Barcelona. Proclamation of the Second Republic. 14 April 1931

Around 3 in the afternoon of 14 April 1931, someone hung the tricolour Republican flag on the roof of the Central Post Office in Madrid’s Cibeles Square. Years later, writer María Zambrano would recall how word spread and that within minutes, “a crowd made up of groups, residents of the neighbourhoods, friends, people who suddenly were fraternizing” took over the city centre. Some three hours later, the Second Republic was proclaimed.

The image of those festive crowds shared across the country illustrates the transcendental change that that had been taking place in the world since the end of the 19th century. The masses, to use a word that characteristic of the political and social literature of the time, had erupted into the political scene, shattering what remained of the old oligarchic liberalism in which public affairs were run by a small political, economic, social, and cultural elite.

Philosophers, social scientists, and writers observed thus phenomenon apprehensively. In 1895, French sociologist Gustave Le Bon declared that “the mass is always intellectually inferior to the isolated man”, and in 1927, Spanish philosopher José José Ortega y Gasset warned that “the arrival of the masses to full social power [is] the gravest crisis that peoples, nations, and cultures can suffer”.

This fear is understandable. Since World War I the masses had become an essential political subject for the radical political movements of both the right and the left. The Russian Revolution had demonstrated their strength, and Communist parties, and some Socialist ones, saw themselves in the Soviet mirror. For example, in 1932, the Spanish Federation of Socialist Youth called for the “conquest of power by the revolutionary action of the masses”. 

The capacity for mass mobilization was also crucial for the Fascists and National Socialists in their road to power. And they were the points of reference for the radical right across Europe. In 1933, the first issue of the daily paper El Fascio warned that the Fascist state must win over “the authentic mass of the nation for itself”. And, a year later, the program of the Falange called for the defeat of capitalism in order to end “the misery in which the human masses live”.

At the start of the 1930s, only a few European countries had radically changed their institutions in order to incorporate the masses, that is the citizenry, into democratic political systems. With the proclamation of the Second Republic, Spain joined them. But the Republic was born into an unpromising European context. As the British liberal and writer Ramsay Muir lamented in 1930, the repudiation of democratic systems “and the ideas of liberty on which they were based” had spread across the continent of Europe.

MML