Thèse Doct. (Nouveau doctorat) Études ibériques, sous la direction de Jean Coste. Paris 10, 1988. [S.l.] : [s.n.]
Summary
1930: After seven years under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, Spain was involved in political and economic problems in the aftermath of the stock-market crash of 1929.
Agriculture dominated the economy and a freak drought which ruined the olive harvest served to underline the injustice inherent in the system of land tenure. In the monoculture regions of the South, agriculture labourers found themselves destitute, and the liberal press laid the blame on the regime. Through the numerous articles concerning the rural world appears the image of a society divided into two blocs: large landowners, many of them absentees, and lanless labourers.
The Republican victory in the municipal elections of April 1931 brought an immense wave of hope, and the press unanimously recognized the urgent necessity for agrarian reform; but unrest soon broke out again, anarchists and trade unionists engaged in violent demonstrations, and a succession of projects for agrarian reform, planned but never implemented, contributed to increase disillusionment among the labourers. Nonetheless, legislation helped modify the balance of power by giving certain rights to landworkers.
The failure of the Republic was marked by two bloody episodes: the savage murder in January 1932 of civil guards by the peasants of Castilblanco, a remote village in Extramadura, showed the gulf which separated illiterate rural Spain from the urban culture...