UC San Diego

This dissertation considers why the Civil Guard, Spain’s gendarmerie, was one of the most violent organizations in the country during the politically turbulent Second Republic period. The work argues that while the Civil Guard’s military armament and the general increase in the number of protests were important factors, the corps’ military culture, which centered on honor, also led to violence because it made guards unable to adapt to the mass forms of political contestation that accompanied the Republic. The Civil Guard’s founders had believed that if members sought to gain honor through earning the respect of the public then they would naturally act with restraint. However, as mass politics took hold in Spain, the Right learned to exploit this desire for honor while the Left only antagonized the Civil Guard by criticizing it. Failing to win respect from all classes of an increasingly mobilized population, guards learned to instill fear as a substitute for that respect and used violence as their tool for creating fear. The Republic’s mass press ensured that guards would now be criticized for their harsh and at times extralegal tactics, which only made them feel the need to defend their honor even more vigorously. As the intensity of the confrontations with Spain’s workers escalated, many guards abandoned their hopes for earning the respect of all classes and came to view honor as glory won in a battle to subdue their opponents.

Using the example of the Civil Guard, this dissertation suggests the inability of Europe’s gendarmeries to adapt their organizational cultures to the new socio-political landscape of the continent’s fledgling democracies was an important reason why so many of these regimes collapsed during the interwar period. In order to prove this argument for Spain, this work draws upon, principally, personal service records of civil guards, telegrams from the Ministry of the Interior, and newspapers. It also proposes that the idea of repertoires, borrowed from social movement theory, can help explain how police forces act in confrontational situations by treating policemen as independent actors who make claims of their own.