CEDA

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Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights
Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas
Party flag

The Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (lit.'Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights', CEDA) was a Spanish

Italian Fascist March on Rome) to forcefully seize power.[6]

The CEDA claimed that it was defending the

extreme nationalism, and social hierarchy.[7] Gil-Robles observed a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and was greatly influenced by it, henceforth becoming committed to creating a single anti-Marxist and pro-Catholic political party in Spain.[7]

CEDA was largely the party of practicing Roman Catholics, the middle-class, and small holding farm families. It would ultimately become the most popular individual party in Spain in the 1936 elections.[8]

The CEDA failed to make the substantive electoral gains from 1933 to 1936 (though it did see an increase in the number of individual votes

Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista or "Falange".[10]

The CEDA eclipses the republican centre

Gil Robles set up CEDA to contest the 1933 election,[

Nuremberg Rally. A national electoral committee was established, comprising CEDA, Alfonsist, Traditionalist, and Agrarian representatives – but excluding Miguel Maura's Conservative Republicans. The CEDA swamped entire localities with electoral publicity. The party produced ten million leaflets, together with some two hundred thousand coloured posters and hundreds of cars were used to distribute this material through the provinces. In all of the major cities propaganda films were shown around the streets on screens mounted on large lorries.[14]

The polarization of political opinions and the CEDA

The need for unity was the constant theme of the campaign fought by the CEDA and the election was presented as a confrontation of ideas, not of personalities. The electors' choice was simple: they voted for redemption or revolution and they voted for Christianity or Communism. The fortunes of Republican Spain, according to one of its posters had been decided by 'immorality and anarchy'. Catholics who continued to proclaim their republicanism were moved into the revolutionary camp and many speeches argued that the Catholic republican option had become totally illegitimate. 'A good Catholic may not vote for the Conservative Republican party' declared a Gaceta Regional editorial and the impression was given that Conservative Republicans, far from being Catholics, were in fact anti-religious. In this all-round attack on the political centre, the mobilization of women also became a major electoral tactic of the Catholic right. The Asociación Femenina de Educación had been formed in October 1931. As the 1933 general election approached women were warned that unless they voted correctly communism would come " which will tear your children from your arms, your parish church will be destroyed, the husband you love will flee from your side authorized by the divorce law, anarchy will come to the countryside, hunger and misery to your home."[15] AFEC orators and organisers urged women to vote 'For God and for Spain!' Mirroring the female qualities emphasized by AFEC the CEDA's self-styled sección de defensa brought young male activists to the fore. In one incident in the last week of the campaign, in Guijuelo the efforts of a group of left wing sympathisers to prevent people entering the bullring, where José María Lamamié de Clairac was speaking, led to a running battle with CEDA's sección de defensa. Later stopped and searched they were found to be carrying a quantity of pizzle whips – (bullwhips made from the dried penises of bulls) – taken along to 'fend off the violence which had been promised.' It was one example of the polarisation of political opinions which had occurred in the province of Salamanca, Robles's province, since the early days of the Republic. This new CEDA squad was also very much in evidence on election day itself, when its members patrolled the streets and polling stations in the provincial capital, supposedly to prevent the left from tampering with the ballot boxes.[16]

In the 1933 elections, the CEDA won the most seats in the

Nuremberg Rally
in 1933 and spoken of its " youthful enthusiasm, steeped in optimism, so different to the desolate and enervating scepticism of our defeatists and intellectuals."

Stanley Payne argues that CEDA was neither fascist nor democratic. Payne argues that CEDA's goal was to win power through legal means and to then enact a constitutional revision that would protect property and religion and alter the basic political system. They would create neither a fascist state nor an absolute monarchy but a Catholic, corporative republic. While this would entail the limitation of direct democratic rights, it would not be a state in the style of Hitler or Mussolini's but probably closer to the neighbouring Portuguese Estado Novo.[21]

The Juventudes de Acción Popular, the youth wing within the CEDA, "soon developed its own character. The JAP emphasized sporting and political activity. It had its own fortnightly paper, the first issue of which proclaimed: 'We want a new state.' The JAP's distaste for the principles of universal suffrage was such that internal decisions were never voted upon. As the thirteenth point of the JAP put it: "Anti-parliamentarianism. Anti-dictatorship. The people participating in Government in an organic manner, not by degenerate democracy."[citation needed] The JAP held a series of rallies during the course of 1934.

On 26 September, the CEDA announced it would no longer support the RRP's minority government; it was replaced by a RRP cabinet, led by Lerroux once more, that included three members of the CEDA.[22]

Rifts, moving further to the right

José María Gil-Robles at a campaign rally at San Sebastián in 1935.

Between November 1934 and March 1935, the CEDA minister for agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, introduced into parliament a series of agrarian reform measures designed to better conditions in the Spanish countryside. These moderate proposals met with a hostile response from reactionary elements within the Cortes, including the conservative wing of the CEDA and the proposed reform was defeated. A change of personnel in the ministry also followed. The agrarian reform bill proved to be a catalyst for a series of increasingly bitter divisions within the Catholic right, rifts that indicated that the broad based CEDA alliance was disintegrating. Partly as a result of the impetus of the JAP, the Catholic party had been moving further to the right, forcing the resignation of moderate government figures, including Filiberto Villalobos.[23] Gil-Robles was not prepared to return the agriculture portfolio to Giménez Fernández. "For all the social Catholic rhetoric, the extreme right had won the day."[24]

Lerroux's Radical government collapsed after two large scandals, the

Nazi propaganda techniques.[25] CEDA turned its campaign chest over to army plotter Emilio Mola. Monarchist José Calvo Sotelo replaced Gil Robles as the right's leading spokesman in parliament.[18][26] The Falange expanded massively, and thousands of the JAP joined the organisation (though the majority of the JAP seem to have abandoned politics).[27] They successfully created a sense of militancy on the streets, in order to make an authoritarian regime justifiable.[28] CEDA came under direct attack from the Falange.[29]
This rapid radicalization of the CEDA youth movement effectively meant that all attempts to save parliamentary Catholicism were doomed to failure.

Many of the party's supporters welcomed the military rebellion in the summer of 1936 which led to the Spanish Civil War. In April 1937, the rebel leader Francisco Franco issued the Unification Decree which laid out the creation of the FET y de las JONS upon the merging of the Fascist FE de las JONS and the traditionalist carlists, outlawing the rest of political parties in the rebel-controlled territory. As result, CEDA ceased to exist. Many party cadres, including Franco's co-brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer[30] (who ended up becoming chief of the political junta of the FET y de las JONS) joined the new organization.[31]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Blinkhorn, Martin (2002), Democracy and Civil War in Spain 1932–1939, Routledge, p. 15
  2. ^ Blinkhorn, Martin (2002), Democracy and Civil War in Spain 1932–1939, Routledge, p. 140
  3. .
  4. ^ Mary Vincent , Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic, Chapter 9, p. 202
  5. ^ Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge. 3rd edition. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 2006 p. 64.
  6. ^ Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge. 3rd edition. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 2006 pp. 45, 69.
  7. ^ a b c Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge. 3rd edition. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 2006 p. 62.
  8. ^ a b Payne, Stanley G. The Franco Regime, 1936–1975. University of Wisconsin Press, 2011, p. 46
  9. ^ Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge. 3rd edition. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 2006 pp. 88–89.
  10. ^ a b Paul Preston. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge. 3rd edition. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2007. 2006 p. 89.
  11. ^ Preston (2006). pp. 63–65.
  12. ^ Vincent, p.202
  13. ^ Gaceta Regional, 27 December 1932, 9 January 1933, quoted, M.Vincent, 203
  14. ^ Gil Robles, No fue posible la paz p.100
  15. ^ Gaceta Regional, 5 and 8 November 1933
  16. ^ Vincent p. 212.
  17. ^ Preston (2006). p. 67.
  18. ^ a b Thomas (1961). p. 100.
  19. ^ Preston (2006). p. 72.
  20. ^ Preston (2006). pp. 73–74.
  21. ^ Payne, Stanley G. Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977. University of Wisconsin Pres, 1999, p. 45
  22. ^ Thomas (1961). p. 78.
  23. ^ Preston, Coming of the Spanish Civil war, 153–154 (2nd edn, 184)
  24. ^ Vincent, p. 235
  25. ^ Preston (2006). pp. 82–83.
  26. ^ Preston (1999). pp. 17–23.
  27. ^ Ruiz, Julius. The 'red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 28
  28. ^ Preston (2006). p. 89.
  29. ^ Preston (2006). p. 92.
  30. .
  31. .

Sources

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