The Nationalisation of the Masses

On Saturday 2 March 1929, Miguel Primo de Rivera wrote to the Director- General of Health, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Horcada Mateo, to ask him to give a lecture at a course for Army officers. ¹ The dictator sought to gather the most distinguished members of the regime’s intelligentsia in a course ‘particularly aimed at the officers who were going to be engaged in the missionary work of educating the people in the incredibly important civic and pre-military ideas’. ² The idea, as the dictator eagerly explained, was that the lectures to regime officials would constitute ‘the basis of a doctrine which, propagated thereafter, will raise the level of the citizenry’. ³ On Sunday 3 March, Primo met at one in the afternoon with Máximo Cuervo, the Bureau of the Prime Minister, to finalise the details of the course, which was to be held at the Alcázar de Toledo. ⁴ The Marqúes de Estella went for a walk after the meeting, returning to his office to dine at around 6, and then went to the Zarzuela Theatre with his family. ⁵ After the performance, at 9 o’clock that evening, the dictator gave an optimistic press statement about the staging of a ‘preparatory course for the leaders chosen to spread civic, gymnastic and pre-military education’ among the people. ⁶