Tragic week
The Tragic Week ( Catalan Setmana Tràgica , Spanish Semana Trágica ) is the name of a series of bloody confrontations between the anarchist and radical republican-backed working class of Barcelona and other Catalan cities and the Spanish army between July 25 and August 2, 1909. You was triggered by 40,000 drafting orders to reservists that Prime Minister Antonio Maura Montaner wanted to use to reinforce the Spanish colonial troops in Morocco on July 9th.
prehistory
Minister of War Arsenio Linares y Pombo mobilized the Third Mixed Fighter Brigade in Catalonia; it consisted of active members and also of reservist units. Among them were 520 men who had finished active military service six years earlier and had not been called up since then. The majority of those called up were married fathers. Those who wanted to avoid being drafted could buy themselves out, which made military service a sacrifice for the destitute. With 6000 reals, the rich could get a representative, which was beyond the possibilities of the workers.
The Moroccan War , in which the Spanish army was supposed to repel the attacks of the Rifkabyls on the Spanish mining company near Melilla , was viewed by the Catalan workers as a class war in which it was not a question of national interests of Spain, but of private enrichment and mining interests of the possessing class went. This mining company was privately owned by the liberal Count Romanoes and the Margrave de Comillas. After a series of setbacks by Spanish associations, the catastrophe in the Wolfsschlucht occurred on July 23, 1909 , in which 200 Spanish soldiers were killed.
course
.jpg)
As a result, a wave of anarchist, anti-militarist and anti-colonialist propaganda unfolded across the country . At Atocha station in Madrid , tensions and especially the union unloaded Solidaridad Obrera in the Catalan capital Barcelona, which was led by anarchists and socialists, the July 26, 1909 called on Monday for a general strike on. Although the civil governor Ossorio y Gallardo had received a warning of growing dissatisfaction in good time, the jóvenes bárbaros ('Young Barbarians'), the youth of the Partido Republicano Radical Socialista ('Radical Socialist Republican Party') from Alejandro Lerroux were able to provoke and vandalize. Workers took power in Barcelona on Tuesday. They stopped trains and trams and turned them into barricades . Open street fighting broke out on Thursday, which was accompanied by general uprising, strikes and arson.
Many of the insurgents were anti-militarist, anti-colonial, and anti-clerical, especially Lerroux's radical republicans. Lerroux had won many followers in Barcelona with his radical republican-anti-capitalist-church-hostile rhetoric. The general strike and the anti-war demonstrations turned into an anarchist and anti-clerical uprising. The insurgents suspected the church and the clergy of being part of the corrupt bourgeois structure, whose sons did not have to go to war, but demanded that the proletariat perform patriotic duties. Lerroux blamed the church for the ignorance and poverty of the workers, as it dominated education in Spain and was the not insignificant owner of real estate and land. Anarchist elements in the city threw incendiary devices on churches and monasteries , schools run by church institutions and church asylums .
After the riots began in downtown Barcelona, security forces fired at protesters in Ramblas to stop street barricades , leaving many injured. The central government, which declared martial law , dispatched the army to quell the revolt ; Hundreds of people were killed in the process. After the troops stationed in Barcelona refused to shoot their compatriots, troops from Valencia , Saragossa , Pamplona and Burgos were brought in and ultimately put down the uprising.
Aftermath
The riots left 8 dead and 124 wounded among the forces of the police and army. According to various reports, 104 and 150 civilians were killed. The central government's response to the uprising was not only brutal but arbitrary. Over 2,500 people were arrested, 1,700 of whom were convicted of armed rebellion in military courts . 17 people were sentenced to death and 5 of them were executed . Among them was the founder of the Escuela Moderna , the educator Francisco Ferrer , who was accused of being the leader of the uprising. His execution on October 13, 1909, along with four others in the Montjuïc barracks sparked protests across Europe because he had not played a significant role in the events. 59 people have been to a lifelong imprisonment convicted. The constitution was suspended until November, anarchist and left-wing nationalist newspapers were banned, cultural workers' centers and meeting places as well as well over 100 secular schools were closed. Alejandro Lerroux fled into exile .
Due to the general condemnation in the European press, King Alfonso XIII was. alarmed by the reaction at home and abroad. Demonstrations and attacks in front of or on the embassies were the result. The King then replaced the Conservative Prime Minister Antonio Maura with the liberal Segismundo Moret y Prendergast in the wake of the Tragic Week. The plans of the party leader of the Conservatives for a "revolution from above" were thus finally settled.
The uprising changed nothing in terms of colonial policy. Despite the overwhelming nationwide impact of the uprising, general policy was not revised.
The tragic week was the subject of a cinematic presentation in 1977 during the Transición in the Catalan film La Ciutat cremada (“The burned city”) - 67 years after the tragic events, two years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco .
literature
- Walther L. Bernecker : Strategies of "direct action" and the use of force in Spanish anarchism
- Murray Bookchin : The Tragic Week . In: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 . ISBN 1-873176-04-X .
- Joan Connelly Ullman: The Tragic Week. A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain 1875-1912 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1968.
- Hugh Thomas : The Spanish civil war . Simon & Schuster, 1994. ISBN 978-0-671-75876-9 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ See on this: Thomas Hugh, The Spanish civil war . P. 29.
