Everything about Niceto Alcal Zamora totally explained
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 didn't 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 didn't 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'd 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 didn't 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.
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