Niceto Alcala-Zamora
Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Torres (Priego de Córdoba, July 6, 1877-Buenos Aires, February 18, 1949) was a Spanish politician and jurist who held various ministries during the reign of Alfonso XIII, the presidency of the provisional government of the Second Republic and, finally, the position of president of the Spanish Republic between 1931 and 1936.
Biography
Family and early years
He was the third child of Manuel Alcalá-Zamora Caracuel and Francisca Torres Castillo, also parents of Manuel and Pilar. He was the grandson of Gregorio Alcalá-Zamora García and María de Santa Engracia Caracuel Serrano, both natives of Priego de Córdoba and with a long progeny, eleven children; and Juan Manuel Torres and his wife, María del Rosario Castillo, both from Alcaudete, Jaén.He was the nephew of Gregorio Alcalá-Zamora Caracuel, deputy and senator between 1881 and 1894. His father, Manuel, was secretary in the city Hall. His mother died when Niceto was three years old. He was raised by single relatives and, later, by his older sister Pilar.
His birthplace in Priego de Córdoba, a beautiful manor house from the XIX century renovated at the beginning of the XX and located at Calle Río, 33, is currently a museum dedicated to his memory. The origins of the museum date back to December 17, 1986, when the daughters of Niceto, Purificación and Isabel Alcalá-Zamora Castillo, donated the president's birthplace to the town of Priego.
An outstanding student, Alcalá-Zamora completed his baccalaureate between 1887 and 1891 at the Real Colegio de Cabra. At the early age of seventeen he graduated in Law from the University of Granada and at twenty-two, a lawyer for the Council of State.
In 1900 he married Purificación Castillo Bidaburu, three years his junior, with whom he had seven children (three boys, Niceto, Luis and José; and three girls, Pura, Isabel and María Teresa; his daughter Elia would die at the seven years old; two other Nicetus were also born, one who lived seven days and the other who was stillborn)
By turning forty, he was already known as a highly prestigious lawyer, and he took over the portfolio of the Ministry of Public Works in the government of Manuel García Prieto, Marquis of Alhucemas. It was the almost logical fate of a politician who throughout his life and from a very young age had flaunted his liberal and monarchical ideas, which led him in his youth to join the Liberal Party, then led by such illustrious figures as Praxedes Mateo Sagasta and Segismundo Moret. However, it was a poisoned order, taking into account that Spain in 1917 found great difficulties in producing food in sufficient quantity and the First World War was endangering the traditional supply channels.
That government did not survive even a year, but he would still be minister again, in this case of War, with Manuel García Prieto in the last constitutional government of the monarchy of Alfonso XIII.
Alcalá-Zamora had held distinguished political and administrative positions, and had also distinguished himself as a speaker in Parliament since he was elected deputy for La Carolina in 1905. He was director of Local Administration and undersecretary of the Interior. He also kept abreast of the discussion of the mancomunidades, a program presented by José Canalejas in order to solve the problem of the Spanish territorial configuration. During all this time he was at the service of the Liberal Party of the Count of Romanones, but he finally joined the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD) of Manuel García Prieto and since then began his ministerial career, both in Public Works and in War.
When the Cortes Generales met on May 23, 1923, the Chamber was made up of twenty-two different groups: Democrats, Liberals, Leftists, Liberals, Agrarian Liberals, Reformists, Nicetists, Conservatives, Ciervistas, Mauristas, Regionalists, Republicans, socialists, monarchist unionists, Catalan nationalists, Basque nationalists, members of the Biscayne Monarchical League, traditional Carlist, Catholics, mercantile, agrarian, fundamentalist and independent classes. In short, a political panorama that made it impossible to govern.
For all these reasons, as soon as General Miguel Primo de Rivera carried out a coup d'état in September 1923 and established the Military Directorate, many Spaniards welcomed the new regime with enthusiasm and some relief, but Alcalá-Zamora gradually modified his position politics until becoming one of the staunchest opponents of the dictatorial regime of General Primo de Rivera and the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, which endorsed the dictatorship.
Thus, on April 13, 1930, when General Primo de Rivera had already resigned from his position and had been replaced by General Dámaso Berenguer, who had been commissioned by Alfonso XIII to return to the constitutional regime of 1876, Alcalá -Zamora gave a famous speech at the Apolo theater in Valencia in which he withdrew his support and confidence in the monarchy, demanding a republic based on a model similar to the French Third Republic, that is, supported by the middle classes and intellectuals.
The proclamation of the Republic and the Provisional Government
Together with Miguel Maura and his party, Derecha Liberal Republicana, he represented conservative republicanism in the Pact of San Sebastián held on August 17, 1930, aimed at promoting a popular movement to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republican regime. From this pact an Executive Committee emerged in charge of directing the republican action in Spain and Alcalá-Zamora was elected president. It was, in fact, the antecedent of the Provisional Government of the Republic.
On December 12, 1930, the Jaca uprising took place, when captains Galán and García Hernández proclaimed the Republic in the Jaca garrison and began a march towards Huesca but, defeated by government forces, they were tried and executed.
Commander Ramón Franco (brother of General Francisco Franco) and General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano also rose up at the Cuatro Vientos aerodrome. The bombing of the Royal Palace was planned as a signal for the military pronouncement, but apparently Ramón Franco saw some children playing in the Sabatini gardens and did not dare to drop the bombs, as he did not want to harm the children.
Thus, the rest of the units did not manage to join the uprising, giving rise to the airfield being surrounded by troops from the vicinity, for which they had to flee to Portugal by plane. The leaders of the Republican forces, part of the Committee, including Alcalá-Zamora, were arrested by the Government. The public trial, held in March 1931, sentenced them to six months and one day, which were replaced by probation.
Given the difficult turn that the situation was taking, and after the resignation of Berenguer in February 1931, the king entrusted Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar-Cabañas with the formation of the new government. On the 18th of the same month, the new cabinet was presented, made up of ministers of all monarchical tendencies, but that same government reflected the monarch's inability to find a leadership capable of stabilizing the discredited Spanish monarchy. Thus, on April 12, 1931, crucial municipal elections in the history of Spain were held.
The first counts were 22,150 monarchist councilors against 5,775 republicans, although later studies show 19,035 councilors prone to the monarchy, 39,568 republicans and 15,198 traditionalists, fundamentalists, Basque nationalists, independents, etc., who could not be classified in a specific category. In 41 of the 50 provincial capitals the Republicans won. In Barcelona, the Republicans quadrupled the monarchical votes, and in Madrid they tripled. Alfonso XIII, in favor of one of his ministers that there was no bloodshed, went into exile before the ultimatum of the Revolutionary Committee chaired by Alcalá-Zamora. This, who had popular support from the outset and that of the Civil Guard, commanded at that time by General José Sanjurjo, became the president of the Provisional Government. Alcalá-Zamora and Maura guaranteed the presence of the lively conservative bourgeoisie in the government and political continuity within a different regime. This government proclaimed the Second Spanish Republic on April 14, 1931; while the king embarked in Cartagena and his family took a train that would take them to France.
On April 15, 1931, the new republican government published an action program based on the agreements of the Pact of San Sebastián. An agrarian reform, freedom of worship and belief, respect for private property, responsibilities to collaborators of the dictatorship, gradual increase in individual and union freedoms, etc. were announced.
As soon as it came to power, the Government had to face the proclamation of the Catalan Republic and the anticlerical events of the month of May of that same year. There were also many difficulties with the anarchist organizations, which denied their collaboration with the new Republic and even openly confronted it.
The government leaned towards the left, represented in the republicanism of Manuel Azaña, a position that was clearly reflected in the drafting of the 1931 Constitution, calling elections on June 28. The clerical question again confronted conservative and leftist republicans, socialists and radicals, and finally both Alcalá-Zamora and Maura left the government on October 14, 1931.
President of the Republic
Fearing that Alcalá-Zamora would undertake a revisionist and smear campaign against the Republic, the Socialists and the Azañistas agreed to offer him the Presidency of the Republic, a position for which he was elected sole candidate on December 2. He was sworn in on December 11, 1931.
The idea of the President of the Republic was to incorporate into the leadership of Spain the new forces that emerged after the Restoration and contained by the last Bourbons. This opening had to be done from above, suppressing everything that prevented this step and establishing the essential premises of a new order through peaceful and parliamentary means.
The problems with Azaña
Relations with the government were oscillating. When Azaña presented him for ratification the Ley de Congregaciones (law for the secularization of teaching) and the Ley del Tribunal de Garantías Constitucionales, which completed the Republican Constitution of 1931, Alcalá-Zamora was extremely resistant to signing both laws, but did not dare to veto them. The opposition accused Alcalá-Zamora of late payment.
Later, on the occasion of a government readjustment, the differences arose again and Azaña resigned with his cabinet. After several failed consultations, Alcalá-Zamora reappointed Azaña as president of the Council of Ministers (June 12), a fact that disappointed the conservatives.
Months later, in September, Azaña resigned. Alcalá-Zamora dissolved the Constituent Cortes and, after a fleeting mandate from the radical Alejandro Lerroux, commissioned the also radical Diego Martínez Barrio to hold new elections for October 8, 1933.
The radical-Cedista biennium
The right-wing forces largely won the elections of November 29, 1933, the first in the history of Spain in which women could vote. Alejandro Lerroux formed a government commissioned by the president and with the consent of the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), led by José María Gil-Robles. Alcalá-Zamora got along badly with the radicals and especially with the CEDA, since he mistrusted the democratic spirit of Gil-Robles's party, which, although it declared itself respectful of the established order, had not sworn allegiance to the Republic. For this reason, he always sought compromise solutions, such as the confused government of the radical Ricardo Samper, which no one liked.
In October he had to turn again to Lerroux, who formed a government with three CEDA ministers, but the independence uprising of October 6, 1934 in Barcelona, the revolution in Asturias, his indecision and the scandal of the "black market" prevented coherent government action.
On the other hand, Alcalá-Zamora used all his resources to remove the CEDA from power until the government crisis of December 9, 1935 offered him this opportunity. He appointed his friend Manuel Portela Valladares as prime minister, who presided over an interregnum between November 1935 and February 1936. His intention was to create a center force between the radical-CEDA right and the Azañista social left.
Removal
The Popular Front won the February 1936 elections. If this was a defeat for the right, it was also a defeat for Alcalá-Zamora and its aspirations. Azaña was in charge of forming a government.
The left-wing republicans had not forgotten Alcalá-Zamora's attitude since June 1933. A debate began in the Cortes on the unconstitutionality of the last dissolution of the same, since according to the 1931 Constitution, the president was empowered to dissolve the Cortes twice, but the second dissolution could be subject to prosecution by the Chamber, and if a majority considered that some irregularity had been committed, the president could be removed.
The controversy arose when the new majority of the Cortes, considering that this was the second dissolution, judged the president's actions and ruled that the dissolution had taken place too late, for which reason the president had to be dismissed. However, there were those who believed that this was the first dissolution, since the previous one (that of 1933) should not be counted as it was the Constituent Cortes, which elaborated the Constitution and therefore were prior to it. Finally, on April 7, 1936, 238 deputies voted in favor of the dismissal by only 5 against. 174 deputies abandoned the chamber or were absent, for which the president was dismissed (an absolute majority of the 417 incumbent deputies was required, that is, 209). He resisted in principle, but abandoned by all he had to admit the cessation.
After a few weeks in which Diego Martínez Barrio, in his capacity as president of the Cortes, took charge of the State Headquarters on an interim basis, he was replaced by Manuel Azaña on May 11, 1936.
War and exile
The start of the Spanish Civil War surprised him on a trip to Norway. He decided not to return to Spain when he found out, according to his memoirs, rewritten during exile, that Popular Front militiamen had illegally entered his home, stealing his belongings and looting his safe deposit box (and at least one other property). of one of his daughters) at the Crédit Lyonnais bank in Madrid, taking with him the manuscript of his memoirs, part of which was published (with censorship cuts) in the Republican press during the war and extensively commented on by Manuel Azaña in his Memories. He established his residence in France, where he was surprised by the Second World War.
On January 17, 1937, in the midst of the civil war, he published an article in the Swiss newspaper Journal de Genève in which he joined the thesis of the insurgent side that the victory of the Popular Front in the general elections of February 1936, it had occurred thanks to the alteration of the electoral records due to the "disorder offensive" deployed by the Popular Front in the street during the evening of the same day of the elections and the following days ("the crowd seized electoral documents; in many localities the results could have been falsified"), followed by the manipulation carried out by the Minutes Commission ("which proceeded arbitrarily. All the minutes of certain provinces were annulled, where the opposition was victorious; defeated friendly candidates were proclaimed. Several minority deputies were expelled from the Cortes»). This was how, according to Alcalá Zamora, the Popular Front achieved an absolute majority in the Cortes when it had only really obtained some 200 seats, therefore very far from the 237 where the absolute majority threshold was located. The Popular Front managed to win an absolute majority "violating all the scruples of legality and conscience", concluded Alcalá Zamora.
After the war, in 1941 the National Court of Political Responsibilities created by the winning side fined him 50 million pesetas for considering him "one of the main responsible, by action and by omission, for having forged the red subversion, having contributed to keeping her alive for more than two years and hindering the providential triumph of the glorious Uprising”, which led to the confiscation of her assets. He also sentenced him to lose his Spanish nationality in application of article 9 of the Law, although there is no record that the Francoist government actually applied that point. After multiple penalties, due to the German occupation and the collaborationist attitude of the Vichy government, he left France and after a transatlantic voyage of 41 days by boat, he arrived in Argentina in January 1942, where he lived from his books, articles and lectures until his death. This occurred on February 18, 1949 in Buenos Aires.
He did not want to return to Spain during the Franco dictatorship, although, apparently, some offer was made to him, since one of his sons was married to a daughter of General Queipo de Llano, one of the protagonists of the uprising, and who Niceto Alcalá-Zamora was a man of deep Catholic beliefs. His body was repatriated to Spain in 1979 and buried in the Almudena cemetery in Madrid.
In mid-December 2008, some 1,200 historical documents were recovered by the Civil Guard. Among them were the president's handwritten memoirs, as well as letters and various papers that were taken from him in February 1937.
The Diaries
These unpublished texts have mostly been used by right-wing revisionist sectors about the supposed electoral fraud of February 1936. The process of appearance of the text was in itself bizarre and piloted by representatives of these reactionary sectors: a businessman anonymously offered the valuable documents for sale to the writer César Vidal, who contacted the historian Jorge Fernández-Coppel, and the Civil Guard Heritage Group, so that his colleague could meet the businessman in Valencia and, thus, the documentation could be seized through the intervention of an undercover agent known as Operation León.
Rogelio Blanco Martínez, a firm defender of the Law of Historical Memory, decides to keep these diaries hidden where the president of the Second Republic between 1931 and 1936 reflected his vision of the political process of that period.
The heirs have decided to undertake a process that culminates in the recovery of the documents, as stated by his grandson, the historian and member of the Royal Academy of History, José Alcalá-Zamora y Queipo de Llano, who considers it necessary to public the document that can shed the most light on the history of Spain in those troubled years. Only knowing the stolen writings, "justice can be done regarding the historical significance of the President of the Republic ".
For the only person who has had access to the documents in recent months, historian Jorge Fernández-Coppel, they are fundamental to understanding the process that led from the proclamation of the Republic to the Civil War:
Among the 1100 pages of the papers held by the Ministry of Culture is an explanation of the events of the Revolution of October 1934 and the finding of the fraud in the elections that gave the triumph to the revolutionary government of the Popular Front. José Rodríguez Labandeira, Professor of Contemporary History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, believes that he will bring light on the illegal removal of the president after the February 1936 elections. [chuckles]required].
The first part of the newspapers was published on November 15, 2011, in the publishing house La esfera de libros with the title Assault on the Republic. Edited by Jorge Fernández-Coppel, with a prologue by Juan Pablo Fusi and an epilogue by José Alcalá-Zamora, this book also includes numerous unpublished letters and documents that put certain episodes in jeopardy, such as the minutes of the votes obtained by the different groups in the elections to the Cortes on February 16, 1936, which show, according to the revisionist authors, how what they describe as a "parliamentary coup d'état" was woven. "The documents stolen from President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora during the war prove his refusal to support a coup d'état and his distancing from Azaña."
Works
- Regionalism and the Problems of Catalonia1916.
- The Picasso file1923.
- Unity of the State and the diversity of its civil laws1924.
- The Defects of the Constitution of 19311936.
- What can be and what cannot be1945.
- Memories. Ed. Planet, Barcelona, 1998. ISBN 84-08-02608-9
- Assault on the Republic: January-April 1936: the stolen newspapers of the president of the Second Republic / Niceto Alcalá-ZamoraISBN 978-84-9970-812-6