Growing Political Turmoil
After the conservatives came to power in Spain in November 1933, the CNT planned a national uprising for December 8. Despite a spectacular Barcelona jail break by CNT prisoners, the insurrection was a failure; indeed, it was used to legitimate government censorship, union repression, and the arrest of labor leaders. When, in October 1934, the Catholic conservative party won three cabinet positions, Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists were galvanized to take action against what they feared would be a right-wing coup, whether in fact or
in name. Within a few days, the CNT and the Socialist General Confederation of Workers (UGT), which since December 1933 had been discussing some kind of working-class alliance, planned a national general strike. It began on October 4, with coal miners in Asturias in northern Spain leading the struggle. If there had been any doubts about the ruthlessness of the new republican government, they were laid to rest by its treatment of the workers. Utterly unsympathetic to the gruesome conditions under which the coal miners worked and without concern for their fears, it called in Colonel Francisco Franco. As commander of the crack Moroccan troops and Foreign Legion mercenaries, Franco showed no mercy as his soldiers quashed the miners and their supporters. From October 10 to October 18, Moroccan troops and Legionnaires were permitted to rape and pillage in the mining towns of Asturias. The maneuver resulted in about one thousand dead and thirty to forty thousand jailed throughout Spain.
The day after the nationwide general strike was called on October 4, 1934, Lluís Companys, now president of the Generalitat, proclaimed the "Republic of Catalunya within the Federal Republic of Spain"—an act that was regarded as treason, since there was no federalist state at the time. Companys was arrested and held for sixteen months, and the Statute of Autonomy was abrogated.
After the strike, forces from among Spain's landowners, its army, and its fascist Falange political party had begun to negotiate with Mussolini and Hitler, from whom they obtained financial commitments and promises of military support for a rebellion to overthrow the legally elected Second Republic. The republicans and the left, increasingly aware of the growing fascist menace throughout Europe and mindful that in 1933 divisions among republicans, Socialists, and leftists had permitted conservatives to come to power in Spain, decided to run a unified slate for the parliamentary elections of February 16, 1936. Their coalition, like other such slates elsewhere in Europe, was known as the Popular Front.
Meanwhile, during the summer of 1935, Jaume Sabartés, a poet turned journalist who had been a close friend of Picasso's some three decades earlier in Barcelona, received a summons from the painter. Now that Picasso had left his wife Olga Koklova, with whom he had been fighting for years, he needed a secretary. He hoped that Sabartés, who had recently returned to the city after twenty years as a journalist in Latin America, would accept this position. Although Sabartés had been
the butt of Picasso's jokes in their youth, he was happy to serve. Persuading his own wife to join him, Sabartés headed for Paris, where, from November 1935 to the winter of 1937, he practically lived with Picasso as his secretary and companion. Presumably, he filled Picasso in on recent events in Barcelona.
In the midst of the Popular Front election campaign, Picasso was contacted by the Catalan Friends of the New Arts (Amics de l'Art Nou, or ADLAN), who wanted to open an exhibit of his work on February 18, 1936, two days after the election was scheduled to take place. Even though Picasso was a celebrity, few in Barcelona were familiar with his art, which had not been seen since he and Ramón Casas exhibited jointly in Barcelona in 1932. Picasso agreed to the retrospective but refused to attend. His mother, María Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí talked on the radio in his place to publicize the show. Picasso's friend, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, traveled down to Barcelona from Paris for the exhibit and delivered a lecture at the opening. Éluard, standing in for Picasso, received the hearty support of students who chanted, "Picasso, the Marxist," confirming that they saw Picasso as a radical. (In fact, although Picasso did later, in 1944, join the Communist party of France, Éluard, like most of the other surrealists, had become a member in 1926.)
When the Popular Front won the elections in February, the left was jubilant, and the right intensified their plotting. With the support of Catholic landowners and fascists, five generals, including Francisco Franco, organized a barracks uprising for July 18, 1936, that was designed to overthrow the freely elected government and impose one more congenial to themselves. The plotters, however, had not counted on the loyalty of certain officers who supported the Popular Front. Nor did they count on the quick action of the people in cities like Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville, where civilians—many of them acting through their unions—rose up to defend the Republic. Only about half of Spain went over to the rebels. And thus the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 began.
On the day of the attempted coup in Barcelona, the CNT marched on the army barracks, disarmed the soldiers, and seized their weapons to arm themselves. Having chafed at the bit under nearly five years of republican rule, the CNT now attempted to carry out a social revolution by collectivizing all local economic and social resources. George Orwell, who was in Barcelona shortly afterward, talked about how it felt to be in a city in which the people ruled:
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; . . . almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-workers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said "Señor" or "Don" or even "Usted"; everyone called everyone else "Comrade" and "Thou. " . . . The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. . . . Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
The Spanish Republican government continued to carry on its work while it attempted to defend itself against its enemies. The right-wing rebels, among whom General Francisco Franco had become preeminent by November 1936, were willing to empower Hitler and Mussolini to test new military strategies on Spain in their behalf. On October 23, 1936, three months after the Civil War had begun, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Madrid. Over five thousand people were killed in a single night, in the first time systematic bombing was used specifically to terrorize and crush the will of a civilian population. Like later similar attempts, however, this first instance only enhanced the resolve of the people, both in Madrid and in the Spanish nation as a whole. It was at this time that Dolores Ibarruri, a Communist leader known as "La Pasionaria," coined the slogan "No pasarán" (They shall not pass), which became a watchword for democratic forces throughout the world.