Civil Directory of Primo de Rivera

However, the institutionalization project failed and Primo de Rivera presented his resignation to king Alfonso XIII, who had also withdrawn his support, in January 1930, leading to Berenguer's "dictatorship".

[2] As the historian Ángeles Barrio has pointed out, "the popularity that the success of the African campaign had given Primo de Rivera allowed him to take a step forward in the continuity of the regime, to return the Army to the barracks and to undertake a civil phase of the Directory.

In fact, on December 3, 1925, Primo de Rivera constituted his first civil government, in which, however, the key posts -Presidency, occupied by himself, Vice-Presidency and Interior, by Severiano Martínez Anido, and War by Juan O'Donnell, Duke of Tetuán- were reserved for military personnel.

[3] The objective set by Primo de Rivera to the new civil directory was to carry out the economic transformation and the preparation of laws by means of which, after a prudential time, a legal normalcy would be reestablished to guide and govern the future political life of Spain.

The civilians belonged to the Patriotic Union, and among them stood out "the rising stars of corporate authoritarianism: José Calvo Sotelo [a former "maurista" who in the previous two years had occupied the General Directorate of Local Administration] in Finance, Eduardo Aunós in Labor and the Count of Guadalhorce in Public Works".

According to González Calleja, "the convening of the National Consultative Assembly in September 1927 and the elaboration of the draft Constitution marked the definitive break of the Dictatorship with the parliamentary system, provisionally suspended four years earlier.

[10] Primo de Rivera expressed it clearly a few days after the coup d'état was consummated: "Workers' associations, indeed, for purposes of culture, protection and mutualism, and even of healthy politics, but not for resistance and struggle with production".

By the end of the year, the employers' organizations were already openly against it and called for the dissolution of the Joint Committees or at least their reform so that they would be limited to conciliation and arbitration tasks, and would no longer legislate on labor relations and working conditions.

According to González Calleja, a revealing fact of the "lukewarm reception that the primorriverist mobilizing project had among the Spanish population" was the modest circulation of the UP and the regime's newspaper La Nación (50,000 copies in 1927).

[25] On the other hand, according to this same historian, "the influence that this attempt at patriotic mobilization exerted on the nationalist rituals that, with the aroma of incense and barracks, the Franco dictatorship elaborated less than a decade later should not be underestimated".

[26] The mobilization of the masses took the form of large "patriotic" demonstrations of adhesion or atonement to the dictator organized by the Patriotic Union (UP) in collaboration with the State apparatus, such as the rally in Madrid of provincial leaders of the UP and mayors from all over the country which was organized in 1924 in response to the publication by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez of his book denouncing the Dictatorship and the Monarchy entitled Alfonso XIII unmasked, which was accompanied by the delivery to Primo de Rivera of an album with more than three and a half million signatures of support and the distribution of half a million medals in homage to the King.

[28] Another of the instruments used for the indoctrination of the masses were the "patriotic" ceremonies organized by the government delegates, all of them military, on the occasion of "the Fiesta de la Raza, the homage to the troops of Africa, the swearing in of the flag of the recruits, the blessing of the Somatén flag or the Arbor Day" and the "patriotic" conferences, also organized by the government delegates, in which "the virtues and traditions of the Hispanic race, the duty to defend the homeland, the veneration of the Head of State, respect for authority, love of nature and the obligation to pay taxes" were promoted, says Eduardo González Calleja.

The Service would be organized by judicial districts and an Army commander would be appointed to head them, assisted by a sergeant, who would be in charge of directing the pre-military instruction and education programs and of giving patriotic lectures on political topics.

[26] On September 4, 1926, the leaders of the Unión Patriótica made public a communiqué requesting that a plebiscite be held to coincide with "the third anniversary of the glorious coup d'état" in which an opportunity would be given "for opinion to express whether it is convenient to organize a Supreme National Assembly to assist in the governance of the State".

[33] Sonnet written in exile by Miguel de Unamuno dedicated to Primo Rivera on the occasion of his appointment in 1926 as doctor honoris causa by the University of Salamanca, from whom the dictator had deprived him of his position as rector.

The consultation was held between September 11 and 13 without any guarantee, since the tables were full of members of the Patriotic Union and the men and women over 18 years of age who participated did not vote, but signed minutes in support of the Dictator.

On September 13, 1929, the sixth anniversary of the coup d'état, Primo de Rivera made public his reservations about the draft Constitution, highlighting its "imbalance of powers" in favor of the Crown.

In August 1926, the Minister of Public Instruction, the Catholic Eduardo Callejo de la Cuesta, launched the reform of the Bachillerato, whose main novelties were the greater weight of technical-scientific education and the subject of Spanish History, and the obligatory teaching of Religion.

As Eduardo González Calleja has pointed out, "the prohibition of some Carnival celebrations, the collection of anti-religious publications, the circulars against the profanation of holidays and the immorality of customs created an atmosphere of hypocritical puritanism, in which the patriotic, Catholic and uncompromisingly moralistic good citizen defended a pactful version of Catholicism, fearful of social change, retrograde and conformist", constituting, as Shlomo Ben Ami has noted, an antecedent of the national-Catholicism of Franco's dictatorship.

Then, in order to force the SoN to accept the proposal, Primo de Rivera reopened the question of Tangier and on August 25, 1926, he requested its incorporation into the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco.

The only thing Primo de Rivera achieved was that the Council of the League of Nations met in Madrid on June 6, 1929, and that Spain participated in the administration of Tangier —it was assigned the appointment of the chief of police— but its international status was maintained.

[63] These failures led Primo de Rivera to reorient his foreign policy towards Portugal —a relationship that was favored by the triumph in 1926 of a military coup d'état that installed a regime similar to that of the primorriverist dictatorship—[64] and towards Latin America, a term that began to consolidate then.

Thus, the Dictatorship sponsored the trip of the Plus Ultra, a seaplane piloted by Commander Ramón Franco that left Palos de la Frontera on January 22, 1926, and arrived in Buenos Aires two days later, after a stopover in the Canary Islands and Cape Verde.

Other examples of this pan-Hispanic policy were the inauguration of the Cervantes Monument in Madrid's Plaza de España and the restoration of the mausoleum of the Catholic Monarchs in the Royal Chapel of Granada.

[67] González Calleja concludes: "In reality, the rapprochement with the American subcontinent fulfilled for the Dictatorship the double function of consoling public opinion of the troubles of Morocco and diverting the attention of a muzzled press".

The problem was that the revaluation of the peseta was largely artificial, since it was mainly due to the speculative movements of foreign capital attracted by the high interest rates and the rising prospects of the currency.

Historian Eduardo González Calleja makes the following evaluation of the Spanish economy during the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera:[76]The Dictatorship was one of the crucial stages in the process of formation of Spanish capitalist society, prolonging previous attitudes (nationalism), accentuating others (state interventionism, monopolistic practices, support for financial power) or trying out new formulas for the promotion of production and distribution of income (corporate organization, creation of new credit entities, adjustments in the taxation system, and so on).

However, as [Francisco] Comín observes, protectionism, corporativism, state interventionism and the existence of oligopolies and monopolies were common in Europe between the wars, although they manifested themselves in Spain with an intensity and peculiarities different from those known in other countries.In 1924 Primo de Rivera appointed Eduardo Aunós, a former militant of the Lliga Regionalista, as Undersecretary of Labor to organize the new corporate system of labor relations —which would culminate in the creation of the National Corporate Organization in November 1926— and to develop a series of social measures.

[80] Between the two failed coups d'état was the so-called Prats de Molló plot, an attempted invasion of Spain from French Catalonia led by Francesc Macià and his party Estat Catalá, in which Catalan anarcho-syndicalist groups of the CNT-AIT collaborated.

Among the members of the parties of the time of the old politics who confronted the Dictatorship was the conservative José Sánchez Guerra, who, as he had promised, when the National Consultative Assembly was convened, went into exile from Spain, and later participated in the attempted coup d'état of January 1929.