It’s never a good day to be Spanish

Jonathan Meades admires a history of Spain between 1874 and 2018 that unfolds as a series of nightmares

A PEOPLE BETRAYED

The historian whom Sir Paul Preston most recalls is Francisco Goya. In this relentless book, subtitled A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain, 1874-2018, year after year, decade after decade, regime after regime, chapter after chapter, atrocity is piled on atrocity: executions, mutilations, assassinations, violent strikebreaking, martial barbarity, state sanctioned “reprisals” for crimes that it had itself committed – all these are presaged in Goya’s Disasters Of War prints, which the Spanish artist made in reaction to the Peninsular War of 1808-14 and the French occupation of Spain but may equally be read as a horrible diagnosis of a priestinfested nation which has no appetite for agreeing to disagree or for the practice of compromise. Whatever form of governance it burdens itself with the result will be the same, condensed in the title of Goya’s print of a firing squad and its victims, And There’s No Cure.

Nor will there ever be one. Plus ça change and all that. Spain remains, in Preston’s view, irremediable. To his subtitular corruption, incompetence and social division might be added repression and political charlatans claiming that they embody the will of the people in order to silence their opponents and justify despotism.

Franco’s Nationalists called the bloodbath of 1936-39 the Holy War. The Spanish Civil War is a perhaps inadequate moniker. The unequivocal definite article grants that war a sort of exceptionalism. A Spanish Civil

War suggests what Preston implicitly proposes, that Spain, for over half a century before that conflict actually happened, rehearsed for it. Trouble was forever kicking off all over. During the years covered here three prime ministers were assassinated: maybe Spain is on to something.

The narrative begins with restoration of the complicatedly inbred Bourbon monarchy after the brief and chaotic First

Republic. The frail 17-year-old Alfonso XII assumed the throne. It’s a clever Bourbon that knows his father. Alfonso’s was probably a member of his mother’s guard. So he was fortunate to escape the gene pool that had diminished to a puddle.

He was, however, not a lucky man. Although he survived two assassination attempts – one by a pastry chef, the other by a cooper, both garrotted – he lost his first wife to typhus and died of dysentery at 27. It is evident that the Spanish monarchy was as politically impotent and as vacuous as the British. The business of bent government and outrageous peculation continued no matter who was on the throne. The two main parties, conservative and liberal, enjoyed a cosy mateyness. They took it in turns to rule.

This turn system was “an exclusive minuet danced by a small privileged minority”. More or less rotten boroughs and de facto hereditary seats abounded. The status quo took advantage of high illiteracy and a dependent, all but enslaved, landless agrarian population. Bread shortages and food riots were commonplace even as the country caught up with its neighbours.

Not that the wealth so accrued translated into political muscle. The northern, mainly Atlantic regions which had been the earliest to industrialise – the Basque Country, the Asturias, Galicia, plus Catalonia – militated for secession because they were excluded, unrepresented: of the almost thousand ministers who held office in the half century between the two republics only about 20 were Catalan. The power remained with the latifundistas who ruled vast estates with private militias under the command of stewards like Scottish factors. The military and the church also clung to power and would, of course, side with Franco’s Nationalists. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno who was too internationally famous to execute would describe the Nationalists as “catholic without Christianity… they practise ancient militarised Spanish traditions that are not Christian”.

Spain lost Cuba and was humiliated in Morocco, not least because of King Alfonso XIII’s interference. Patience with forever mutating but reliably weak governments grew thin. As is so often the case, a “strong man” was called for. Alfonso, a characteristically dim-witted monarch fond of fast cars and with a tendency to make speeches which were own goals, connived in

Miguel Primo de Rivera’s coup without realising that it undermined his own position. In an apparent competition to demonstrate lack of self-awareness Primo published a manifesto condemning the very nepotism and favouritism which had enabled his rise. Unamuno decried it as “pornographic” and described Primo as “a pleasure-seeking general of below average intelligence”.

Primo was a textbook dictator. He suspended parliament and censored the press. He was laughably mendacious, notably in his promises to Catalonia, whose secessionist parties were banned and whose bilingual street signs were removed. His reign was informed by cronyism and clientelism. He surrounded himself with yes-men. He imposed martial law which, with a change of name, transmuted into a “civilian directory”.

Among its brass was the sometime military governor of Barcelona, Severiano Martinez

Franco’s body ought to have been dumped in a skip, not removed to a family crypt

Anido, who – and he was not alone in being in such a position – was blackmailed by the organiser of his hit squads. Among Martinez’s achievements was securing for his son a national monopoly on rodent extermination: Unamuno called him “an epileptic pig”.

Martinez was merely a smalltime vengeful gangster with a high rank and a gaudy uniform, one of hundreds who stain these pages. He was insignificant beside the ubiquitous figure of Juan March Ordinas, a sometime tobacco smuggler, petroleum industrialist, banker to impecunious royalty and fixer who developed into a fully formed, free range, totally legit “philanthropist” with a pretty much global reach. Here he is under suspicion of murdering his wife’s lover, fleeing to Paris disguised as a priest; here he is denounced in parliament, backing a failed coup against the Second Republic, using his five newspapers to spread antiRepublican propaganda, fixing elections, buying immunity from prosecution, receiving money to spy for Britain, bribing liberally, being sarcastically proclaimed “the Sultan of Spain”, paying for the charter of the aircraft (at Croydon) which would, in 1936, take the still-dithering Nationalist puppet Franco from the Canaries to Morocco. That was when rehearsal ended and the Holy War began.

Preston does not pretend to impartiality. He does not for a moment buy into the entirely bogus notion of an equivalence between the two major factions in the Holy War, a notion born, of course, of governmental lies and victors’ propaganda. The proposition that Western Europe’s bulkiest lump of devotional kitsch, the basilica of the Valle de los Caidos, is a monument to all who died in the war, irrespective of side, can be believed only by the gullible, the delusional, Catholic naïfs and sick nostalgics – who will doubtless still flock there even now that Franco has been removed to a family crypt. His body ought to have been dumped on a skip.

A People Betrayed is the work of a very great historian who knows all there is to know about his often sanguinary subject and who, beyond that, can impart his knowledge in swift muscular prose. His bias towards the underdog is humane and tonic. In an interview with another great historian, Ian Kershaw, he suggested that it derived from his lifelong support for Everton Football Club. Well, we all have our mis-hit cross to bear.

Jonathan Meades’s Pedro and Ricky Come Again will be published in October. Call 0844 871 1514 to order A People Betrayed for £25