Niceto Alcalá-Zamora

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Niceto Alcalá-Zamora when he was minister of the Crown.

Niceto Alcalá-Zamora y Torres (July 6, 1877-February 18, 1949) served, briefly, as the first Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic, and then—from 1931 to 1936—as its President. He was succeeded in the latter office by Manuel Azaña.

Alcalá-Zamora was born in Priego de Cordoba, Spain. A lawyer by profession, from a very young age he was active in the Liberal Party. Chosen as a deputy, he quickly gained fame for his eloquent interventions in the Congress of Deputies, arriving to be minister of Promotion in 1917 and of War in 1922, comprised part of the governments of concentration presided over by García Prieto. He was also Spain’s representative in the League of Nations.

Disappointed by the acceptance on the part of the King, Alfonso XIII, of the coup d'état by General Miguel Primo de Rivera on September 13, 1923, Alcalá-Zamora did not collaborate with the new regime. After the departure of the dictator in 1930 he declared himself a republican in a meeting that took place on April 13 in the Apolo theater of Valencia. He was one of the instigators of the Pact of San Sebastián. The failure of the military uprising (Revolt of Jaca), in Aragon, of that same year took him to prison, as member of the revolutionary committee. But he left jail after the municipal elections of April 12, 1931. In these elections, although the monarchist candidates won more overall votes than the republicans did, the republicans did so well in the provincial cities that Alfonso soon abandoned power. Without waiting for a fresh election, Alcalá-Zamora put himself at the head of a revolutionary provisional government, which occupied the ministries in Madrid on April 14 and which proclaimed the Second Spanish Republic.

Confirmed as Prime Minister in June, he resigned in October, along with Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior. Both men opposed the writing of articles 24 and 26 of the new Constitution; these articles, consecrated the separation of Church-State and made possible the dissolution of the religious orders considered dangerous for the State. Alcalá-Zamora and Maura said that these articles injured their religious feelings as well as those of the Catholic electorates which they represented.

Nevertheless, on December 10, 1931 Alcalá-Zamora was elected President, by 362 votes out of 410 present deputies (the Chamber was composed of 446 deputies). He stayed in this position until April 7, 1936.

The elections of November 1933 (which occurred after Alcalá-Zamora had dissolved the Cortes) gave victory to the right, to which Alcalá-Zamora was very hostile, with constant institutional confrontations throughout its term in office. The party with the highest number of votes was the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), but it did not have enough seats to govern in its own right, and so its leader José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones yielded power to Alejandro Lerroux. In October 1934 Gil-Robles obtained two ministerial portfolios for CEDA; the following March he acquired three more, though at first he stopped short of trying to obtain the office of Prime Minister. When in the end he decided to try for that post, Alcala-Zamora dissolved the Cortes (January 7, 1936) specifically to avoid that outcome.

Congress controversially decided that the dissolution had been illegal, although it had made possible new elections and the consequent victory of the Popular Front. The 1933 dissolution had already cost Alcalá-Zamora critical support on the part of the left, but on the other hand, he refused to put power into the hands of CEDA either, since he distrusted the democratic spirit of the party of Gil-Robles.

The beginning of the Spanish Civil War surprised Alcalá-Zamora, who was on a trip to Scandinavia at the time. He decided to stay away from Spain when he found out that militiamen of the Popular Front government had illegally entered his home, stolen his belongings and plundered his safe-deposit box in the Madrid Crédit Lyonnais bank, taking the manuscript of his memoirs.

When World War II began, Alcalá-Zamora was in France. Due to the German occupation and the collaborationist attitude of the Vichy government, he left France and went to Argentina in January of 1942. There he lived on money derived from his books, articles and conferences. An offer was allegedly made to him that he would be left unmolested if he did go back, since a son of his was married to a daughter of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, one of the leaders of the uprising. If the offer ever occurred it came to naught, because he did not want to return to Spain under Franco.

Alcalá-Zamora died in Buenos Aires. His body was brought back to Spain in 1979, and he was interred in Madrid's Cementerio de la Almudena.