The Politics of Reprisal: The CEDA, the PSOE and the Insurrection of 1934

Abstract

Between 1931 and 1933 the republican-Socialist coalition had endeavoured to create a socially progressive republic. In a context of world depression, it is inconceiveable that their programme of tentative reform could have resolved the highly conflictive social and economic problems inherited from the monarchy. Nevertheless, left republicans and Socialists believed that they had done enough to distinguish the new regime from the old and to set Spain off on its first faltering steps to modernity. They agreed that any step backward from the minimum achieved so far would be disastrous for the majority of the population. The Socialists, however, had been disturbed by the vehemence of opposition to what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation. In the light of this, a growing sector of the trade-union movement and the FJS, encouraged by rather reckless support from Largo Caballero, were losing faith in the possibility that bourgeois democracy would allow the establishment of even a minimal social justice, let alone full-blown socialism.