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linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful. 19
    Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas. 20 Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democraticlegitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable.
    Barely three weeks after the establishment of the new regime, at a time when the government was notable mainly for its timidity in social questions, Acción Nacional had been created as ‘an organization for social defence’. It was the creation of Ángel Herrera Oria, editor of the militantly Catholic (and hitherto monarchist) daily El Debate . A shrewd political strategist, Herrera Oria would be the brains behind political Catholicism in the early years of the Second Republic. Acción Nacional brought together two organizations of the right that had combated the rising power of the urban and rural working class for the previous twenty years. Its leaders came from the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about five hundred prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions. Its rank-and-file support would be found within the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria, a mass political organization which proclaimed its ‘total submission to the ecclesiastic authorities’. Established to resist the growth of left-wing organizations, the CNCA was strong among the Catholic smallholding peasantry in north and central Spain. 21
    Acción Nacional’s manifesto declared that ‘the advance guards of Soviet Communism’ were already clambering on the ruins of the monarchy. It denounced the respectable bourgeois politicians of the Second Republic as weak and incapable of controlling the masses. ‘They are the masses that deny God and, in consequence, the basic principles of Christian morality; that proclaim, against the sanctity of the family, the instability of free love; that substitute private property, the basis and the motor of the