Throughout its long and eventful history Freemasonry has often been attacked and its members persecuted. Yet today many people are unaware that the movement’s darkest hour occurred little over half a century ago, in Spain.
    Freemasonry first arrived in Spain in 1728, when the English Duke of Wharton established a lodge in Madrid. Although frequently persecuted, Spanish Freemasonry thrived in the nineteenth century and embraced a number of liberal notables, including seven Prime Ministers. The loss of the Spanish Empire in 1898 saw the movement blamed by its conservative opponents, and domestically the country entered a difficult period of its history. Between 1923 and 1930, the country was governed by a military dictatorship led by General Primo de Rivera. Spanish masons opposed this dictatorship, but their opposition came at a price. In 1928 approximately two-hundred masons, most notably the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, were imprisoned for plotting against the State.
    After the fall of the dictatorship, King Alfonso XIII went into exile and on 14 April 1931 the Second Republic was born. At the time there were two main Spanish masonic bodies: the Grand Lodge founded in 1885, and the larger Grand Orient founded in 1899. From 23-25 May 1931 the Grand Lodge met in Madrid and issued a declaration of principles upon which the new Spanish Constitution should be based:

Freemasonry proclaims as a general principle the inviolability of human rights in all their manifestations …

These included the right to life and security; freedom of thought and conscience; the separation of Church and State; universal suffrage; free and compulsory education for all; State-controlled obligatory work allocated according to the strength and aptitudes of each individual; care of the elderly; free justice for all citizens and trial by jury for all offences; civil marriage with divorce laws and the legitimisation of natural offspring; abolition of the death penalty and voluntary military service limited to home defence in case of aggression until ‘the spirit of peace among all nations makes it unnecessary’. The declaration ended with a call to those who favour ‘the Progress of Humanity’ to ‘form Masonic nuclei in their respective places of residence’.
    In the June 1931 elections the Left won a decisive victory. Eight members of the new cabinet were Freemasons, so too were the Mayor and Civil Governors of Madrid, the President and the Speaker of the Catalan Parliament, and Barcelona’s Mayor. The Grand Orient endorsed the new government as it was ‘based on three principles’ that ‘our Institution regards as fundamental’: ‘Freedom, Equality, Fraternity.’ The Bulletin de l’Association Maçonnique Internationale jubilantly proclaimed:

Our Spanish Brethren, who had so long been under suspicion by the dictatorship, are today in the seats of honour. We congratulate them.

Significantly the new Minister of Communications, Diego Martinez Barrio, was also the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, and over the next five years no less than seventeen masons served in ministerial positions.
    In October 1931 Manuel Azaña (made a mason in 1932) became President and attempted to introduce agrarian reform and regional autonomy but many on the Right believed his government was part of an evil Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. When Diego Martinez Barrio became Prime Minister in December 1933 the Right became positively hostile to Freemasonry, and in the same month, the son of the former Dictator founded the Falange and proposed that Spain should become a Fascist state. The Grand Orient denied that masonry dabbled in politics but the Right remained unconvinced. In 1934 Mauricio Karl published, El Enemigo: Marxismo, Anarquismo, Masoneria (‘The Enemy: Marxism, Anarchism, Masonry’). The following year he produced a sequel, Asesinos de Espana: Marxismo, Anarquismo, Masoneria (‘Assassins of Spain: Marxism, Anarchism, Masonry’), and he was joined in the attack by Francisco Luis, with La masonería contra España (‘Masonry against Spain’). Yet when a Spanish Deputy proposed banning masons from senior military office, a publication in Malaga defended masonry and emphasized that the lodges were ‘philosophical schools of virtue, science, art, literature and universal morality,’ that encouraged ‘beneficence, self knowledge, and universal brotherly unity’:

Freemasonry is only the enemy of intolerance ... Where there is intolerance, there confronting it is Freemasonry as the defence and bulwark of liberty – freedom of thought.

The election of February 1936 saw Azaña’s leftist Popular Front coalition win by a narrow margin although he quickly upset the conservatives by releasing political prisoners and introducing agrarian reforms. The wealthy began to extract vast sums from the country and the value of the peseta declined. With trade damaged, prices rose and workers demanded higher wages which in turn led to a series of strikes causing the Right to become increasingly jittery.
    The situation came to a head on 13 July when the leader of the Monarchist party, José Calvo Sotelo, was murdered in Madrid. The Right was incensed. Five days later military garrisons in Spain and Morocco rose in revolt against the Republic and within seventy-two hours more than half the Spanish army had joined the rising. Diego Martinez Barrio prudently offered concessions to the rebels, but he was unable to maintain Republican unity. Later in exile he told the Mexican Lodge Luz Hispanica:

Contemplating the damage, I called together masonic representatives of all the parties that made up the governments of the Republic, and in these meetings, with fraternal clarity, I warned them of the risks that the Republic ran, that the masons ran, that we all ran. The masons I gathered together agreed with my criteria, but they were unable to find a solution.

His ministry gave way to an all-left Republican cabinet under Professor José Giral (mason) who acceded to leftist demands to arm the workers. In response General Francisco Franco flew to North Africa to take command of the Spanish forces and on 27 July, German and Italian aircraft helped him airlift his forces onto the mainland. Their advance was rapid and by November the Republican government had retreated to Valencia, leaving Freemason, General José Miaja to defend Madrid.
    As the nationalist forces advanced large numbers of Freemasons, members of leftist parties and trade unions were executed. A resident in Seville requested the Editor of a magazine to keep publishing lists of masons so that ‘we may know’ these ‘vile carrion’. The newspaper, El Defensor de Cordoba (The Defender of Cordoba) was less inhibited:

Let us fight to form a single national front against the Jews and the Masonic lodges... he calls to extermination are constant.

One Falangist newspaper called for a crusade against masonry, while another in Zaragoza stated that quick punishments should be meted out, ‘such is the damage that this pernicious society has caused Spain’. On 15 September the Nationalists declared masonry illegal, adding that anyone who remained a member would be considered ‘guilty of the crime of rebellion’. Cardinal Goma made a radio address from Pamplona in which he announced that the Nationalists were fighting against the ‘bastard soul of the sons of Moscow’ - the ‘Jews and the Masons’, and a Priest in Burgos even interrupted Mass and castigated the congregation for daring to consort with them: ‘Let their seed be stamped out’ – ‘the seed of the Devil.’ Unsurprisingly on 20 October the Grand Orient declared:

The whole of Spanish Masonry is totally and absolutely with the Popular Front, the legal Government, and against fascism.

Prior to the battle for the northern Basque city of Bilbao, Franco responded by ordering the expulsion of all Freemasons from his Army.
    The Basques were poorly armed and in April 1937 the towns of Durango and Guernica surrendered after suffering devastating bombing by units of the German Condor Legion. The bombing of Guernica shocked the world and moved the artist Picasso to produce, arguably, his most famous painting, Guernica. The Republican Embassy in London also denounced the Fascists for attacking Catholic and Protestant priests in the Basque country, adding that:

in certain provinces, the rebels gained possession of lists of members of Lodges, so they were able to track down the Masons whom they executed without mercy.

At this time one of the most rabid opponents of Freemasonry, Father Jean Tusquets, began to work in the Nationalist Press Service with the task of exposing masons. One of his close associates was Franco’s personal chaplain, and over the next two years, these two men of the Delegation of Special Services assembled a huge index of 80,000 suspected masons, even though there were little more than 5,000 masons in Spain.
    The reprisals were terrible. The lodge building in Cordoba was torched, the masonic temple in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, was confiscated and transformed into the headquarters of the Falange, and another was shelled by Nationalist artillery. In Salamanca thirty members of one lodge were shot, including a priest. Similar atrocities occurred across the country: fifteen masons were shot in Logrono, seventeen in Ceuta, thirty-three in Algeciras, and thirty in Valladolid, among them the Civil Governor. Few towns escaped the carnage as Freemasons in Lugo, Zamora, Cadiz and Granada were brutally rounded up and shot, and in Seville, the entire membership of several lodges were butchered. The mere suspicion of affiliation was often enough to earn a place in a firing squad, and the blood-letting was so fierce that, reportedly, some masons were even hurled into working engines of steam trains.
    By 16 December 1937, according to the annual masonic assembly held in Madrid, all masons that had not escaped from the areas under nationalist control had been murdered. Franco’s position was unequivocal: Freemasonry was to be annihilated in all Spanish territories and in pursuance of this goal, no quarter was to be given.

© M. D. J. Scanlan, 2003.

Matthew Scanlan, MA, is a member of the Duke of Wharton Research Lodge, No. 18, Barcelona and of the Centro Estudios Historicos de la Masoneria Espanola in Zaragoza.