Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931 – 1936
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The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931 – 1936 Maria Angharad Thomas Royal Holloway University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, 2012 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Maria Angharad Thomas, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This thesis is an exploration of the motives, mentalities and collective identities which lay behind acts of popular anticlerical violence and iconoclasm during the pre-war Spanish Second Republic (1931-1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The five year period following the proclamation of the democratic Second Republic in April 1931 was marked by physical assaults upon the property and public ritual of the Spanish Catholic Church. These grassroots attacks were generally carried out by rural and urban anticlerical workers who were frustrated by the Republic’s practical inability to tackle the Church’s vast power. On 17-18 July 1936, a rightwing military rebellion divided Spain geographically, provoking the radical fragmentation of power in territory which remained under Republican authority. The coup marked the beginning of a conflict which developed into a full-scale civil war. Anticlerical protagonists, with the reconfigured structure of political opportunities working in their favour, participated in an unprecedented wave of iconoclasm and violence against the clergy. During the first six months of the conflict, innumerable religious buildings were destroyed and almost 7,000 religious personnel were killed. This thesis challenges standard interpretations which link these acts to irrationality, criminality and primitiveness. It focuses directly upon the agents of anticlerical violence, exploring the connections between the anticlerical outpouring of July 1936 and those forms of anticlericalism that were already emerging before the coup. It argues that Spanish popular anticlericalism was a phenomenon which was undergoing a radical process of reconfiguration during the first three decades of the twentieth century. During a period of rapid social, cultural and political change, anticlerical acts took on new, explicitly political meanings, becoming both a catalyst and a symptom of social change. After 17-18 July 1936, anticlerical violence became an implicitly constructive force for many of its protagonists: an instrument with which to build a new society. 3 The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931 – 1936: Contents Page List of Abbreviations 5 – 6 Introduction 7 – 48 Chapter One: The Construction of Anticlerical Collective Identities Before 1931 49 – 81 Chapter Two: Expectation, Mobilisation and Grassroots Secularisation during the Second Republic 82 – 118 Chapter Three: Profiling the Protagonists of Anticlerical Violence 119 – 152 Chapter Four: ‘We have come to place you at liberty and to burn the convent.’ Gender, Sexuality and Anticlerical Violence 153 – 178 Chapter Five: Anticlerical Violence as a Building Block 179 – 210 Chapter Six: The Physiognomy of Anticlerical Violence 211 – 246 Conclusions 247 – 252 Bibliography 253 – 281 4 List of Abbreviations ACCPCE - Archivo del Comité Central del Partido Comunista Español ADM - Archivo Diocesano de Madrid-Alcalá AGA - Archivo General de la Administración AHN - Archivo Histórico Nacional AHPA - Archivo Histórico Provincial de Almería AMM - Archivo Militar de Madrid ASV – Archivo Secreto Vaticano ATM – Audiencia Territorial de Madrid ATTMA - Archivo del Tribunal Togado Militar de Almería CDMH - Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica CEDA – Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas CG – Causa General CNT – Confederación Nacional de Trabajo FAI – Federación Anarquista Ibérica FNTT – Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra FO – Foreign Office INE – Instituto Nacional de Estadística IR – Izquierda Republicana JJEE, TRP - Jurisdicciones Especiales, Tribunal de Responsabilidades Políticas JJLL – Juventudes Libertarias JSU – Juventudes Socialista Unificadas Interior – Ministerio del Interior LSEA - LSE Archive NA - National Archives PCE – Partido Comunista de España 5 PRRD – Persecución Religiosa Reorganización Diócesis PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español PS Madrid – Político-Social Madrid PS-Santander – Político-Social Santander UGT – Unión General de Trabajadores UP – Unión Patriótica 6 Introduction And the God of Love they paint for us/Does not exist. We guess the impossibility of God, God the eternally mute, God the unfeeling, the uncouth/The abyss. The God who Christ says lives/In Heaven is unjust Federico García Lorca1 ...those men who walk through the streets dressed as women with black clothes on. They’re bad, really bad, always on the side of the rich and never with poor people like us. A working class mother in Andalucía explains the figure of the priest to her six-year-old son2 At the beginning of May 1936, rumours began to circulate in several workers’ districts of Madrid that nuns and members of Catholic lay associations were distributing poisoned sweets to workers’ children. As reports of the alleged clerical maleficence flew from mouth to mouth, anger and anxiety mounted among local people. On 4 May, large crowds took to the streets, protesting against the ‘poisoning’ outside churches and religious schools. In the popular neighbourhood of Cuatro Caminos, crowd members set fire to a church and its adjacent religious school. The attack marked the beginning of a wave of anticlerical incendiarism which lasted for most of the day. Across the Spanish capital, more than ten ecclesiastical buildings were left gutted, while several more suffered partial damages. A number of nuns were jostled, insulted, injured and forced to leave their convents. Several people assumed by their assailants to be ‘poisoners’ were attacked in the street.3 As the government issued a statement to the press regarding the falsehood of the rumours, construction workers in nearby Nuevos Ministerios declared a spontaneous strike in protest against ‘the attitude attributed to rightist elements concerning the distribution of poisoned sweets.’ 4 1 Federico García Lorca in Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p.65. 2 Abel Paz, Chumberas y alacranes (Barcelona: Diego Camacho, 1994), p.61. Anarchist activist and writer Abel Paz, who was a child in Almeria in the 1920s, recalls an early conversation with his mother. 3 Archivo Secreto Vaticano (ASV), Relato de los hechos antirreligiosos del 3-4 de mayo en Madrid (05/05/1936) in José Ramón Hernández Figueiredo, Destrucción del patrimonio religioso en la Segunda Republica: 1931 – 1936 (Madrid: BAC, 2009), pp.207-8. All further ASV references are to this volume; Archivo Histórico Nacional, Causa General (AHN, CG) legajo 1557-2: Madrid, pieza No. 10, exp. 5/323; 1514: Madrid, pieza No. 10, exps. 31/2, 31/13, 31/56, 31/59, 31/60; 31/79; 31/91; 31/92; El Debate, 27/05/1936; El Socialista, 05/05/1936; British National Archives, Foreign Office (NA, FO) 371/20521, Chilton to FO, 04/05/1936; John Langdon Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades (London: Reportage Press, 2007), p.51; Claude Bowers, My Mission to Spain: Watching the Rehearsal for World War Two (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954), pp.224-25 4 José Luis González Gullón, ‘El bulo de los caramelos envenenados (3 y 4 de mayo de 1936)’, in Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza and Luis E. Togores (eds.), La otra memoria (Madrid: Actas, 2011), pp. 650- 60. 7 The five-year period following the proclamation of the democratic Spanish Second Republic in April 1931 was marked by numerous physical assaults upon the property and public ritual of the Spanish Catholic Church. Grassroots attacks like the one outlined above were generally carried out by rural and urban anticlerical workers who were deeply frustrated by the Republic’s practical inability to tackle the Church’s vast social, cultural, political and economic power. On 17-18 July 1936, a rightwing military rebellion aimed at halting the social and political changes inaugurated by the Republic divided Spain geographically, provoking the radical fragmentation of power in territory which remained under Republican authority. The coup marked the beginning of a conflict which developed into a full-scale civil war. Anticlerical protagonists, with the reconfigured structure of political opportunities working in their favour, participated in an unprecedented wave of iconoclasm and violence against the clergy. Innumerable religious buildings and liturgical objects were destroyed and almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns were killed, the vast majority during the first six months of the conflict.5 The current historiographical status of this subject inevitably reflects the victory of the Church-backed rebel forces over the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The Franco dictatorship, in close collaboration with religious personnel, had a monopoly on writing the history of the anticlerical violence and iconoclasm of the pre-war Republic and the civil war. This official history was grounded in the construction and continual reinforcement of a Manichean image of the ‘two Spains’: one comprised of the war’s Catholic, patriotic victors; the other populated by defeated, ‘red’, foreign ‘enemies of the fatherland’. The Franco regime used the image of the ‘martyrs’ of the conflict – the dead of its own ‘side’ – in order to legitimise itself in perpetuity.6