On 12 April 1931, the men of Spain enjoyed the unusual experience of going to the polls. The elections were only local, but the politically informed were well aware that their importance extended far beyond the municipality, that on their outcome might rest the very survival of the king, Alfonso XIII, and the ‘Liberal Monarchy’ of which he was the incarnation. Little more than a year previously, Spain had emerged from the disappointing experiment of the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera; this six-year regime, far from saving the monarchy as had been intended, had actually lowered its credit and at the same time injected a new vigour into Spanish Republicanism, a cause which had been in the political shadows since the short-lived and chaotic Republic of 1873. The ‘Dictablanda’ of General Berenguer and Admiral Aznar which followed Primo de Rivera's fall merely postponed the reckoning, warning of which came in the shape of a pact between Republican, Socialist and Catalan autonomist politicians, signed in San Sebastian in August 1930, and an unsuccessful Republican rising at the end of the year. The present electoral contest supposedly represented the opening stage in a gradual return to the full-scale parliamentary government which had operated before Primo de Rivera's coup d'état in September 1923; in reality, however, with monarchist candidates throughout the country opposed by a coalition of Socialists and middle-class Republicans, it had been raised into what amounted to a plebiscite on the monarchy's future.