Spain is a bottle, and I am the cork.

And when the cork is no longer there, the champagne gushes over.

Spanish king Ferdinand's seventh.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music to the history of the 20th century. Episode 295, The Bottle Uncorked.

We last talked about the situation in Spain in episode 253. We discussed the RIF War, which was when the Spanish military struggled to subdue the people of the RIF,

or Spanish Morocco, as they called it in the West, even when Spanish control over it was mostly theoretical.

The war went poorly, and opposition grew. when Spanish control over it was mostly theoretical.

The war went poorly, and opposition grew, until a military coup established a dictatorship

under an aristocrat and general named Miguel Primo de Rivera and Orbanaja.

The Spanish king, Alfonso X, supported the coup and ratified it by appointing Primo de Rivera, prime minister.

Primo de Rivera's greatest accomplishment was defeating the Riff rebels and ending the war,

with, it must be said, a great deal of help from the French.

Afterward, he governed a fractious Spain for the

following six years. The challenges were vast. The right-wing traditionalist forces in Spain

included monarchists, aristocrats, large landowners, military officers, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

And you should note that a Venn diagram of these forces would reveal considerable overlap.

Aristocratic families were usually large landowners and often included among their family members,

high-ranking military officers, and high-ranking Catholic

clergy. Large landowners held estates that measured in square miles, or even more if you measured

them in square kilometers, and they seldom visited them in person. They treated the landless

laborers who worked their lands with cruelty and contempt,

...