Defending the state: the militarization of the public order system in the second Republican biennium, 1933-1936

Abstract

The objective of the following article is to analyse the militarization of the public order system during the second Republican biennium. The corpus of consulted sources includes the Official Gazette of Madrid, the Record of Proceedings of the Spanish Parliament (Cortes), memoirs, police journals, historical press and archival documentation. I argue that its evolution basically depended on five factors: governmental discourse on public order and the professional culture of the civil guard and police; the legal and organizational security apparatus; the pressure on the government from political parties, employers’ organizations, big landowners, national newspapers, police forces, and the Army, particularly the behaviour of the border parties and the president of the Republic; the different public order policies; and the policing of collective protest and major episodes of political violence. I conclude that militarization was neither a constant nor an irreversible phenomenon, but that two dissimilar processes were taking place: a militarization process between September 1933 and December 1935, that was accelerated as of October 1934 and decelerated as of April 1935, and then a demilitarization process until February 1936. This alternation was produced by the dialectic between two specific models of public order: one counterrevolutionary and the other liberal.