Since the coming of the Republic, the Carlists had never faltered in their belief that such a regime – at least in Spain – could, if permitted to do so, only end in a full-scale social revolution. Incidents like Castilblanco and Casas Viejas fortified their conviction that Spanish liberalism, by breeding socio-economic injustice while blindly allowing its manipulation by the propagandists of revolution, was self-defeating. After the 1933 election these utterances assumed a new stridency, and a mere article of faith was transformed into an acute, visceral fear as revolution seemed to loom closer. Carlist speakers now began to refer repeatedly to the revolution which they expected the left, backed by Jews, freemasons and the Comintern, soon to unleash upon an unprepared Spain. Given the characteristic Carlist belief in attack as the best form of defence, Fal Conde's assumption of the Secretary-Generalship suited this mood perfectly.

The new sense of urgency was well founded, for to the innate revolutionary activism of the CNT, expressed in the unsuccessful but nonetheless ominous risings of winter 1933–4, was now added the adoption of a revolutionary posture by an increasing number of Socialists. To the right and the bourgeois Republicans alike, the CNT was a threat which could be contained; the prospect that the traditionally bureaucratic, reformist Socialist Party and the UGT might be about to devote their vastly superior organizing abilities to the revolutionary cause was infinitely more alarming.