The Truth Betrayed
Alejandro Lerroux and his Critics
Many years ago, I became familiar with the political life of Alejandro Lerroux as an undergraduate studying modern Spanish history. He was such a puzzle. Historians wrote of him as both a youthful republican firebrand who called for churches to be burned during the ‘Tragic Week’ in Barcelona in 1909 and the wizened leader of moderate republicanism who entered government with Catholics in 1934, putting down an insurrection led by those leftists who had proclaimed the Second Republic alongside him barely three years earlier. This remarkable political journey from revolution to counter-revolution was not explained in terms of changing ideas during the tumultuous years of monarchy, dictatorship and democracy, but rather as the all too predictable actions of an unscrupulous opportunist who sought power only for the material benefits it could provide. The fact that Lerroux’s career ended in scandal seemed to be the fitting end to a lifetime of political immorality and wickedness.
This caricature remains influential in the historiography of twentieth-century Spain. It helps to explain why Alejandro Lerroux remains the least studied and understood of all the major figures of the Second Republic, despite being the leader of its most important republican party. This is the first complete political biography of a man who held the premiership on six occasions. The only other scholarly account, written by José Álvarez Junco in 1990 and published in English in 2004 as The Emergence of Mass Politics in Spain, ends in 1910 when Lerroux had only just established a national reputation. This is not to say that we lack studies that deal with aspects of his career. Joaquín Romero Maura’s magisterial 1989 account on the emerging labour movement in early twentieth-century Barcelona placed the young Lerroux’s political activities in a wider socio-economic context,1 while Octavio Ruiz Manjón’s pioneering 1976 examination of his Radical Republican Party offered a stimulating discussion of his charismatic leadership, despite an over-reliance on Manuel Azaña’s partisan opinions of his most significant republican rival.2 A more recent study of the party – the first available in English – was Nigel Townson’s innovative 2000 monograph that incorporated sources unavailable to Ruiz Manjón to depict a moderate and centrist leader.3 Ruiz Manjón argued that continued involvement in dubious political practises reflected an opportunism that would finally lead to the party being consumed by the political right. In this sad story Lerroux was fundamental, as he managed to prevent progressives led by Diego Martínez Barrio from renovating the party. Within the exiguous historiography of centrist politics, only Andrés de Blas offered a dissenting view in 1983, acquitting Lerroux of opportunism and avarice, arguing that he offered a genuine liberal and moderate vision of the Republic.4
Irrespective of their undoubted merits, these historians of the 1970s and 1980s have failed to shift the negative paradigm on Lerroux. This is less of a surprise if one recalls the loathing that he provoked among his adversaries of whatever political stripe. The Catholic right never forgave him for his incendiary anticlerical propaganda, while Catalan nationalists despised his stubborn defence of Spanish unity. Left republicans, socialists and communists regarded Lerroux with a mixture of jealousy and hatred. On the one hand, his popularity among the ‘people’ eclipsed that of his rivals, for example Pablo Iglesias, the founder of the PSOE. On the other, Lerroux was condemned as a traitor to the leftist cause after April 1931. His argument for a broadly based moderate Republic led him to oppose Azaña’s left republican-socialist coalition government, and after his victory over his one-time allies in the 1933 general election, he became the advocate for constitutional reform as the means to integrate Catholic rightists within the Republic. Any prospect of reconciliation with the left vanished in October 1934 with the suppression of a rebellion intended to coerce president Niceto Alcalá-Zamora into ejecting the elected centre-right government from power. For the defeated revolutionaries, Lerroux’s decision to support the Nationalist cause in 1936 only confirmed his perfidy; it mattered little to them that the Radical leader had nothing to do with the military conspiracy.
Ultimately, the left was defeated in 1939, but Lerroux was not one of the victors. His support base of moderate republicans and liberal monarchists perished in the civil war. It did not return with the death of Franco in November 1975. The Radical Party seemed to offer little inspiration to former Francoists turned democrats, while the left remained dominated by the same socialist, communist and catalanist parties that had risen against Lerroux in October 1934. But while makes it easier to understand why the historical reputation of the Radicals remains so low, it does not follow that historians should reassess the party at the expense of its leader. Created by Lerroux in 1908 as an instrument for his charismatic leadership, it had no other jefe throughout its almost thirty-year existence. Therefore, to speak of the Radical Party as a centrist and liberal force is to speak of the man who without doubt embodied those values during the Second Republic: Alejandro Lerroux.
With the significant exception of Townson, the myths and distortions around Lerroux’s career remain especially resilient in British historiography. To read Paul Preston’s newly published A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain is to read the charge sheet drawn up by his contemporary political enemies.5 For Preston, the Radical leader is the epitome of the ‘corruption’ and ‘political incompetence’ of the book’s title, while his rivals on the left appear as virtuous servants of the ‘people’. In taking this approach, the historian ignores the sins of left republicans and socialists, who practised enchufismo – the concession and accumulation of public posts and salaries to political friends and allies – on an industrial scale during the Azaña governments of 1931 to 1933. Among the most egregious offenders were the Basque socialist leader Indalecio Prieto, denounced in parliament for the favouritism he displayed towards friendly businessmen such as Horacio Echevarrieta in the allocation of state contracts, and the left republican Marcelino Domingo, found to have committed irregularities in wheat imports before opening schools lacking heating despite money being allocated for boilers; these new institutions had to be closed for safety reasons by the ‘corrupt’ Lerroux government in the winter of 1933–34. Preston even overlooks the leftist theft of arms from state factories to supply Portuguese revolutionaries and the rebels of October 1934, and chooses to forget the robbery committed by socialists of fourteen million pesetas deposited in the Bank of Spain in Oviedo during the insurrection itself. As the police discovered during their investigations between November 1934 and December 1935, this heist was only the most spectacular example of the larceny carried out in the name of antifascism.
If Prieto and Domingo are for Preston laudable defenders of Republican democracy, then Lerroux is dismissed on countless occasions as ‘congenitally corrupt’ or a practitioner of ‘shameless corruption’. The British historian repeatedly accuses Lerroux of being a paid ‘puppet’ of the millionaire Juan March, dedicated to the protection of the latter’s shady activities such as tobacco smuggling, but fails to provide any evidence of a long and mutually advantageous relationship. Characteristically, Preston ignores the fact that March worked with politicians of all ideological backgrounds, and provided favours and even gifts to the PSOE, including a magnificent ‘House of the People’ [Casa del Pueblo] in Palma de Mallorca.
In order to demonstrate his innate malevolence, A People Betrayed also provides a highly distorted view of the Radical leader’s early career. For example, the appearance of Lerroux in Barcelona in time for the 1901 elections is depicted as the arrival of a ‘virtuoso carpetbagger’ paid by Madrid monarchists to combat Catalan nationalists. As we shall see, the reality could not be more different: the then young chief editor of El País, famous throughout Spain for his campaign against the government for the alleged torture of anarchists in Montjuich Castle, was invited to the Catalan capital by a faction-ridden republican movement to reverse years of decline. For Preston, his success in winning a parliamentary seat was only about making money; his republicanism was nothing more than ‘a cynical bid for working-class support’. Remarkably, A People Betrayed asserts that Lerroux invented the ‘anti-clerical demagogy’ that would lead to Tragic Week in 1909, as if violent anticlericalism were not a well-established feature of Spanish populist republicanism that aspired to entice urban workers away from an emerging anarchist movement. According to Preston, Lerroux’s most significant contribution was the introduction of ‘near-pornographic techniques’ to anticlerical discourse, although he does not provide any examples. In fact, anyone familiar with Lerroux’s speeches knows that his ‘demagogy’ could provoke various reactions, but to call as ‘near-pornographic’ perorations that have no sexual references is comical.
Less amusing are Preston’s attempts to associate Lerroux with the anarchist terrorism of the early twentieth century. He claims that in 1908 the young republican fled Spain ‘to avoid imprisonment for his involvement in an assassination attempt on Alfonso XIII’. In reality, Lerroux was escaping from a two-year prison sentence imposed for various crimes of defamation committed as a journalist since 1899. No evidence has been unearthed to implicate the young republican with anarchist violence; the only certainty is his connections with Francisco Ferrer Guardia, a former political ally who later converted to anarchism. Yet as the second chapter shows, their friendship reflected the ambiguous and problematical relationship between republicanism and anarchism during this period; there was co-operation born out of necessity, but ultimately they remained rivals as both were fishing in the same barrel of urban workers.
Preston’s fixation with corruption as the only explanation for Lerroux’s career leads him to make more elemental mistakes. Due to his supposed ‘venality’, the radical republican made a profitable shift towards constitutional liberalism on the basis of a newly found ‘anti-Catalanism’ and ‘pro-militarism’. This ignores the fact that these positions were the only ones that did not change through Lerroux’s political life. The leftist scourge of the monarchy was also a passionate defender of Spanish unity and the military, an institution in which his father had served as a veterinarian. Before entering politics, Lerroux had even dreamed of an army career and only the lack of money impeded his entry into the Toledo Military Academy.
Similarly, Preston attributes the wealth that the Radical leader originally acquired in Argentina in 1908 and later augmented in Spain to ‘the corruption of party members with positions in local administration’. However, apart from Barcelona, the Radical Party did not have a significant presence in Spain’s municipalities. On this flawed premise, Preston argues Radicals were by definition immoral, as ‘many were in politics to derive profit from access to the levers of power’. This, of course, was only a reflection of the pragmatic and liberal drift of their leader, who ‘accumulated possessions; cars, jewellery and an estate in San Rafael’, located in the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid. No wonder then, the Briton claims, that Lerroux supported the Entente during the First World War as he depended on ‘the exports by his companies, particularly of meat, to the French Republic’. In fact, and as we shall see, the Radical leader supported the Allied cause from the outset and therefore well before the great export boom that began in 1915. But for Preston such was Lerroux’s greed that he had no compunction about serving the Dictatorship of the 1920s, writing that he was ‘suspected of being on Primo [de Rivera]’s payroll’; this explains why conspiracies against the regime were ‘easily dismantled by the authorities’. Again, no evidence is provided to support these serious accusations, and A People Betrayed is silent on the fact that Lerroux’s unremitting hostility to Primo de Rivera from 1925 earned him two spells in prison that almost cost him his life on the second occasion. Such is Preston’s disposition against the future Republican prime minister that he remarks that the latter co-operated with Berenguer’s monarchist government of 1930–31 as ‘no arrest warrant had been issued for Lerroux’. But an arrest warrant had been issued by the police, and the politician was forced into hiding for five months until the very day of the proclamation of the Second Republic itself on 14 April 1931, meaning that that he could not take part in the historic municipal election held two days earlier. It may be true that he was not arrested, but neither were five other members of the republican Revolutionary Committee, who would all become members of the Provisional Government following the departure of Alfonso XIII. Among them was Manuel Azaña, and no one has accused the left republican prime minister and president of being a monarchist spy.
In Preston’s morality tale, Lerroux’s actions during the Second Republic were shaped by his unquenchable desire for money. If he received the marginal and unsuitable post of foreign minister in April 1931, it was not due to internal power struggles within the new government but because the portfolio ‘gave him the fewest opportunities for embezzlement’. In any case, while the actions of Lerroux’s more left-wing ministerial colleagues were praiseworthy, his tenure of the foreign ministry was ‘a disaster’, as ‘at the League of Nations at Geneva, he would cut a ridiculous figure’. Chapter 4 will demonstrate that this is far from the truth, as Lerroux was the most popular figure within the government both at home and abroad; the June 1931 general election would prove to be the greatest personal triumph of his career. The same chapter will also show that president Niceto Alcalá-Zamora’s decision to pass over the foreign minister for the premiership following the bitter constitutional debates around religion that October was not due to ‘Lerroux’s known corruption’. Far from being ‘outraged’ by the appointment of Azaña, Lerroux actually proposed him for the job, since he had no wish to lead what he thought would be an ephemeral government that would end after the proclamation of the Constitution in December. In a similar vein, despite the claim that only corruption can explain ‘the determination of the Socialists not to collaborate in a cabinet with Lerroux’, it is clear that hostility between the PSOE and the republican dated from at least the turn of the century. For Preston, Lerroux would stop at nothing to prevent the reforms of the Azaña governments, accepting uncritically the unfounded allegations of the Radical leader’s political adversaries concerning involvement with general Sanjurjo’s pronunciamiento of August 1932; Lerroux is even named as one of its principal sponsors alongside Juan March and Benito Mussolini.
Yet Preston saves his most bitter invective for Lerroux’s premierships of 1933 to 1935. These allegedly stripped the Republic of its virginal purity. The Radical leader ‘had always hankered after a life of luxury’ and constantly bombarded ‘other ministers with requests for official positions for his relatives and cronies’. The British historian is apparently unaware that Lerroux’s family was small and any requests for favours generally came from others who were not always those associated with the Radical Party. Chapter 8 will show that while the Radical prime minister was very receptive to clientelist practises, these did not begin with him or his party. In this sense, it is ironic that Preston regurgitates Niceto Alcalá-Zamora’s long-standing criticisms of the Radicals. A People Betrayed portrays the former monarchist as a paragon of virtue, noting that the president ‘lamented that his [Lerroux’s] criteria for such [ministerial] appointments were the candidates’ need for money and their personal likeability’, which provoked ‘real alarm . . . when it was a question of senior positions in banks’. Preston’s sympathy for the president’s predicament is very surprising, as few, if any, specialists on modern Spanish political history would deny that Alcalá-Zamora was the perfect example of a political boss in Cordoba before 1923, who maintained and extended his patronage network after April 1931. Such empathy is not extended to Lerroux or his followers, as it is simply assumed that the mere presence of Radicals on the management boards of financial institutions is enough to guarantee malfeasance. Preston argues that everyone was worried by the presence of ‘Lerroux and his gang of thieves’ in government, an expression taken from the memoirs of Felix Gordón Ordás, a radical-socialist deputy who nevertheless had worked closely with the Radical leader, advocating anti-socialist pact between their two parties between 1931 and 1933. Since the British historian had long since passed sentence on Lerroux, it is logical that he found it unnecessary to investigate the estraperlo and Tayá-Nombela scandals that finally brought Lerroux and his party down in 1935. What is the point if both were intrinsically corrupt? This is symptomatic of a book that does not provide any analysis of political influence and clientelism during the Second Republic, and therefore does not recognise the limited impact of the spoils system within a permanent civil service that had been professionalised by reforms introduced by Antonio Maura in 1918.
Preston’s interpretation of Lerroux ends with a dismal account of his final years during and after the civil war. Typically, Lerroux is presented as writing from Lisbon ‘sycophantic letters to Franco in the vain hope of being allowed to return to Spain’, and reduces his memoirs –written during and not after the war despite the claims of the book – to a mere apologia of the ‘military coup’. In sum, the thief and traitor Lerroux fittingly ended his days as a propagandist for a brutal dictator.
Given Preston’s objective of making the Radical leader the personification of Spanish corruption and incompetence, it is no wonder that sympathetic reviewers have focused on Lerroux. For Dominic Sandbrook of the Sunday Times, he was ‘the Radical demagogue’ and ‘outstandingly corrupt’;6 Isambard Wilkinson in the Times is more emphatic in his use of adverbs, labelling Lerroux ‘outrageously corrupt’.7 Perhaps the most worrying consequence of Preston’s distorted view of Lerroux is the life that it breathes into the dormant clichés of Spanish exceptionalism. As the enthusiastic Sandbrook writes, many ‘Spaniards are understandably irritated by the enduring “Black Legend” of a land of “fanaticism, cruelty and uncontrolled emotion”, epitomised by the opera Carmen and the travel books of writers such as Gerald Brenan. But as Preston’s tremendously rich and learned history shows, the legend only endures because it has more than a grain of truth’.8
Lerroux remains the most derided Spanish democratic politician in English-language historiography. This alone justifies the publication of this political biography. Nonetheless, over seventy years after his death, it combines the fruits of the latest Spanish research into the man and his Radical Party with original material that sheds new light on one of modern Spain’s most significant statesmen. To understand Lerroux is to understand the evolution of Spanish republicanism from the late nineteenth century to its collapse in the Second Republic. Although others like Azaña and Alcalá-Zamora have attracted more attention from historians, Lerroux was the dominant figure within the republican movement until the outbreak of war in 1936. Despite his modest talents as a journalist, he was a born communicator and successful advocate of the republican creed. His famous campaigns against the monarchy revived a movement still coming to terms with the chaotic collapse of the First Republic in 1874. As a vigorous deputy for Barcelona from 1901, he created a modern party machine capable of attracting liberal critics of Catalan nationalism and weaning workers away from anarchist apoliticism. This was the key to his great electoral victories between 1901 and 1911.
Success at the ballot box mellowed Lerroux’s fiery spirit. After 1903, his appeals to overthrow the monarchy were purely rhetorical; he was not prepared to risk everything on a repeat of the farcical republican uprisings of his youth. No firm evidence has yet been produced of his participation in the Tragic Week of 1909, and his lack of enthusiasm for the republican conspiracies of 1917 and 1930 provoked criticism among the plotters. By then, the experienced Lerroux was an unambiguous advocate of liberal democracy. He was prepared to work with monarchist Liberals and was even willing after the republican failures of 1917–1918 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to accept the monarchy as the price for a democratic new deal for Spain.
If Lerroux was more liberal than republican by 1931, this did not imply that he did not welcome the proclamation of the Second Republic. He would become the leader of the republican opposition before holding the premiership on more occasions than anyone else from September 1933. If Azaña symbolises the first two leftist years of the Republic, Lerroux embodies the subsequent centre-right period of September 1933 to February 1936. When the Republic came courtesy of Primo de Rivera’s disastrous military coup of September 1923 that discredited the monarchy, Lerroux envisioned the ‘beautiful girl’ as a liberal and tolerant entity that would continue the democratising processes disrupted by the Dictatorship. For the Radical leader, the Republic could not be identified with any particular party programme; to survive it had to be inclusive and accept governments of the right as well as of the left. His project was met with incomprehension from his old allies on the republican left and the PSOE. When they rose in arms against his centre-right government of October 1934, Lerroux did not hesitate to defend constitutional democracy; his horror of revolution led him to support the Nationalists in the civil war. Yet the fratricidal conflict only came after his political fall from grace in the much-exaggerated scandals of estraperlo and Tayá-Nombela.
Lerroux’s political demise was much more than a personal tragedy. It led to the dissolution of the centre-right dominated parliament before Lerroux had time to pass the constitutional amendments needed to consolidate the Republic. With the Radical leader’s forced departure, a golden opportunity to forge a liberal democratic Republic was lost. We will never know whether this would have been enough to avoid its collapse. What we do know is that the continued conflation of the Republic with left republicans and socialists brought disaster.