Miguel Primo de Rivera
Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja (Jerez de la Frontera, January 8, 1870 - Paris, March 16, 1930) was a Spanish dictator and soldier who ruled the country between 1923 and 1930., after leading, on September 13, 1923, a coup that had the approval of the monarch himself, Alfonso XIII. As soon as he took power, he suspended the Constitution of 1876 and established a dictatorship that, in a first phase (until 1925), took the form of a military directory and, later (until 1930), of a civil directory, chaired by himself. From the beginning he applied an interventionist and protectionist economic policy that, promoting investment in works public and infrastructure, and favored by a context of an expansive foreign economic cycle, it experienced notable economic growth.
In 1927 he founded the National Consultative Assembly, considered the first chamber of a corporatist nature in Europe during the interwar period, which would come to draw up a draft constitution of an anti-liberal and authoritarian nature.
Despite certain foreign policy successes, such as the resolution, with the military operation of the landing of Al Hoceima in 1925, of a territorial dispute that he had been holding with Morocco, Primo de Rivera was losing popularity among the population; Finally, after losing favor with the monarch and the Army, he ended up resigning on January 28, 1930. To replace him at the head of the Government, Alfonso XIII appointed General Dámaso Berenguer as president, who would inaugurate the historical period commonly known as the Dictablanda.
From Madrid, Primo de Rivera moved to Paris, where he would die just two months later, on March 16, 1930.
Biography
Youth
Miguel Primo de Rivera was born on January 8, 1870 in Jerez de la Frontera, province of Cádiz. The son of Miguel Primo de Rivera y Sobremonte, and Inés Orbaneja y Pérez de Grandallana, he belonged to a Jerez family with a military tradition, a career followed by his grandfather José Primo de Rivera, his uncle Fernando Primo de Rivera y Sobremonte, or his brother Fernando Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja. His childhood in the bosom of the landed aristocracy of Jerez was comfortable; although a sudden economic bankruptcy led his family to move to a more modest home.
Military career
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Primo de Rivera, who moved from his native Jerez to Madrid in 1882, was hosted by his uncle José. At the age of fourteen he entered the Military Academy and, having graduated, was assigned to Melilla in 1893 In recognition of his military merits in the capture of Cabrerizas Altas during the Margallo war, he received the Cruz de San Fernando and was promoted to captain. He spent most of his military career in colonial destinations, such as Morocco, Cuba and Philippines.
He was stationed in Cuba between 1895 and 1897 in two independent stays, the first accompanying General Arsenio Martínez Campos until his dismissal in January 1896, and the second accompanying his uncle Fernando Primo de Rivera from September 1896 until March 1897. Both Primo de Riveras were sent to the Philippines, where Miguel had to negotiate with groups of Filipino insurgents without the support of an escort. They embarked for the peninsula before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.
He married Casilda Sáenz de Heredia in 1902, daughter of the last mayor of Havana under Spanish rule, with whom he had six children before his death in 1908. In 1908 he was promoted to colonel and in 1909 posted to the north of Africa, where he took part in the Melilla war. He was wounded in October 1911 during the Kert campaign when he led the San Fernando infantry regiment. In 1911 he was promoted to the rank of general — brigadier; he would be promoted, in turn, to division general in 1914. In 1915 he was on the peninsula and was appointed military governor of Cádiz. He was one of the first members of the Nobility Action Center.
Due to his military career, he was linked to the group of Africanist soldiers, although at first he spoke out in favor of abandoning the North African protectorate.
Promoted to lieutenant general in July 1919, he was captain general of Valencia, Madrid and Catalonia. In Valencia he faced the problem of anarcho-syndicalist terrorism and came to apply expeditious methods to repress it. Primo de Rivera He came to suggest, for the first time in 1917 —he would do it again in 1921 and 1923—, the possibility of bartering with the United Kingdom exchanging Ceuta and Gibraltar, theses abandonists that would mean the cessation of as Governor of Cádiz in 1917 and as Captain General of Madrid in 1921. In 1920 he was elected senator for the province of Cádiz. In 1921 he would have wanted to accede to the Government. Primo de Rivera, who lost his brother Fernando in the Annual disaster, after his statements in November 1921 in the Senate in favor of the abandonment of the North African colonies, which caused an enormous uproar —and in which he would have stated "I estimate, from a strategic point of view, that a soldier beyond the Strait is detrimental to Spain»—, he was dismissed from his position as captain general of Madrid by the Government, a fervent supporter of remaining in Africa. He inherited the Marquesate of Estella from his uncle Fernando.
In May 1922 he was appointed Captain General of Catalonia. In Barcelona he established links with Severiano Martínez Anido, civil governor of the province of Barcelona, and with Joaquín Milans del Bosch, former captain general. During his tenure he promoted the Free Trade Unions for union repression and became a favorite of Catalan industrial and agricultural owners.
Coup d'état
In a political climate influenced by the Annual Disaster —and the Picasso File—, Primo de Rivera began to make preparations to carry out a military uprising. In September 1923, the then Captain General of Catalonia went to Madrid to try to gather support for the planned pronouncement, which did not come from Francisco Aguilera y Egea, a veteran general with ancestry who would have harbored desires to "save Spain", but yes, of a group of Africanist generals opposed to the latter known as the Quadrilateral. Juan O'Donnell joined the conspiracy in Madrid on the 12th at the last minute, thus opting Diego Muñoz Cobos for the coup as well. Primo had returned to Barcelona on the 9th.
Finally, at midnight from September 12 to 13, Miguel Primo de Rivera proclaimed a state of war in Barcelona and brought the military into the streets, occupying key buildings in the city. The same happened in the rest of the Catalan capitals. In the Catalan region, he had the support not only of the military, but also of the somatén, of industrialists and of conservative sectors in general. Outside of Catalonia, the same thing happened in Zaragoza and Huesca, where the military also seized strategic locations thanks to the fact that Sanjurjo had managed to convince the Captain General of Aragon, General Palanca, to "refrain" from intervening. In the first few hours, the pronouncement did not find any opposition.
Throughout the 13th, Primo de Rivera gave the order to his subordinates to "wait and resist", and he dedicated himself to making various reassuring statements to the press, avoiding all embarrassing questions. Primo de Rivera realized account of the military isolation in which he found himself, because outside of Catalonia and Aragon no general had clearly supported him. However, although the Army had not supported the coup, it did not position itself in favor of defending the constitutional regime either. The government, for its part, was divided. Only two ministers expressed their direct opposition to the coup —Portela Valladares and Admiral Aznar—, while the rest maintained a hesitant attitude. Admiral Aznar, in fact, refused to allow the Navy to bomb Barcelona. On the 14th, the king He returned to Madrid from San Sebastián and, in the meeting he held with the head of government, García Prieto, did not support him when he proposed to convene the Cortes and dismiss the rebel military commanders.
Thereupon, García Prieto resigned. After taking various steps, Alfonso XIII ended up calling Primo de Rivera to Madrid. At 1:15 p.m., the king granted power to Primo de Rivera, and then Captain General Muñoz Cobos declared a state of war in Madrid. According to Ucelay-Da Cal and Susanna Tavera, the coup Primo de Rivera would have put an end to one of the achievements of Canovism: the discrediting of the "interclass appeal to insurrection" as a political tool.
Dictatorship
Military Directory
The pronouncement was well received by the Maurista wing of Antonio Goicoechea, the rest of the non-dynastic parties, the opinion media, the employers' organizations and even, after an impasse of passivity, by a large part of the citizenry. The monarch, who claimed to have had prior knowledge of the coup plans, enthusiastically supported the initial period of the dictatorship. The military directorate suspended constitutional guarantees, declared a state of war, and proceeded to suddenly remove all civilian governors in the provinces, replacing them with the military governors. On his transfer from Barcelona to Madrid Primo decided on the fly to continue with the military directory once he arrived in Madrid instead of establishing the planned civil directory presided over by himself.
In September 1923, the somatén, the traditional Catalan militia, extended to the entire Spanish territory through the Royal Decree of September 17 establishing the National Somatén. Through the Royal Decree of September 30, the dismissal of all the councilors of the town halls, with the subsequent replacement by boards of vowels —taxpayers not democratically elected—, in a process led by the military authority; these members would be in charge of electing the mayor and the rest of the municipal offices.
After the 1923 coup, the tiny group with fascist whims of La Traza (later the Spanish Civil Somatenista Party and the Civic-Somatenista Federation) maneuvered to try to become the civil movement of the regime. In November 1923, Primo de Rivera made a trip to Italy with Alfonso XIII to meet with Mussolini, where he would compare fascism with his movement to the Italian dictator, as well as the somaten with the black shirts. On his return to Spain on December 1, a delegation of about 300 members of the tiny organization Federación Cívico Somatenista received the monarch and the dictator with a fascist spectacle and, the next day, Alfonso XIII and Primo de Rivera received a mass bath with &&&&&&&&&0250000.&&&&&0250,000 attendees at the award ceremony of the first with the somatén medal held in Barcelona. The plans for the projection of La Traza were finally cut short, when in an attempt to occupy the space left by the dynastic conservative and liberal parties, Primo de Rivera launched the Patriotic Union as the official party of the regime in April 1924, although the origins of this organization must be traced back to the Castilian Patriotic Union of Ángel Herrera Oria. The composition of the party —whose motto was the triptych with Carlist resonances of "Homeland, Religion and Monarchy"— was diverse.; in this, according to José Manuel Cuenca Toribio, members of the rural bourgeoisie, the urban classes, civil servants, farmers and, in second instance, opportunists converged. The newspaper La Nación, extension of La Acción by Manuel Delgado Barreto, would go on to exercise the role of spokesperson for Primo de Rivera and the Patriotic Union since its founding on October 16, 1925. Instead El Debate, which was related to the founding of the Castilian Patriotic Union, after initially offering fervent support to Primo de Rivera, he later adopted a more lukewarm position towards the regime.
The military directory sought the annulment of the anarchist National Labor Confederation (CNT) by increasing repressive measures against it. Shortly after the 1923 coup, Primo de Rivera managed to attract the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and the Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) to collaborate with the dictatorship. Although the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) had limited relevance at the time, Primo de Rivera came to use after the fact the threat of communism as a one of the justifying arguments for his coup and, albeit precariously, the publication of his medium La Antorcha was allowed; party headquarters were looted and closed at the end of 1923.
By Royal Decree of January 12, 1924, he proceeded to dissolve the provincial councils, with the exception of those of Álava, Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya and Navarra, leaving the election of the new provincial deputies at the discretion of the corresponding civil governor.
Primo de Rivera's strategy in the protectorate lacked a clear long-term scheme and he made improvised decisions based on pragmatic principles, proposing solutions as the different problems appeared. After the resignation presented in October 1924 by the High Commissioner of Morocco Luis Aizpuru, Primo de Rivera appointed himself High Commissioner. In November the withdrawal of Chefchaouen took place, carried out after the fall of the city on the 17th and suffering a large number of casualties, within the framework of a withdrawal of the Spanish military presence to areas with more possibilities of being successfully defended from the attacks by Abd el-Krim's Rifians. After the Riffian attack on the French protectorate, the possibility of Franco-Spanish cooperation arose, to which Primo de Rivera ended up agreeing after being convinced by his collaborators Antonio Magaz and Francisco Gómez- Jordana Sousa. However, the differences between the ideas of the French marshal Philippe Pétain, with a comprehensive plan for the occupation of the Rif to pacify the area, and those of Primo de Rivera, who would have optimistically harbored the idea that with a landing in Al Hoceima it would be possible to pacify the area, without the need to continue with the campaign moving away from the coast.
The aforementioned landing in September 1925 —an operation the monarch had opposed— was commanded by Primo de Rivera and formed part of a combined operation with the French army to end the rebellion of the Kabyles of the Rif. After the successful landing operation and a celebration of this that took place in Melilla, he removed himself as high commissioner, replacing himself in office with José Sanjurjo in November 1925. After two more years of military campaign, the protectorate it would be fully pacified in the spring of 1927.
Primo de Rivera, who had initially relied on the Catalan regionalists of the Lliga in his pronouncement, soon turned around and adopted anti-Catalanist policies. He outlawed the use of Catalan symbols in public events, the celebration of 11 September September and closed Catalan regionalist associations. The dictatorship took measures aimed at imposing the Spanish language in different areas, such as education, carrying out, according to Josep M. Roig i Rosich, a "systematic" action, although not brutal, against the Catalan language. However, Enric Ucelay-Da Cal points to a repressive action characterized by a "confused arbitrariness" that, centered on symbols, did not act against the Catalan-language press, in fact increasing the number of newspapers written in that language during the dictatorship. On March 12, 1925, Primo de Rivera proceeded to abolish the Commonwealth of Catalonia.
In December 1925, the Military Directorate was replaced by a Civil Directorate.
Civil Directory
The Military Directory gave way to a Civil Directory (1925–1930) and a National Consultative Assembly was created (1927).
Primo de Rivera, on the occasion of the planned incorporation of Germany into the League of Nations, would request that in the event that the claim of the condition of permanent member of Spain in the council of the League of Nations is abandoned, it be incorporated Tangier to the Spanish protectorate. After consummating the rapprochement with Fascist Italy, embodied on August 7, 1926 with a friendship treaty between the two countries, Primo raised the claim to a combined ultimatum including both the possession of Tangier and the post of permanent member in the council. Rejected by France and the United Kingdom, Primo decided to withdraw Spain from the League of Nations in the assembly of September 1926. After the dismissal of the Minister of State José Yanguas Messia due to disagreements with Primo de Rivera in February 1927 —although Yanguas would later be appointed president of the National Consultative Assembly—, Miguel Primo was in charge of the functions of the State portfolio. Spain rejoined the League of Nations for another year and a half late after his departure, in March 1928.
After the failed coup against the dictatorship known as "la Sanjuanada" that took place in June 1926, which took place simultaneously with the so-called "artillery question", caused by Primo's annulment of the military scale in which the artillery officers and engineers only promoted by rank and seniority, the constitutionalist opposition to the dictatorship began to be led by Rafael Sánchez Guerra, relegating the count of Romanones and Melquíades Álvarez, who had been involved in the coup, to that role. The accusation by Primo de Rivera of Gregorio Marañón as a Sanjuanada conspirator contributed to the deterioration that was taking place in the relations of the dictatorship with the intellectuals, who in a majority —with the exception of, for example, Miguel de Unamuno and Manuel Azaña— did not they had shown particular anger against the advent of the dictatorship. Unamuno had already been exiled and action would also be taken against Luis Jiménez de Asúa and Fernando de los Ríos.
The National Assembly drew up a preliminary draft of the Constitution, of an anti-liberal and authoritarian nature. The constitutional project, made public in July 1929, found very early the majority rejection of the liberal, monarchical and republican forces. It aroused criticism in within the National Consultative Assembly itself, and not even Primo de Rivera himself found many aspects and prerogatives of the draft satisfactory.
The dictatorship focused its propaganda on economic achievements, but the truth is that the favorable international situation (the Roaring Twenties) had a lot to do with the notable economic growth that occurred in those years. His economic policy was based on greater State intervention, through organizations such as the National Economy Council created in 1924 —without whose permission no new industry could be installed, for example—, and on the protectionism of "production national". Two of its important achievements were the creation in June 1927 of the Compañía Arrendataria del Monopoly de Petróleos (CAMPSA) and the Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España, with majority capital from the North American ITT. But where the interventionist economic policy of the Dictatorship became most evident was in public works, whose work ranged from hydraulic works —for the full use of which the Hydrographic Confederations were created— to highways —in 1926 the Circuito Nacional de Firmes was founded. Specials, which built some 7,000 kilometers of highways—and the railways—in 1926 an ambitious railway construction project was approved, the so-called Plan Guadalhorce. Electricity was also brought to the rural world. Unable to collect enough through taxes, harmed by tax fraud, had to resort to the issuance of public debt and budget makeup.
The exchange rate of the peseta, which in the period 1926-1927 had experienced an upward trend, modified this trend in 1928, entering a devaluation phase again; even defenders appeared —such as Flores de Lemus— of fixing the change to the gold standard. This economic situation was one of the factors behind the attrition and resignation of the Minister of Finance Calvo Sotelo. The change of the peseta in relation to the pound sterling almost tripled and made the economic improvement vanish.
In January 1929 there was another failed coup attempt to overthrow the dictatorship led by José Sánchez Guerra. The sentence of the military court that tried the politician from Cordoba — imprisoned after the attempt on a prison ship in Valencia — which acquitted him and the rest of the defendants in the process that began on October 25 and presided over by General Federico Berenguer, it would have symbolically meant —according to Eduardo de Guzmán— "a death sentence to the dictatorship".
Fall of the dictatorship and exile
Disillusioned, increasingly unpopular, after having lost the support of King Alfonso XIII and the bulk of the military commanders —with exceptions such as General Sanjurjo— Primo de Rivera experienced a worsening of his physical condition mainly due to diabetes In January 1930, a conspiracy was being prepared in Andalusia for the 28th of which Manuel Burgos Mazo, Diego Martínez Barrio, Miguel Maura, Carlos de Borbón - and probably the monarch himself - would be aware of which was to be led by General Goded, military governor of Cádiz. Although it did not come to pass, Primo de Rivera ended up resigning on January 28, citing health reasons, and went into exile in Paris. The monarch assigned the government to General Dámaso Berenguer, giving way to the period known as the "Dictablanda", with which it was intended to gradually return to constitutional normality prior to 1923.
Six weeks later, on March 16, 1930, he died in Paris, at the famous hotel "Pont Royal", on "rue" du Bac, because of the diabetes he suffered in conjunction with the effects of the flu. His death occurred shortly after his daughters had left the hotel, while Miguel was reading an email that had come from Spain. When they arrived, they found him sitting, with his glasses about to slip off, the mail glued to his chest and one hand on the arm of the chair. His daughters thought he was sleeping, until they realized he wasn't breathing. They called the doctor, who came and determined that he had died from diabetes. His remains were buried in the San Isidro cemetery, in Madrid, although they were later moved to the Basilica de la Merced in Jerez de la Frontera, as he requested. in his phrase: "If I were born a hundred times, I would like to be in Jerez, I want to come to Jerez to die, and in Jerez I want my ashes to be kept"
On March 17, the day after his death, the coffin was taken to the Austerlitz station for transfer to Spain. The funeral procession paraded through Paris with honours, as Primo de Rivera wore the great cordon of the Legion of Honor. The French Minister of War, André Maginot, and General Pétain, with whom he had commanded the landing at Al Hoceima, were present. The official Spanish representation headed by the Minister of State Duke of Alba was expected at the station. However, when the train arrived in Irún there was no authority, which José Calvo Sotelo complained about in an article published in ABC: «When getting off at the Irún station... it did not appear properly any official Spain, not a squad of troops! Civil Guards and Carabineros, yes; but we weren't criminals or smugglers."
In 1947, seventeen years after his death, he was posthumously appointed Captain General of the Army by the government of Francisco Franco.
Thought and politics
His regime was initially presented as regenerationist and of a provisional nature, and Primo de Rivera himself went so far as to affirm that his military directory would last only three months. However, he soon created a political party, the Patriotic Union, as the political base of the regime. Impressed by Italian fascism, he came to call Mussolini on a visit to Italy "my inspiration and teacher". Primo de Rivera would try to institutionalize the regime during the Civil Directorate.
Pedro Carlos González Cuevas points out that, unlike fascism, his dictatorship was nothing more than a typical bureaucratic-conservative or military-corporatist regime, in addition to also pointing out the lack of cultural concerns and the manifest contempt for the intelligentsia for part of Primo de Rivera. Gabriele Ranzato notes that his visceral aversion to the intelligentsia was animated by an inferiority complex. Martin Blinkhorn notes that Primo was a "benevolent and sincere paternalist". Stanley G. Payne notes that Italian fascism —despite the fact that a copy of it was not included in the regime's objectives—was, in any case, the "closest thing to a model" that the dictatorship had. For Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, his dictatorship constituted "a hybrid of nineteenth-century praetorianism and end-of-the-century regeneration", while Raúl Morodo interpreted it as the "regenerationist institutionalization of Bonapartism". tool to nationalize the masses through the propaganda of patriotic ideas executed by officers throughout the country.
The political thought of Primo de Rivera, who saw himself as the regenerationist "iron surgeon" of Joaquín Costa, and who also added the concept of Antonio Maura's "revolution from above" to his ideas, he is described by Raymond Carr as "primitive, personal and naive". In the words of Richard Herr, he was "too folksy to compare with Mussolini". Despite spending many hours in his government duties, his habits of life they were very messy.
Offspring
From his marriage in 1902 with Casilda Sáenz de Heredia y Suárez de Argudín (1879-1909), Primo de Rivera had six children: José Antonio, Miguel, Carmen, Pilar, Ángela and Fernando.
Acknowledgments
- First Class Cross of the Order of San Fernando (1894)
- Grand Cross of the Order of Military Merit (1913)
- Gran Cruz Laureada de la Real y Militar Orden de San Fernando (1925)
- Grand Cross of the Order of Naval Merit with red distinctive (1925)
- Grand Cross of the Royal Military Order of San Hermenegildo (1925)
- Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Salamanca (1926)
- Great Cross of the Order of Christ (1927)
- Necklace of the Order of Elizabeth the Catholic (1929)
- Grand Cross of the Order of the Tower and of the Sword, of Value, Loyalty and Merit (1929)
In his birthplace (which housed a music conservatory) a museum began to be set up to his figure, collecting personal and valuable objects. A tombstone designed by Francisco Hernández-Rubio y Gómez was even placed, but the project was paralyzed and the house abandoned.