Exile and Return
(1936–1949)
On 28 June 1949, the press announced that Alejandro Lerroux had died of a heart complaint in the early hours of the previous day. He was eighty-five. He died ‘in the bosom of the Catholic Church’ and ‘comforted by the spiritual assistance’ of his parish priest and friend, father Moreno. But the news was no surprise to many of his friends and acquaintances in Madrid. Many had already come to pay their last respects to his nephew Aurelio and his wife. Lerroux no longer resided in calle O’Donnell, so they headed to 4 Marqués de Villamejor, adjacent to the central thoroughfare of the Paseo de la Castellana, where the former prime minister lived following his return from Portuguese exile in July 1947. They brought ‘countless flowers’ to go alongside the numerous ‘telegrams of condolence’ received ‘from all the provinces of Spain’. Although the family tried to prevent his funeral becoming a political act, let alone an anti-Francoist gathering, the backgrounds of the mourners suggested the opposite.
Among them was Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, the chief-editor of ABC and friend of Lerroux from their days in the Press Association. At 6.15 p.m. on 27 June, he witnessed the coffin being carried into the Concepción Church from a modest hearse. Among the crowd following the body were fellow monarchists Count Romanones, Gabriel Maura, Natalio Rivas, Joaquín Calvo Sotelo, Juan Pujol, José Martínez Acacio, the widow of general Cavalcanti and the Count of Vallellano. While the ceremony did not have the pomp of an ex-prime minister’s funeral, other attendees included the Cortes speaker, the carlist Esteban Bilbao, and Madrid’s mayor, the former CEDA deputy José Moreno Torres. Their presence ameliorated the hostility emanating from monarchists towards a regime encountering serious internal and external problems. These critics also included former republican ministers who believed that the return of a king would be the best way to restore constitutional politics such as Rafael Guerra del Río, Cirilo del Río, Vicente Iranzo, José María Cid, Diego Hidalgo, César Jalón, Ramón Feced and a host of others who had served Radical governments or supported them from the backbenches. Perhaps the most poignant example of this was the appearance of generals Luis Castelló and Mariano Muñoz Castellanos, close associates of Lerroux in the war ministry who fought on different sides during the civil war.
Recalling the funeral, Luca de Tena’s hostility towards the Republic diminished slightly. He acknowledged that ‘History would have radically changed’ if that regime ‘had consolidated under a presidency held by don Alejandro Lerroux’, a man ‘profoundly liberal in spirit and action’ who alone among the victors of 1931 sought to ‘liberalise, democratise and make bearable’ the political earthquake of 14 April. That explained the reaction to his death: ‘nearly every one of us were monarchists at Lerroux’s [burial]. Just imagine saying to don Alejandro on 14 April 1931 that among the chief mourners in his funeral would mainly be . . . adversaries of that form of Government that had been the hope and goal of his life!’1
Nevertheless, Luca de Tena’s memory was selective. He had forgotten that among the congregation were also old men who represented a dwindling ideal that Lerroux embodied best in his later years: liberal constitutionalism. Since the Franco regime was an explicit repudiation of this tradition, it could never consider the former prime minister as one of its own. As defenders of the rule of law, centre-right moderates who governed under both the constitutional monarchy and the Republic could not identify with the Caudillo. At best, they had to put up with his dictatorship, obeying it as the unavoidable consequence of a political catastrophe.
This sums up Lerroux’s attitude towards the Nationalists during the civil war. His support for Franco was reactive; in no way does it suggest a deep commitment to what would be forty years of authoritarianism. After all, it was not the first civil war in modern Spanish history, and constitutionalism had always survived. Without wanting to become a martyr, Lerroux’s decision to back the July 1936 rebellion was a logical confirmation of his political trajectory. He was the prime minister who had defeated the revolutionaries of 1934 and fought against the Popular Front in February 1936. He and his supporters suffered the consequences of electoral defeat as they were harassed and hounded in the months leading up to the fratricidal conflict. Had Lerroux stayed in Republican Madrid in 1936, it is likely that he would have shared the same grisly fates of José Martínez Velasco and Melquíades Álvarez, the leaders of the Agrarians and the Liberal Democrats, as well as other Radical and CEDA politicians. Their murders were evidence – if any were needed – that the rule of law no longer existed in the Republican zone. But the Radical leader’s initial backing for the rebels did not imply that he approved of the subsequent process of ‘Falangistisation’ that transformed a cause that at the outset Lerroux thought was a republican defence of order. How else could he had acted that bloody summer, when the head of the Council of National Defence [Junta de Defensa Nacional] in July 1936 was general Miguel Cabanellas, the most prominent Radical within the military? Why would Lerroux doubt Mola or Franco, the two leading generals of the rebellion whom he had earlier rescued from political ostracism, even placing the latter in charge of the forces that vanquished the revolutionaries of 1934?
Taking Sides
Lerroux did not make his usual sojourn to Baños de Montemayor at the beginning of June 1936. The resort manager warned him of disturbances in the spa town and could not guarantee his safety. The Radical leader decided to go to Portugal instead in order to continue the writing of his memoirs in peace. He had started work on them that spring, although due to the failings of his long-time secretary Sánchez Fuster, his papers were in a chaotic state. Both his wife Teresa and nephew Aurelio were relieved at the change of holiday destination as they became ever more alarmed at the decline of public order in Madrid that prompted the family to place its money, precious items and bonds in a safety deposit box within the Bank of Spain.
On the morning of 13 July, Lerroux heard of the kidnap and murder of José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the National Bloc. The Radical leader’s family panicked when they realised that policemen were among the perpetrators. His wife demanded that they leave Madrid immediately for San Rafael, and returned only on 16 July to prepare their luggage for journey to Portugal the following week. After lunch the next day, when conspirators in Melilla were on the brink of revolt, Martín Báguenas, an old police friend involved in the planning of the rebellion in Madrid, warned Lerroux that he should leave the capital immediately. Taking heed of this advice, the family took their belongings back to San Rafael, although Sánchez Fuster preferred to stay behind in Madrid. With the head of his protection team bringing the passports, Teresa asked her husband to go to Portugal the following day, 18 July, while she would follow with Aurelio and their daughter-in-law three days later. She hoped that they would all be back in Spain a month later.
Lerroux set off early the next morning unaware that the garrisons in Spanish Morocco and the Canaries had already risen against the government. His destination was the Curia hotel-spa in the Portuguese Buçaco mountains, and he reckoned it would take the entire day to arrive. While travelling west he noticed a heavy police presence on the Avila-Salamanca road, but reached the frontier without incident at 1 p.m. After a long wait and a baggage search, he crossed into Portugal and reached the hotel at 7 p.m. It was only then that he read the first reports of the rebellion in the local press. His heart fluttered when he saw reports about fighting near his home at the Guadarrama Pass where he had left his family hours earlier. Afterwards, he received a phone call from general Cavalcanti who wanted to know his reaction to the rebellion. Lerroux replied that although he was not involved, he would not oppose it, although his only focus was locating the whereabouts of his family. This remained his main preoccupation until they were reunited three weeks later on 11 August.
By that date, it was evident that the failed military rising had turned into civil war. Lerroux issued a public note of support for the insurgents, and on Spain’s National Day of 12 October, pledged his allegiance to the recently elevated Nationalist leader Francisco Franco. In the latter missive, he refused to recognise the ‘apparent legality’ of the Popular Front government, as this was based on ‘an artificially rigged [election] result’. Leftist ministers, he went on, were ultimately responsible for the violation of civil rights to the point that ‘the life, the home, the property and the conscience of each citizen was protected only by the individual means of defence available to him’. This was the inevitable consequence of the decision on 19 July to give up the monopoly of legitimate force by distributing weapons to Popular Front parties and trade union organisations. Consequently, the Caudillo was merely doing the same as he had done in October 1934, saving the ‘ethical and moral principles that underpin the nation, society and civilisation’.2
Lerroux dismissed Republican propaganda that portrayed the war as a conflict between democracy and fascism. While recognising that possession of the principal organs of state gave the left a moral legitimacy abroad, he could not accept that ‘Popular Front Spain has a democratic character’ as it would ‘take an effort of imagination or hypocrisy that goes beyond reasonable limits’. It was absurd, he argued, to conflate ‘communism’ with ‘democracy’ while at the same time labelling those liberal politicians who opposed the Popular Front as ‘authoritarians’. Using similar arguments to Gregorio Marañón and Clara Campoamor, the exiled Radical warned that the left republicans have been disembowelled by the revolutionary forces of socialism interested only in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Lerroux did not fail to realise than an attempt to defend the Nationalist cause from a liberal democratic perspective sounded incongruous, but appealed to international opinion to recognise that the rebels represented the Spanish army which was but ‘the people organised and armed by the nation’ to defend ‘the law and rights’ besmirched by revolutionaries. The Nationalist movement was but as an ‘interim power’ created by the destruction of the rule of law by the Popular Front. Moreover, he insisted that the army had acted in defence of the Republic, using its flag, national anthem and acclamations. He may not have been directly involved, but when dealing the communists, the military rebels faced ‘the battle standard of one dictatorship’, and ‘raised that of another dictatorship’, the army. With democracy crushed in a struggle between two dictatorships, he had to take sides, and inclined towards the latter.3
However, the continuation of the war and the ‘fascistisation’ of the Nationalist zone placed Lerroux in an increasingly uncomfortable position during the course of 1937. He supported Franco on the basis that he led a strictly military dictatorship that would only last until victory was secured, public order restored and ‘disappearance’ of ‘the dangers’ that had caused the war. With Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship in mind, he wanted neither a prolongation of exceptional measures nor the institutionalisation of an authoritarian regime. With ‘the dangers’ eliminated, Franco should give way to a ‘regime of responsible liberty and organised democracy that guaranteed . . . order and authority’ and stabilised society ‘on the paths of progressive development and social justice’. Lerroux no longer thought of a liberal democracy but of a Republic that combined aspects of his hosts’ Salazarism with representative institutions. This, he hoped, would help heal the wounds of the civil war and stamp out demands to exterminate the political enemy. The conflict had to be won, but once it was over, the vanquished should be reincorporated into the ‘common Patria’.4
Did all this mean that Lerroux had renounced liberal democracy? His 1937 memoir Pequeña Historia shows that this was not the case. He accepted that it had not worked well in Spain ‘whether with Monarchies or with Republics’, even if he did not clarify why the latter always ended so quickly. In any case, and reflecting sadly on the course of his own political career, he implored an end to the dynamic of ‘going through life coming and going from the Monarchy to the Republic, from the Republic to the Dictatorship, and from the Dictatorship to the Monarchy’. There needed to be an end to the sacrifice of so many generations ‘who succumbed heroically, tragically and futilely in the task’. This could only come, he wrote, with the realisation that constitutions in themselves do not create democracies and freedoms. Without deep roots, Spanish constitutionalism had co-existed with openly dictatorial governments and ‘oligarchies of various kinds, organised in political parties’. Like the republican he was, Lerroux reasoned that reforming representative government to reconstruct a legal and institutional system within Spain that would guarantee individual freedoms and facilitate popular participation was not the priority. Rather, he called for nothing less than the remaking of a people incapable of governing itself in order to build a democracy founded on a common ideal of mutual respect. This was the mission of his ‘regime of responsible liberty and organised democracy’; it had to plant the seeds of ‘culture’ that would eventually produce the flowers of freedom and democracy.
As a lifelong patriot, it was axiomatic for Lerroux that any regime that emerged from the military dictatorship would not slavishly imitate a foreign model. With its foundations based on ‘the depths of tradition’, this new political system would be shaped by ‘the spirituality of a common civilisation’, even if it remained ultimately rooted in ‘present realities’. His vision was not a static one, as it essential to promote ‘moral and material prosperity’ through peaceful, gradual and patient change. Even during the dark days of 1937, he dismissed as ‘sectarian prejudice’ the argument that freedom, democracy and parliamentary government were in terminal decline and mocked those who sought to revive authoritarian institutions that had ‘failed’ in the past.
Lerroux’s criticism of those within Nationalist Spain who wanted to use the war to sever Spain’s link with the values of western civilisation could not be more explicit. Carlist or Falangist conceptions of organic democracy, guilds and corporations may have been ‘essences’ that ‘do not evaporate’, but they were also pure ‘political archaeology’. If communism was the ‘complete denial of our [human] personality’, Spain should not adopt ‘fascist or Nazi’ models either, irrespective of the supposed achievements of Mussolini and Hitler: ‘If we are right in being Spanish patriots above everything, then perhaps we already have the solution that our necessities demand’. Lerroux did not have a problem if the Francoist authorities thought the answer lay in organic democracy and a corporative parliament. But he reaffirmed his devotion ‘until the end of my days, because of conviction and decorum’ in ‘a republican, democratic, liberal and parliamentary regime’. As this required ‘the people to be educated again’ to ensure that freedom could be exercised ‘completely’ and enjoyed ‘to its greatest extent’, he did not hesitate to call for the present generation to make sacrifices so that it could ‘live without sun to allow the rain to fertilise the earth’. Someday, he dreamed, ‘the sun of liberty’ would rise and ‘shine again on Spain’.5
A Tolerant and Inclusive Leader
Lerroux’s wartime writings are valuable in that they dispel the myth about his supposed intellectual vacuity. These are not the words of an opportunist who sacrificed everything to get political power for nefarious or corrupt ends. They are the thoughts of a seasoned statesman committed to constitutional politics who managed to prosper originally as an outside critic of ‘the system’ and later as the leader of an electorally successful political movement that mirrored his strengths and ambitions. There were failures: he could not make the Radical Party the national equivalent of the Barcelona machine that provided his first taste of political victory during the 1900s. While his party served as a vehicle for power in the 1930s, he was never able to establish an effective organisation capable of sustaining lasting loyalties outside election campaigns. He also clung to romantic notions of revolution for far too long, not adjuring the faith until the last years of the constitutional monarchy; a radical firebrand until 1910, his ambivalent attitude to dynastic politics for the next decade may not have brought the system down but it scarcely strengthened it. Yet this hardly makes him unique among republicans. If one compares his direction of travel with those republicans who came before and after him, we find that Lerroux came to terms with constitutionalism much more quickly; once that step was taken, his main priority became the legal pursuit of power by the Radical Party.6
Lerroux’s distain for long-winded political programmes and dense intellectualism can be easily explained. He was a born organiser scornful of the narrow doctrinal disputes that characterised Spanish republicanism after the restoration of the monarchy in 1874. He discovered that effective leadership was necessarily grounded in ambiguity, and used this insight to construct the most formidable republican movement in Spain before the civil war. Although his less successful political rivals accused him of a lack of principle, the very reason for his popularity among the electorate was his ability to convey simply his vision of a modern Spain. From his youth in Madrid to enforced exile in Portugal, Lerroux believed that a Republic was the best way to democratise the nation. He entranced audiences with talk of civil equality and the end of privilege; the state would serve the many not the few. His evocation of the cross class ‘republican pueblo’ against the ‘monarchist oligarchy’ and its malevolent ‘caciques’ was so powerful because it was sincerely believed; conviction slowed the journey towards a more liberal and inclusive politics that was taken by others like Melquiades Álvarez.
Yet with time Lerroux combined his ideas about the Republic and democracy with a growing appreciation for civil liberties and tolerance; a ‘live and let live’ attitude7 eroded his youthful quasi-religious passion for equality and fraternity. He no longer saw the state as an instrument through which one party could remodel society according its ideological whims; rather than seeing revolutions as midwives to the new society, Lerroux feared them as being more destructive than creative. By 1923, he argued that positive and lasting reform could only come about slowly, and that elections and parliaments were more useful tools for change than bullets and barricades. This conclusion took him to the brink of accepting office under Alfonso XIII before the political crisis provoked by the Annual disaster of 1921 and Primo de Rivera’s pronunciamiento two years later relieved him of the arduous task of transforming his anti-system Radical Party into a respectable candidate for government. Nonetheless, his reversion to the old shibboleths of Spanish republicanism during the subsequent dictatorship was more apparent than real. Although Lerroux was the leading figure in the Republican Alliance, he never severed his ties with such liberals as Romanones, Melquíades Álvarez and Santiago Alba and indeed worked with them to find an exit from authoritarian government that would restore constitutional government as peacefully as possible. The Republic was no longer the sine qua non of Spanish democracy.
It is in this context that we should place the Radical leader’s ambivalence towards the Republican-Socialist Alliance and above all his telling silences that Alcalá-Zamora and Azaña simplistically attributed to his ‘lack of preparation’ for government. For better or worse, Lerroux did not compare unfavourably to the average republican or socialist politician, and unlike them had many years of political experience behind him. His reluctance to speak out in the last days of the monarchy and within the Provisional Government was a way to avoid making uncomfortable commitments to others in the Alliance whom he had to work with in his role as Spain’s most prominent republican leader. This was obvious after 14 April 1931, when the euphoria of taking power induced his partners to turn leftwards while a more cautious Lerroux took his party in the opposite direction, losing power and influence in the process.
So how should we understand the Radical Party during the Second Republic? Was it left-wing, centrist, or right-wing? Throughout this period, the party used all these labels tactically. Sometimes it emphasised radicalism to underline its origins and retain the loyalty of the faithful. On other occasions, it sounded conservative to attract the centre-right vote. With the party system in flux, ambiguity was a virtue, not a vice. Yet this should not be mistaken for a lack of strategy. Lerroux never wavered in his objective of making the Radical Party the most significant centrist voice of the Republic against the siren calls of the PSOE and its left republican allies. This was not historically unique; the Radical Progressive Party sought to do the same in the 1873 Republic.
The commitment to moderation ensured that the Radicals became the most important republican party in the 1930s. Of course, errors were made. Antipathy towards the Liberal Republican Right – mutual it needs to be said – and Lerroux’s efforts to keep Azaña within the Republican Alliance contributed to the eventual hegemony of the socialist-left republican coalition within the constituent assembly. In a parliament where former monarchists were thin on the ground, Lerroux decided that the Radicals would be the conservative wing of the constitutionalised revolution of 1931, and eschewed the opportunity to denounce unreservedly its anti-liberal and anti-democratic spirit. Struggling to decide whether the party should move firmly to the right or conciliate the left republicans in the hope of peeling them away from the socialists, Lerroux allowed his right-wing flank to be occupied by others who did not share his commitment to the Republic. His hesitation carried a heavy electoral price, as the Radicals could not take advantage of the conservative tide in November 1933 to become the largest party in the new parliament.
In the aftermath of this shock electoral result, the impromptu pact with the CEDA and the Agrarians demonstrated the extent to which his strategy was neither opportunistic nor merely centrist. By then the Radicals no longer occupied an equidistant position between left and right. The departure of Martínez Barrio and the October 1934 insurrection accelerated the shift to the right that had already begun. That the majority of a once leftist party followed its leader in this journey cannot be attributed simply to his leadership or internal discipline. The partisan Constitution of 1931, and the failures of the left republican-socialist coalition government, convinced the Radicals that liberal democracy and its longstanding commitment to social harmony would be better served with a centre-right coalition rather than collaboration with those who had polarised Spanish society by deepening the ‘class struggle’.
Many who knew Lerroux after 1918 stressed his clarity of judgement, and this was on display in November 1933 when he turned the republicans’ electoral defeat into a new opportunity for the Republic. His genuine commitment to liberal democracy was shown during the desperate days of October 1934, when he overcame the most violent insurrection in sixty years without turning to authoritarianism. Although some observers compared Lerroux to André Tardieu, the moderate republican leader who dominated French politics in the early 1930s, he was more like his idol Georges Clemenceau, the left republican patriot who led France to victory over Germany in 1918. A fervent anticlerical in his youth, ‘The Tiger’ ended his career as leader of the conservative National Bloc in reaction to revolutionary strikes of the 1900s and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Lerroux may not have been a war leader, but he fought on numerous political fronts against multiple enemies. When dealing with the unremitting hostility of left republicans, he had to remain watchful of Alcalá-Zamora’s efforts to torpedo his efforts to integrate the Catholic right while defeating the revolutionary aspirations of the anarchosyndicalists (December 1933) and socialists (1933–1934). If that was not enough, he had to confront the challenge of Catalan and Basque nationalism (summer and autumn 1934). It is therefore one of the great ironies of the short history of the Republic that Lerroux was sunk by a minor case of corruption (estraperlo) and a non-scandal (the Nombela affair). As even Portela recognised, both episodes only became politically significant due to ‘the stupid trumpeting from the highest level’8, or presidential intrigues intended to destroy Lerroux’s leadership and the cohesion of the Radical Party. After making an enormous effort to construct the a centre-right ruling bloc, Gil-Robles threw it all away in an effort to preserve the reputation of the CEDA without realising that without his Radical allies, he had little chance of forming a government.
A great opportunity to consolidate the Republic had been lost. By the summer of 1935, it appeared that Lerroux had finally managed to escape the political quarantine of the Republican-Socialist Alliance. No longer did he need to remain silent about his hopes of a moderate Republic in order to remain in office. Unlike in 1931, his party played a key role drafting constitutional reform that promised a more liberal and democratic political system. His supporters understood this project, and the vast majority voted for the centre-right coalition in February 1936 rather than Martínez Barrio’s leftist alternative. Lerroux had carved out his own political space and made the Radicals the anchor of the Republic.
So for this political historian, it is puzzling why Lerroux’s reputation has remained low relative to other republicans like Alcalá-Zamora or Azaña. As Juan José Linz has demonstrated, the Radical leader’s political career is instructive when analysing the consolidation of democratic regimes. In his pioneering work on the Radicals forty years ago, Octavio Ruiz Manjón stressed that Lerroux’s tolerant and inclusive remedy to heal the wounds opened by the 1923 military coup was founded on the values of ‘generosity’ and ‘consensus’. Derided in the 1930s as the remnants of a dying outdated liberalism, these ideals later became the basic ingredients of the 1978 Constitution, Spain’s most successful Magna Carta.9
Lerroux’s ‘loyal and disinterested’ pledge to the Francoist cause did not ingratiate him with the victors of 1939. Persecution at the hands of the left did not count for much. In the early months of war, socialists confiscated his calle O’Donnell home, destroyed part of the furniture and forced open the safe, confiscating ‘various thousands of pesetas in cash, a handful of jewels and other valuables’. The Madrid PSOE quickly converted the building into its eastern district base, and even used its cellars as a prison. Yet these were not the only examples of revolutionary justice against the ‘butcher’ of October 1934. After militiamen arrested Sánchez Fuster, Lerroux’s secretary revealed the details of his employer’s bank accounts and safety deposit boxes in order to save his own life. When opened, the government confiscated nearly one million pesetas, and the Republican press used ‘Lerroux’s Treasure’ as the basis of a smear campaign against the Radical leader with the participation of a terrified Fuster.
What happened to relatives and associates was even worse. His aged widowed sister Adriana lost her sight in prison after being arrested in Valencia on the orders of Ángel Galarza, the socialist interior minister. At least she survived, unlike many of the party’s former ministers, deputies, mayors and councillors who perished in Republican Spain. They included his old friend Juan José Rocha, who died in Montjuich, the very prison that had been the focus of Lerroux’s furious pen forty years earlier.10
Some Radicals who managed to cross the lines into Nationalist Spain found to their surprise that they were under investigation. Although membership of the Radical Party did not incur punishment under the terms of the Law of Political Responsibilities of February 1939, the same was not true of Freemasonry, which included Lerroux and other Radical figures among its number. This helps to explain why the Francoist authorities refused to allow the former prime minister to return to Spain at the end of the war. Instead, the military authorities occupied his Madrid home until 1941, and on departure took what was left of the furniture and library. As his estate in Gudillos was close to the front during the war, it served as a refuge for Falangist troops who amused themselves by drinking his wine cellar dry and smashing whatever took their fancy. When the fascists moved on, others came to pillage the remains. Abandoned to the elements, the Civil Guard had to intervene to prevent the main building from being demolished by a gang who sold construction materials on the black-market.11
In 1940, Lerroux’s ill wife finally managed to return to Madrid in order to receive treatment from the family doctor. She located the remnants of the family’s property and rented a modest flat to await the arrival of her husband. Lerroux remained in a small hotel in Estoril that he had occupied in 1937, living off income obtained by writing articles in the Latin American press. But the old politician could not come home, despite Teresa narrowly avoiding death in February 1941. Subject to a Law of Political Responsibilities investigation, his assets were frozen for three months, and when the case was closed, the Special Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, created in March 1940, charged him for joining a Masonic lodge. Before the Spanish consul in Lisbon, Lerroux responded by stressing that his membership was purely passive, even if he admitted paying dues between 1886 and 1934. He refused a deal that would have involved naming other brothers, irrespective of the fact ‘I had shown . . . that I was never in a position to learn Masonic secrets’. Acquittal only came in 1945 due to his contribution ‘to the cause of order’.
His wife, tired of constant dealings with Francoist investigators, died on 11 March 1943 with Lerroux forcibly absent.12 Her death affected him deeply. When at last he returned to Spain in 1947, the regime forced the exhausted and sick man to declare that he would remain outside politics. The once celebrated politician spent the rest of his life at home awaiting death. With his final breath two years later, the liberal Republic perished.