A coup d'état took place in Spain between 13 and 15 September 1923, led by the then-Captain General of Catalonia Miguel Primo de Rivera. It resulted in the overthrow of the Restoration system and the establishment of a dictatorship under Primo de Rivera, mainly because King Alfonso XIII did not oppose the coup and appointed the rebel general as head of the government at the helm a military directorate.

Historian Francisco Alía Miranda has pointed out that "the coup d'état of General Miguel Primo de Rivera [was] atypical for its simplicity. To triumph he only needed the backing of a few prestigious military officers and to publish a manifesto in the press addressed To the country and the Army. The Restoration regime collapsed in a few hours. [...] He did not need more backing from chiefs in command of the troops, for that the shadow of Alfonso XIII was already behind him".

Javier Moreno Luzón pointed out that Alfonso XIII "knew that handing over power to the military entailed a crucial political turnaround. The most important in Spain since the end of 1874, when had facilitated the return of the Bourbon dynasty and the opening of a different stage, the Restoration. To validate that act of force questioned the moderating functions assigned to the monarch by the constitutional texts of 1876... Moreover, now the Government was not taken over by a caudillo at the service of a specific party, but by the army as a corporation. All of which would bring unforeseeable consequences".

According to the Israeli historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, "it is in Catalonia where the immediate origins of Primo de Rivera's coup must be sought. It was there that the bourgeoisie created the hysterical atmosphere that surrounded Primo de Rivera with the halo of "savior" and placed his rebellion, as a contemporary observer noted, in the general context of the anti-Bolshevik reaction that had also reached other European countries. Cambó, authentic representative of the Catalan high bourgeoisie, "the theoretician of the Spanish dictatorship", as Maurín called him, crudely exposed the yearning and responsibility of his class for the dictatorship: [...] "A society in which the demagogic [syndicalist] avalanche puts ideals and interests in grave danger will resign itself to everything as long as it feels protected..." [...] This does not mean, however, that there was a real danger of social revolution on the eve of Primo de Rivera's coup".

Background

Political role of the Army

Since the "disaster of 1898", there was a growing intervention of the Army in Spanish political life, presenting itself as the interpreter of the "popular will" and the defender of the "national interest, above partial interests and partisan politics". Two key moments of this praetorianism were the Cu-Cut! events of 1905 —the assault by officers of the Barcelona garrison on the editorial office and workshops of this Catalan nationalist satirical publication, and also those of the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, in response to a satirical cartoon about the military— which led to the Law of Jurisdictions of 1906, and, above all, the Spanish crisis of 1917, in which the self-declared Juntas de Defensa, made up exclusively of military personnel, took on a special role.

As José Luis Gómez-Navarro has pointed out, "among Spanish chiefs and officers, since the beginning of the 20th century, but increasingly after the First World War, an anti-parliamentarism and a rejection of politics had spread.... The Spanish army consolidated the defense of values consubstantial to military professionalism but whose weight increased in the face of the crisis: order, hierarchy, discipline and authority; to which was added its growing role as defenders of the foundations of the social order and of the moderating institution that guaranteed the continuity of the social and political system: the monarchy".

"Bolshevik triennium" and pistolerismo (1918–1923)

In the years following the crisis of 1917, a serious social crisis broke out in Catalonia and in the Andalusian countryside. "An authentic "social war", with anarchist attacks and attacks by gunmen in the pay of employers, was declared in Catalonia and three years of mobilizations of day laborers in the countryside to whom the echoes of the Russian revolution in Andalusia had reached". Although the two great Spanish workers' organizations, CNT and PSOE-UGT did not join the communist movement, the October Revolution "acted in Spain as an unstoppable mobilizing myth that shocked for years the working class, dragged its leaders and dazzled the masses they tried to frame".

In Andalusia between 1918 and 1920 there was an intensification of mobilizations, known as the "Bolshevik triennium". There were constant strikes by day laborers that were responded to with extraordinary harshness by the bosses and the authorities. During the strikes the day laborers occupied the farms, being violently evicted from them by the civil guard and the army. There was also sabotage and attacks.

In Catalonia the conflict began in February 1919 with the strike of the Canadiense, which was the name by which the company Barcelona Traction, Light and Power, that supplied electricity to Barcelona, was known. As a result, the city was left without electricity, water and streetcars. The liberal government of the Count of Romanones opted for the path of negotiation accompanied by the approval of the "eight-hour" decree and a new social insurance system, but had to give in to pressure from the employers, who demanded an iron fist and found valuable support in the Captain General of Catalonia, Joaquín Milans del Bosch, and King Alfonso XIII. Thus it was that the Catalan workers' conflict degenerated into a "social war" whose main stage was Barcelona. The violence of the bosses' pistoleros was answered with terrorist attacks perpetrated by anarchist action groups.

The new government of the conservative Eduardo Dato appointed General Severiano Martínez Anido as civil governor, who greatly increased the harsh repressive policy applied by Milans del Bosch against the CNT. "He implemented a regime of terror that made use of free trade unionism, persecuted the leaders of the CNT and applied the law of escapes: some detainees were executed on the spot by the forces of order, under the pretext that they had tried to flee". Terrorist acts and street violence between anarchists and members of the free and parapolice forces followed one after the other between 1920 and 1923. The spiral of violence reached Dato himself, who was riddled with bullets in Madrid by three anarchists on 8 March 1921. In 1923 Salvador Seguí, a leader of the CNT who had not supported the violent way and who defended the return to the trade union way, and the archbishop of Zaragoza Juan Soldevila were also assassinated.

Córdoba speech by Alfonso XIII (1921)

The first problem that the new government formed after the assassination of Eduardo Dato, which was presided over by the also conservative Manuel Allendesalazar, had to face was the controversy raised by Alfonso XIII's speech delivered on 23 May 1921 at the Casino de la Amistad in Cordoba before the large landowners of the province and the authorities of the capital. Alfonso XIII was convinced, and he was not the only one at that time in Europe, that the parliamentary system was in decadence and was not strong enough to face the revolutionary forces driven by the "Soviet idea", which led him to a generalized criticism of the liberal institutions in Spain —parties, government and Cortes—, as could be seen in the Cordoba speech.

The king complained about the politicians whose "machinations and pettiness" prevented the approval in the Cortes of the projects that "interest everyone" and so he proposed that "the provinces" begin a "movement of support for your King and the beneficial projects and then the Parliament will remember that it is the people's mandatary, since nothing else means the vote that you give it at the ballot box. Then the King's signature will be a guarantee that the beneficial projects will become a reality." He also said "that he, inside or outside the Constitution, would have to impose himself and sacrifice himself for the good of the Motherland". Alfonso XIII was aware of what he was saying because before launching the proposal he had said: "Some will say that I am stepping out of my constitutional duties but I have been a constitutional King for nineteen years and I have risked my life many times to be caught now in a constitutional fault". The minister who accompanied him, Juan de la Cierva, tried to get the journalists to publish only the "soft summary" he had prepared, but the complete text was broadcast with posters by a film newsreel (it was the first time, and the last time, that a speech by the king was made public in this way). José Luis Gómez-Navarro has pointed out that "what is truly significant in this speech is not only the criticism of the functioning of the Restoration regime in those years but his call to the citizens to meet with their king, without mediation, outside the political parties, in order to be effective and solve the problems that Spain was facing. [Alfonso XIII had made a qualitative leap in his thinking. The crown, represented in his person, became the interpreter of the popular will, at least in crisis situations".

The Congress of Deputies took up the matter four days later. The socialist Julián Besteiro affirmed that the king had had some words of "contempt" towards the Parliament and the also socialist Indalecio Prieto proclaimed shouting up to three times: "The Parliament has more dignity than the King!" (Prieto's phrase did not appear in the Diario de Sesiones but it circulated all over Madrid). On the other hand, the conservative Antonio Maura supported the monarch saying that his words had been applauded by "sensible Spain" and the Catholic newspaper El Debate published that they would be "fervently applauded" by the "people detached from politics". For his part, Alfonso XIII "for the moment, was frightened by the impact of his statements and denied any anti-parliamentary intention", although in private he confessed that he had said what he thought, with which "Don Alfonso was in tune with the critics of parliamentarism, which abounded in Spain -as in all Europe, as well as in Latin America- during those years".

Disaster of Annual (1921)

The most serious problem that the Allendesalazar government had to face was the crisis caused by the disaster of Annual, which occurred two months later in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. "The unexpected offensive of the Indians [led by Abd el-Krim] concluded in a general disbandment of the Spanish Army in the direction of Melilla. The Spanish troops were dispersed in a very extensive front with a very high number of positions and with serious supply problems. The units were poorly equipped.... The collapse of the front resulted in the loss in just a few days of what had been achieved with great difficulty for years. Not only General Silvestre [commander general of Melilla and head of the Spanish forces in the eastern half of the Protectorate] died, but also 10,000 other soldiers".