A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain

by Paul Preston

Overview

Nowhere does the ceaseless struggle to maintain democracy in the face of political corruption come more alive than in Paul Preston’s magisterial history of modern Spain.

The culmination of a half-century of historical investigation, A People Betrayed is not only a definitive history of modern Spain but also a compelling narrative that becomes a lens for understanding the challenges that virtually all democracies have faced in the modern world.

Whereas so many twentieth-century Spanish histories begin with Franco and the devastating Civil War, Paul Preston’s magisterial work begins in the late nineteenth century with Spain’s collapse as a global power, especially reflected in its humiliating defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and its loss of colonial territory.

This loss hung over Spain in the early years of the twentieth century, its agrarian economic base standing in stark contrast to the emergence of England, Germany, and France as industrial powers. Looking back to the years prior to 1923, Preston demonstrates how electoral corruption infiltrated almost every sector of Spanish life, thus excluding the masses from organized politics and giving them a bitter choice between apathetic acceptance of a decrepit government or violent revolution. So ineffective was the Republic—which had been launched in 1873—that it paved the way for a military coup and dictatorship, led by Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923, exacerbating widespread profiteering and fraud. When Rivera was forced to resign in 1930, his fall brought forth a succession of feeble governments, stoking rancorous tensions that culminated in the tragic Spanish Civil War.

With astonishing detail, Preston describes the ravages that rent Spain in half between 1936 and 1939. Tracing the frightening rise of Francisco Franco, Preston recounts how Franco grew into Spain’s most powerful military leader during the Civil War and how, after the war, he became a fascistic dictator who not only terrorized the Spanish population through systematic oppression and murder but also enriched corrupt officials who profited from severe economic plunder of Spain’s working class.

The dictatorship lasted through World War II—during which Spain sided with Mussolini and Hitler—and only ended decades later, in 1975, when Franco’s death was followed by a painful yet bloodless transition to republican democracy. Yet, as Preston reveals, corruption and political incompetence continued to have a corrosive effect on social cohesion into the twenty-first century, as economic crises, Catalan independence struggles, and financial scandals persist in dividing the country.

Filled with vivid portraits of politicians and army officers, revolutionaries and reformers, and written in the “absorbing” (Economist) style for which Preston is so revered, A People Betrayed is the first historical work to examine the continuities of political unrest and national anxiety in Spain up until the present, providing a chilling reminder of just how fragile democracy remains in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871408686
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/16/2020
Pages:	768
Sales rank:	681,721
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Civil War, Franco, Juan Carlos, and The Spanish Holocaust, is the world’s foremost historian on twentieth-century Spain. A professor at the London School of Economics, he lives in London.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption 1

2 Violence, Corruption and the Slide to Disaster 27

3 Revolution and War: From the Disaster of 1898 to the Tragic Week of 1909 53

4 Revolution and War: From the Tragic Week of 1909 to the Crisis of 1917-1918 79

5 A System in Disarray: Disorder and Repression, 1918-1921 103

6 From Colonial Disaster to Dictatorship, 1921-1923 129

7 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Success, 1923-1926 157

8 The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Failure, 1926-1931 197

9 The Second Republic: Reform and Frustration, 1931-1933 227

10 The Black Years and the Coming of War, 1933-1936 259

11 Civil War: Hatred, Incompetence and Profit, 1936-1939 303

12 World War: Survival, Hypocrisy and Profit, 1939-1945 333

13 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Terror, 1945-1953 369

14 The Franco Regime: Corruption and Complacency, 1953-1969 403

15 The Twilight Years of a Corrupt Regime, 1969-1982 439

16 The Painful Creation of a Democracy, 1975-1982 471

17 The Grandeur and Misery of a Newborn Democracy, 1982-2004 509

18 The Triumph of Corruption and Incompetence, 2004-2018 539

Acknowledgements 567

Notes 569

List of Illustrations 705

Index 707

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/27/2020

Fascist dictators, left-wing terrorists, and feckless democratic politicians all come off badly in this nuanced and evenhanded history of modern Spain. London School of Economics historian Preston (The Last Days of the Spanish Republic) roots Spain’s violent 20th century in deep sociopolitical dysfunctions, including exploitation of impoverished peasants and workers by a reactionary elite of landowners, industrialists, the Catholic Church, and the military, who cemented their power through electoral fraud; outrageous political corruption; and a left-wing opposition given to bomb throwing. These issues persisted through the 1936–1939 civil war—Preston blames the Loyalist government’s defeat in part on left-wing factionalism and Prime Minister Largo Caballero’s lethargy—and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Things looked up, in Preston’s telling, during the mid–1970s, when political moderates and King Juan Carlos (who bravely faced down a 1981 coup attempt) engineered the transition to democracy. But Basque separatist terrorism and a perpetual whirlwind of corruption scandals, according to Preston, have tarnished even Juan Carlos. Preston brings this complex story alive with brisk, lucid prose and colorful character sketches, and treats Spain’s rancorous political antagonisms judiciously. This vigorous narrative history delivers sharp insight into Spain’s chaotic past. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history."

Thomas Snyder

"As an historian of modern Spain in the English-speaking world, Preston has no peer. A People Betrayed has all the merits we have come to expect from Paul Preston: from wide-ranging scholarship to a deep but unsentimental and open-eyed love for Spain and its people. He fully understands how painful elements of the past—from the country’s heritage as a colonial power to the long hand of Franco—still cast a shadow on the present."

Adam Hochschild

"A People Betrayed is a magisterial study of [Spain's] turbulent past, seen through the optic of those apparently ineradicable twins: corruption and political incompetence. . . . The history recounted in A People Betrayed is a long one, but it races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes. . . . Preston’s narrative combines his gift for cogent, summarising clarity and for telling detail. . . . Preston has written an admirable book – a lively, comprehensive history of modern Spain, but also, at barely one remove, a compelling essay on contemporary corruption, which is especially worthy of attention today, as we confront an emergency that underlines what states are really for."

The Guardian - Helen Graham

"It is difficult to see this marvelous, brilliantly written and surely authoritative biography ever being matched. It is a book which any historian would be proud to have written."

Ian Kershaw

"Prodigiously detailed and absorbing... Mr. Preston is, by some distance, the most prolific historian of modern Spain.... Born in 1946—seven years after the end of the Spanish Civil War—Mr. Preston is the reigning king of a tribe of brilliant 20th-century British historians who have shaped our understanding of Spain, often better than their Spanish counterparts have done with their own history."

Wall Street Journal - Tunku Varadarajan

"His eye for the winning detail makes his subjects quite human and enlivens the world of political maneuvering into something other than dry history."

Joshua Goode

★ 07/01/2020

Preston (history, London Sch. of Economics; The Spanish Holocaust) is the foremost historian of modern Spain writing in English. This latest work continues Preston's pattern of producing definitive studies of 20th-century Spain. Citing more than a hundred pages of sources, this massive volume paints a pessimistic picture of Spain's historically stagnant economy, venial and incompetent politicians, reactionary military and clergy, regional separatist movements, and relentless boom-and-bust cycles of revolution and reaction that blunted progress for more than a century. Spain began transitioning to democracy after far-right dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, but the country is still beset by old ills, including rampant corruption and a burgeoning Catalan independence movement. Spain has seen an astonishing number of military coups: 50 from 1814 to 1981. It has withstood crisis after crisis: humiliation in the Spanish-American War (1898), Miguel Primo de Rivera's kleptocratic regime (1923–30), civil war (1936–39) and ensuing decades of dictatorship, and an uphill struggle for democracy (1975-present). Betrayed by their leaders time and again, the Spanish people have nevertheless sustained a rich, robust culture. VERDICT A definitive political history of modern Spain: searing, sympathetic, analytical, and packed with enough intrigues and regime changes to excite scholars and history buffs alike.—Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Library Journal

2020-03-03
One of the leading authorities on 20th-century Spain paints a dark portrait of the political history of the Iberian nation that has long struggled to find solid government and leadership.

Preston, a professor at the London School of Economics who has written many books on the history, politics, and culture of modern Spain, barely hides his anger at the failures of Spain’s major figures over the past two centuries. “Violence, corruption and incompetence of the political class have betrayed the population since 1833 and almost certainly before,” he writes near the beginning. He continues, “unlike, say, France or Italy after 1871, Spanish governments failed to create an all-embracing sense of nationhood.” Opening this authoritative yet searingly critical narrative with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874, Preston takes us smoothly through the ruinous Spanish-American War, the Spanish Civil War and its long, repressive Francoist aftermath, and the country’s transformation into a republic since the 1970s. The author, a discerning critic of a country he clearly understands, delivers a comprehensive, vivid, and bleak record of assassinations, betrayals, anarchist attacks, extrajudicial exterminations, military coups, terrorism, dictatorship, endless corruption, and economic ruin. Even the post-Franco return of representative government and democracy within a monarchy has been “painful,” the republic’s young life a mixture of “grandeur and misery.” Preston leaves readers pessimistic about the ability of Spain’s current regime to lead the country into a bright future, and the author’s unrelenting disappointment with the country he loves is sometimes taxing to readers. The book could have used some lighter-hued relief with more focus on Spain’s ordinary people, who have always gotten on with their lives despite officialdom’s poisonous struggles for power. In the book’s welter of detail about politics and culture, the achievements of average Spaniards often get lost. Still, the scope of the narrative and the obvious depth of research are impressive.

Likely to be the go-to history of modern Spain for many years to come. (20 b/w illustrations)

Kirkus Reviews