arrest and prosecution—or flight into exile.

The assassination had an electrifying effect on all the potential opposition, and proved to be the catalyst needed to transform a limping conspiracy into a powerful revolt that could set off a massive civil war, even though few of those involved anticipated the full extent of the great conflict that would result. The liberal officer Captain Jesús Pérez Salas, who would remain faithful to the Republican cause to the end, explained the effect this way:

The catalyst sought by the right, which would guarantee a military revolt, finally arrived in the middle of July. That catalyst was the assassination of Calvo Sotelo. I do not know whose idea it was to commit such an outrage, but I will say that, even if they had been set up by the rebels themselves, those who did the deed could not have achieved a greater effect. It must have been planned by someone who really wanted to see the army rebel…. If the companions or allies of Lieutenant Castillo had applied the law of revenge and had shot down Calvo Sotelo in the street or wherever they found him, it would have been only one more act of terrorism, added to the many others that summer. The impression this would have caused in the army would of course have been deplorable, and consequently would have constituted one more step toward a rebellion. Because of the importance of Calvo Sotelo, an ex-minister of the dictatorship, his death would have been exploited to demonstrate to military officers the complete impotence of the government to prevent such killings. But in no way would it have been the drop of water that made the glass overflow. Such was the initial effect of the news of the assassination, but after the details were revealed and it was learned that the forces of public order had themselves been involved, the reaction was tremendous…. It is futile to try to deny the importance of this fact. If the forces of public order, on whom the rights and security of citizens depend, are capable of carrying out this kind of act, they effectively demonstrate their lack of discipline and obliviousness to their sacred mission…. The resulting action of the army might have been prevented by a rapid and energetic initiative of the Republican government, punishing the guilty vigorously and, above all, expelling from the security corps all contaminated elements, to demonstrate to the country that the government was determined to end terrorism, no matter where it came from.²⁹Close

Indeed, as noted above, there is some evidence that Casares would have proceeded more energetically to arrest and prosecute the Assault Guards involved, but was blocked by the veto of Prieto and the need always to rely on the worker parties. By this point the Socialists preferred to encourage, rather than discourage, the revolt, though Prieto was not at all as confident as Largo Caballero of the final outcome.

As it was, the change in attitude was dramatic. For the first time it seemed more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel. On 23 June Franco had written to Casares Quiroga to assure him that the army was loyal but urging him to change his policies, and as late as 12 July had sent word to Mola that the time had not yet come and that he was not prepared to join a rebellion. The first word of the assassination seems to have had a decisive effect; on the thirteenth he dispatched a message that he was now firmly committed and that the revolt must not be delayed.³⁰Close Years later, in a speech in 1960, Franco conjectured that the revolt would never have developed adequate strength had it not been for the assassination.³¹Close Two days later, on 15 July, in view of the categorical insistence of the Navarrese Carlists, the Carlist leadership committed all its forces unreservedly to the rebellion,³²Close and support for the insurrection hardened in many quarters.

Mola's final plan stipulated a rather bizarrely staggered schedule, with the revolt beginning in Morocco and several other places on the eighteenth, followed by the rest of the peninsular garrisons within the next forty-eight hours. It calculated that the rebels might not be strong enough to seize all the large cities immediately, but would be able to overwhelm them within just a few weeks, or else the revolt would probably fail. As it turned out, neither the one nor the other result obtained.

Premature disclosure precipitated the rebellion in Spanish Morocco just before 5:00 p.m. on Friday the seventeenth, and Casares Quiroga convened the council of ministers later that evening. According to most accounts, Casares admitted that it might be possible for the rebels to take over all the Moroccan Protectorate, but prophesied correctly that a loyal navy would prevent them from reaching the peninsula.³³Close He seemed confident that any rebellion in the mainland could be put down by the government's own forces. Determined not to play Kerensky, he rejected any notion of “arming the people.”

Socialist and Communist patrols had been seen occasionally in the streets of Madrid since the night of the fifteenth; the CNT had begun to send out patrols in Barcelona even earlier.³⁴Close None of the worker movements had a major paramilitary militia, and had begun to face the practical issue of armed conflict only after the assassination, looking to the government for arms, though in Barcelona the FAI-CNT had begun a more serious search for weapons. It was only the Communists—in formal policy the most concerned to avoid civil war—who had made some preparation for it, having organized as many as 2,000 men in their MAOC, mostly in the Madrid area, while the chief organizer of the UMRA was a Communist officer on the General Staff of the army, Captain Eleuterio Díaz Tendero.

As the military revolt slowly spread on the eighteenth, the UGT declared a general strike, in accordance with a strategy already decided upon. Only forty-eight hours earlier Largo Caballero had announced the need for a revolutionary “red army,” and by the afternoon of 18 July he and other revolutionary leaders began to demand that the government arm the workers, something already demanded by anarchist leaders in Barcelona. This Casares still refused to do, nor would Companys in Barcelona, for doing so would probably mean the end of the parliamentary Republic and the beginning of violent revolution. The prime minister has been quoted as stating that any officer found guilty of handing over arms would be shot.³⁵Close Casares Quiroga convened an emergency meeting around 6:00 p.m., which was attended by, among others, Martínez Barrio, Prieto, and Largo Caballero, at which the latter once more demanded that arms be distributed. Yet again the prime minister refused, insisting that all Spaniards should instead rally round the forces loyal to the government. Nor is it clear that Prieto supported the demands of his Socialist rival, for he could appreciate the force of Casares' argument.³⁶Close

Though the majority of military units did not join the revolt on the eighteenth, it began to expand through part of southern Spain, with some indication that other units were potentially poised to join. The gamble on a limited repetition of the sanjurjada seemed to be failing as a large rebellion unfolded, its full extent still unclear. About 10:00 p.m. that evening Casares Quiroga resigned, his government a failure on every front.

Azaña suddenly decided to reverse course and attempt a limited reconciliation, something that, had he done it five and a half days earlier, immediately after the assassination, might yet have retrieved the situation. He authorized Diego Martínez Barrio, leader of the small right wing of the Popular Front, to form a new and broader coalition of “all the Republican parties” of the left and center, excluding only the Communists and POUM on the left, the CEDA and other rightist groups, and in the center only the Lliga. Martínez Barrio had been the only major left Republican to grasp fully the significance of the assassination, and the only one who had reached out afterward in gestures of reconciliation toward the right. He received virtual carte blanche authorization to put down the rising and restore order. A Martínez Barrio government would implicitly break the Popular Front by including the antirevolutionary Republican center, but some such initiative, which ought to have been undertaken months earlier, was the only means by which the parliamentary Republic could have survived. Had such a government been formed in May, or even later, it might well have prevented the Civil War. The problem faced by Martínez Barrio on the night of 18–19 July was that, by definition, it is too late to prevent something from happening if action is delayed until after the event has already begun. Sánchez Román agreed to serve, and seems to have functioned as Martínez Barrio's chief adviser for the next few hours. Miguel Maura refused to participate, however, on the grounds that this was now too little too late, and Prieto also soon had to decline on instructions from his Socialist colleagues on the executive commission, though the latter apparently promised full support to the new government.³⁷Close

Around 4:00 a.m. on the nineteenth Martínez Barrio began to contact district military commanders by telephone. Though he was not able to reach all of them, he found that several of those loyal to the regime had been virtually deposed by younger officers. Martínez Barrio was able to speak directly with Mola, and subsequently the main controversy about his abortive initiative would have to do with the terms of their conversation. Martínez Barrio has claimed that he merely assured Mola that the new government would restore order and asked him not to rebel.³⁸Close Other sources claim that he went much further, even so far as to suggest a political deal with the military, who could name their own candidates for the Ministries of War, Navy, and Interior. The weight of evidence indicates that some sort of deal was discussed,³⁹Close the irony being that a lesser compromise a week earlier might have averted the crisis. As it was, Mola replied that it was too late, for all the rebels had sworn not to be dissuaded by any political deals or compromises once the revolt had begun.

The great compromise had been attempted too late—the greatest of all Azaña's errors—though Martínez Barrio for the moment continued formation of his new left-center coalition, completed around 5:00 a.m. on 19 July. He was relying on Felipe Sánchez Román and Marcelino Domingo as his chief lieutenants, and his coalition included five members of his own Unión Republicana, three from Izquierda Republicana, three ministers from Sánchez Román's tiny Partido Nacional Republicano, one member from Esquerra Catalana, and a senior general, the pro-Republican José Miaja without party affiliation, in the Ministry of War. This coalition represented a shift toward the left-center, though it was not a coalition of the broad national-unity type.

The goal of the Martínez Barrio government was to maintain the constitutional regime, giving in to neither the rebels nor the revolutionaries. Its leaders probably did not know that at least two Madrid district military commanders had already begun to “arm the people.”⁴⁰Close Both Martínez Barrio and Sánchez Román were firmly opposed to such a step, on the grounds that it would open the door to revolution and anarchy. Sánchez Román would later declare that he had told the new prime minister that this would be “ineffective militarily and pregnant with inconceivable dangers politically,”⁴¹Close yet another of his accurate prophecies. Martínez Barrio has been quoted as having insisted only a few days earlier that such a move was “madness. This would be to unleash anarchy. It is necessary to avoid that at any price.”⁴²Close His government represented the last chance to maintain the integrity of the regime, and still might have had a fighting chance to do so, since as of the early morning of the nineteenth the majority of military units, as well as Civil Guard and Assault Guard units, had not rebelled, and in fact about half would never do so. A responsible Republican government would still have had a chance to repress the revolt and restore order, avoiding a major civil war.

By dawn, however, the new government was being repudiated not merely by the caballeristas, ever insistent on arming the people, but also by some of the more radical leaders of Azaña's own party, who rejected the leadership of their chief rival, the more moderate Unión Republicana, and insisted on maintaining the unity of the Popular Front. The editor of Política, the official newspaper of Azaña's Izquierda Republicana, is sometimes given credit for organizing militants of the latter party to join Socialists in an early-morning street demonstration that demanded immediate resignation of the new government.⁴³Close This was the last straw for Martínez Barrio, who had slept for only about one hour in the past forty-eight, and around 8:00 a.m. he abandoned his efforts, later charging that “the government of Martínez Barrio had died at the hands of the Socialists of Largo Caballero, the Communists, and also irresponsible Republicans.”⁴⁴Close Prieto apparently urged Martínez Barrio to stand fast,⁴⁵Close but the opposition of militants of Izquierda Republicana was a graphic illustration of the Kerenskyist role assumed by Azaña's party.

His one tardy effort at compromise having collapsed, Azaña immediately returned to his already failed policy, appointing a new government headed by the physiology professor José Giral of Izquierda Republicana, basically a more leftist version of the Casares Quiroga ministry. The difference was that the Giral government, in view of the rapidly expanding military revolt, had none of its predecessor's reluctance to grant military power to revolutionaries and began the “arming of the people,” thereby fostering revolutionary militias that would quickly gain de facto power in what was about to become known as the “Republican zone.” The civil war had begun, and the constitutional life of the Republic had ended, replaced by what has varyingly been termed the “Third Republic,”⁴⁶Close the “Spanish People's Republic,”⁴⁷Close and the “revolutionary Republican confederation” of 1936–37.⁴⁸Close In varying degrees, the wartime Republic was all of these, but not a continuation of the parliamentary regime of 1931–1936.