Roberto Villa García - Alejandro Lerroux and the Failure of Spanish Republican Democracy

Alejandro Lerroux
and the Failure of
Spanish Republican
Democracy

Sussex Studies in Spanish History

General Editor: Nigel Townson, Universidad Complutense, Madrid

Consultant Editor: Jos lvarez-Junco, Universidad Complutense, Madrid

Advisory Editors: Pamela Radcliff, University of California, San Diego Tim Rees, University of Exeter

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Roberto Villa Garca, Alejandro Lerroux and the Failure of Spanish Republican Democracy: A Political Biography (18641949).

Published in association with the Caada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies and the Catalan Observatory, London School of Economics.

A full list of titles in the series is available on the Press website.

Alejandro Lerroux
and the Failure of
Spanish Republican
Democracy

A Political Biography (18641949)

ROBERTO VILLA GARCA

Translated by Julius Ruiz

Copyright Roberto Villa Garca, 2021.

Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2019.

SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS

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Contents

Prologue by Stanley G. Payne

The introduction of Spains democratic Republic in 1931 was a unique countercurrent event in European politics of the Great Depression, when the general trend was toward more authoritarian government. Yet the Republic was not a mere anomaly in Spanish affairs, for during the nineteenth century Spain had led nearly all the underdeveloped countries of Europe in the introduction of more liberal, advanced and sometimes even radical political and institutional practices. All the more radical forms had failed the Federal Republic of 1873 had barely survived one convulsive year amid three concurrent civil wars but that had not been for want of trying.

A standard narrative about the Second Spanish Republic is that it perished almost inevitably at the hands of two irreconcilable extremes, by lacking significant moderating political forces that could enable a democratic system to function. Yet this is a somewhat distorted and simplistic conclusion that ignores the real history of the Republic, and particularly of its governance by the center and by the center-right from 1933 to 1935, when Spain began to recover from the Depression.

A genuinely democratic leadership existed, and for a brief period governed successfully under the prime ministership of Alejandro Lerroux, the subject of this new biography. Lerrouxs lengthy political career reflected the adage attributed to Georges Clemenceau, according to which at the age of twenty almost anyone would naturally be on the left else he had no heart, whereas by the age of forty he would have moved more toward the right, or else he had no head. Lerroux was a leader of radical republicanism still at the age of forty, but within a few more years moved with ever more firm decision toward the democratic center.

He began his political life as a rather typical late nineteenth-century radical, fiercely anticlerical and espousing extreme democracy, autonomy and to some extent a vaguely defined socialism. By 1908 he had founded Spains most important new republican group, the Radical Republican Party, following the nomenclature of Frances Radical Socialists. Unlike other extremist republicans, however, he soon moderated his position. Much like his French counterparts, who began to move toward the center, Lerroux eschewed the revolutionary left and political violence, emphasizing patriotic unity and democratic reformism.