The Republican Bourgeoisie in Power

This photo shows Emilio Martínez Garrido, the mayor of Vigo, in the centre wearing glasses, accompanied by a group of civilians and military men during an official visit to the city’s Pereiró cemetery.  To the mayor’s right holding a sabre is Captain Antonio Carreró Berges. Only a few months after the photo was taken, he would order the execution of Martínez Garrido and eight other members of the municipal government against the walls of this same cemetery. The photo illustrates the way power was distributed before the coup as well as the profound significance of the violence deployed while carrying it out. It shows the prominence of the Republican bourgeoise of which Emilio Martínez Garrido, an industrialist and Socialist politician, was a fine representative, and the underlying motives for the rebel soldiers’ need to make the powerful into delinquents in order to justify their action.

From the end of the 19th century through the first third of the 20th, economic and change was creating a new bourgeois class in the cities and mid-sized towns of Galicia. The emergence of new industries and the growth of the service sector and the liberal professions produced a new class that mostly identified with progressive, liberal, and republican ideas.  This bourgeoisie contributed to the configuration of the great social movements of the period, agrarianism and the labour movement, as well as swelling the ranks of republicanism and Galician nationalism. Its prominence explains the victory of the Republican slate of candidates in the main urban and semi-urban centres of the region in the local elections of 1931.

While they belonged to different parties along the wide spectrum of republicanism, they shared a rejection of militarism and support for supporting reformist and collaborative options to both their left and right.  All these reasons made them a particular target of the rebels. They experienced their violence intensely and made up a considerable share of the victims of the 1936 coup in Galicia.

AMM