To many contemporaries outside Spain the
Spanish Civil War represented a great struggle
between the totalitarian forces of the fascist right
against the resistance of the Republic, whose
legitimate government was composed of the
Popular Front parties defending democracy. As it
dragged on the war, indeed, came to resemble
such an ideological contest. This was because,
unlike earlier internal Spanish conflicts, the Civil
War occurred at a time of deep European division,
when fascism, democracy and communism
were seen to be moving towards a showdown,
which would decide the fate of Europe. Fascism
had spread from Italy to Germany and Eastern
Europe. Fascism, so its fervent opponents believed,
should be finally stopped in Spain. The
battle in Spain was seen as marking the turning
point of victory or defeat for the fascists. This was
a popular illusion. Governments, communist,
democratic or fascist, understood better that
events in Spain were a secondary problem. The
real question mark hanging over the future of the
rest of Europe was how Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italy would act in Europe and in
Africa. Would they be satisfied with a negotiated
revision of the Versailles settlement, or was
Europe facing a new struggle for supremacy as in
1914–18?
For the major governments of Europe, Spain
was a sideshow and policy towards Spain was subordinated
to other more important policy objectives.
In France and Britain in particular (even in
the Soviet Union), there consequently developed
a schism between passionate popular feeling,
especially among intellectual adherents of the
broad left, and governments which appeared incapable
of acting against the fascist menace. In
Spain, the simple line of ideological division, as
seen from abroad, was exploited by both sides
since foreign volunteers, and even more so
foreign supplies, played a critical part in military
success. The warring factions in Spain became
known simply as the insurgent Nationalists (the
right) and the Loyalists defending the Republic
(the left). The battle lines between the parties
were not so simple, and the defenders of the
Republic, particularly, were deeply divided. On
the right the analogy with fascism was not a
simple one either.
The rise of contemporary fascism and communism
in the 1920s influenced the political
struggle in Spain itself. Mussolini’s movement
had served as a model to some Spaniards,
although the dictator of the 1920s, Primo de
Rivera, owed only a slight ideological debt to
Mussolini. Socialism and Marxism and anarchism,
rather than Communism of the Stalinist variety,
won adherents in Spain also. But Spanish traditions
were strong too. Although political contest
assumed some of the forms of the great European
ideological schisms of the twentieth century, its
roots lay also in the conditions of Spain and in
the evolution of past social and political tensions.
In searching for the origins of the civil war the
purely Spanish causes always lie just under the
surface and explain why in 1936 Spain was split
into two warring sides which inflicted savage cruelties
on each other.
In the north the Republicans held most of
Asturias and the Basque region; Catalonia, with
the large city of Barcelona, became a Republican
stronghold; Valencia and the whole Mediterranean
coast and central Spain, the eastern regions of
Andalucia and New Castile with the capital of
Madrid were also Republican regions. The other
bigger cities, except for Seville and Saragossa, were
Republican too. Western Spain, western Aragon,
Old Castile, León and the south – mainly the agricultural
regions of Spain – fell into the hands of the
Nationalists. Within each of the regions of Spain
controlled by Nationalists and Republicans, there
were minorities who adhered to the opposite side
and so were subject to murderous reprisals. The
Church, an object of Republican hatred, suffered
grievously in the Republican areas. Landless peasants
recruited in the south by the socialists and
anarchists were exposed to Nationalist terror.
If we look back no further than to the nineteenth
century, the contest over how Spain was
to be governed was already splitting the country
and leading to civil wars. The more extreme
monarchists, supported by the Church, fought
the constitutionalists and liberal monarchists who
then enjoyed the support of much of the army.
Superimposed on this constitutional conflict was
the desire of the northern regions for autonomy:
they opposed attempts to centralise and unify
these regions which enjoyed extensive local rights
and traditions. Spain’s internal turbulence did not
come to an end during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century with the establishment of the
constitutional monarchy and the granting of universal
male suffrage. The votes of the peasants in
the countryside were managed by the wealthy and
by local men of influence. Despite the liberal constitution,
the parliamentary system did not
embody the hopes of all the reformers. Popular
discontent was further increased by Spain’s poor
showing abroad. The loss of colonies, the war
with the US at the turn of the century and the
failures of its imperial policies in Morocco, where
the Spanish army suffered defeats, weakened the
authority of government.
Besides the constitutional conflict, the problem
of the regions and the failures of foreign and
imperial policies, Spanish industrialisation, though
slow, was concentrated in the north and so
added to regional particularism as well as leading
to bitter economic conflict between worker and
employer. Spain was a very poor country, and suffered
perennially from the agricultural problem of
its landless and impoverished peasantry. In the
early twentieth century socialism made headway in
Spain. As in France, the movement was divided
and the anarcho-syndicalists who believed in
direct action had won many adherents among the
workers of the north and some of the peasants
in the south. The strength of their main trade
union organisation, the CNT, lay in Catalonia
and especially in Barcelona. Before 1936, the
Communist Party was small.
On more than one occasion in the early twentieth
century Spain seemed to be poised on the
brink of civil war; Barcelona, the capital of
Catalonia, was a focal point of bloodshed and civil
conflict. The civil guard, hated by the workers,
kept unrest just in check by ruthless force. Spain
was disintegrating amid warring factions, while
the politicians of the Cortes, the Spanish parliament,
proved unable to provide effective and
stable governments. In September 1923, repeating
a pattern familiar in the nineteenth century,
an army general seized power to bring peace to
Spain and save it from monarchist politicians.
Compared with other dictators, this general,
Primo de Rivera, was a charismatic figure. The
king, Alfonso XIII, acquiesced in the overthrow
of the constitution. Primo de Rivera followed a
policy of repression of politicians, the Socialist
Party, anarchists and supporters of Catalan
regionalism. The socialist trade union, the UGT,
became a mainstay of the regime. He also inaugurated
public works which, in the 1920s, seemed
to promise some economic progress. Yet by 1930
he had exhausted his credit and lost support in
the army, and the king dismissed him. The king
himself did not long survive. The cities had
turned against him and he left for exile in 1931.
The second Republic was then established
without violence or bloodshed. Its history was
brief and filled with mounting political and social
conflict. The left had drawn together, temporarily
as it turned out, to take charge of the country.
But it was characteristic of the politics of the left
and the right that, once the electoral victory was
won by electoral pacts, rivalry between the parties
would thereafter prevent any coalition from providing
stable government.
First, until the end of 1933, the Republic was
governed by a coalition of the left and moderate
Republicans under the leadership of Manuel
Azaña. He sought to solve the regional question
by granting autonomy to the Catalans; he promoted
educational reform, and plunged into a
programme of agricultural reform which achieved
little. In the summer of 1932, there was an
abortive generals’ rising against the government
of the Republic. It was a fiasco.
What caused the greatest bitterness was the
anti-clerical legislation of the government, which
regarded the Church as the bulwark of reaction. It
drove moderate supporters who were faithful
Catholics into opposition. The anarchists stirred
up the workers in violent strikes which the government
suppressed with bloodshed, thus alienating
supporters on the left. The moderate
politicians, of whom Azaña was an example, were
assailed by extremists on the left and right, and
even the more moderate Socialists looked fearfully
over their shoulders lest supporting the government
should lose them the allegiance of their followers
to those political groups further to the left,
especially the anarchists. During the election of
November 1933, the left no longer fought by
means of electoral agreements. It was the turn of
the right to strike such bargains, forming a common
opposition to the government’s anti-clerical
legislation. Gil Robles founded CEDA, a confederation
of right-wing Catholic groups. A new electoral
pact, with the radicals changing sides and
now supporting CEDA, gave the centre-right a
resounding victory. From 1934 to 1936 the
Republic struggled on amid mounting tensions.
The coalition government of the centre supported
by CEDA reversed the ‘progressive’
aspects of the legislation of Azaña’s government.
With the roles reversed, the miners in Asturias,
under the united leadership of socialists, communists
and anarchists began a general strike in
October 1934 and seized Oviedo, the provincial
capital. Simultaneously there occurred an abortive
separatist rising in Catalonia. The government
retaliated by using the Foreign Legion and
Moorish troops from Morocco bloodily to suppress
the Asturian rising. The shootings and tortures
inflicted on the miners increased the
extreme bitterness of the workers, while there was
strong Catholic feeling against the godless
Marxist conspiracy. Both the left and right were
strengthening their following. Among groups of
the right, José Antonio, son of Primo de Rivera,
attracted increasing support to the Falange Party,
which he had founded in 1933 and which came
closest to a fascist party in Spain. But in the election
of February 1936 the parties of the left,
which were out of power, organised an effective
electoral pact and presented themselves as the
Popular Front. Its cry was that the Republic was
in danger and that the parties of the right were
fascist. The parties of the right called on the electorate
to vote for Spain and against revolution.
Spanish politics had become so polarised that
neither the parties of the right nor those of the
left were ready to accept the ‘democratic’ verdict
of the people. The Popular Front combination
gave the left the parliamentary victory, but the
country was almost equally split between left and
right in the votes cast. What was now lacking was
a strong grouping of the centre, a majority who
believed in a genuine democratic peace and parliamentary
institutions.
The familiar spectacle of the united left achieving
electoral victory, and then falling into division
when they got to power, was repeated in the
spring and summer of 1936. The left-wing socialists,
led by Largo Caballero, rejected all cooperation
with left ‘bourgeois’ governments; Caballero
continued the Popular Front but would not serve
in the government. He was supported by the
communists; but despite all his revolutionary language,
he had no plans for revolution. On the
right, however, plans were drawn up to forestall
the supposed revolution of the left. The generals
justified their July 1936 rising on precisely these
grounds. Attacked by those who should have supported
the Republic, the government was too
weak to suppress the generals’ rising as easily as
in 1932. But the right, on its own, was unable to
wrest power from the government, either electorally
or by force. It called on the army to restore
conservative order and to uphold the values and
position of the Church. And the army assumed
this task in an action that had more in common
with nineteenth-century Spanish tradition and the
military seizure of power by Primo de Rivera in
1923, than with Nazi or fascist takeovers which
were backed by their own paramilitary supporters,
the army standing aside.
The government of the left in 1931–2 had
offended army feeling by attempting its reform,
replacing many officers with those whose loyalty
to the Republic seemed certain. A large number
of such promotions after the victory of the
Popular Front in 1936 offended the traditionalist
officers, and General Francisco Franco, ‘banished’
to the military governorship of the remote Canary
Islands, protested that such unfair practices
offended the dignity of the army. The leader of
the officers’ conspiracy was not Franco, however,
but General José Sanjurjo, and General Emilio
Mola was its chief organiser. The army itself
was divided between those ready to overthrow
the Republic and those still prepared to serve
it. Franco himself hesitated almost to the last
moment. The increasing disorder in Spain – the
lawlessness and violence of demonstrations of
the left, which the government seemed unable to
control – finally decided the army conspirators in
July 1936 to carry out a military coup, ‘planned’
since the previous April, to take over Spain.
Franco had finally thrown in his lot with the
conspirators and secretly, on 18 July, left the
Canary Islands to take charge of the army in
Africa. On 13 July, the murder of a well-known
anti-Republican politician by members of the
Republican Guard provided a further pretext for
the military rising, which had actually already
been set in motion. A day early, on 17 July, the
army rose in Morocco. General Mola had ordered
the risings to begin in Morocco on 18 July and
the garrisons in mainland Spain to take power a
day later. But the risings on the mainland also
began earlier, on the 18th, and the following day
spread to Spain’s two largest cities, Madrid and
Barcelona. Here the risings were successfully suppressed.
Thus the army failed to take over the
whole of Spain in one swift action. Within a
short time the Nationalist and Republican zones
were becoming clear. Their respective military
resources were fairly equally balanced in metropolitan
Spain with about half the army and most
of the air force and much of the fleet siding with
the government of the Republic.
What decisively tipped the balance was the
help Hitler and Mussolini gave to Franco, providing
transport planes to ferry the African army
to the peninsula. Franco decided not to risk crossing
by sea. The Republican fleet’s doubtful capacity
was thus not tested. The disorganisation on
the Republican side extended to the air force,
which made no efforts to intercept the German
and Italian transport planes. The Nationalists
speedily dominated the west and much of the
south. By the end of July, Burgos in the north
had become the capital of Nationalist Spain.
There, Mola had set up a junta of generals.
However, it was Franco who was accepted by all
the generals as their commander-in-chief; by the
end of September he was also declared head of
the Spanish state as well as of the government.
This marked the beginning of a long, undisputed
hold on absolute power which was to last until
his death thirty-nine years later in 1975.
As the Nationalists captured Republican-held
territory, prominent Republican leaders, civil and
military, were murdered in their tens of thousands.
Terror was a weapon used to cow workingclass
populations. On the Republican side attacks
were indiscriminately directed against the Church.
The Church’s political identification with the right
(except in the Basque provinces) was beyond
doubt, but the Church had not participated in
the uprising. Twelve bishops and thousands of
priests and monks were murdered. Many thousands
suspected of sympathy with the Nationalists
were summarily executed. The government of the
Republic could not control its followers in this
bloody lawlessness. The bitter hatreds of the fratricidal
war have lived on as long as survivors of
both sides remain to recall the atrocities of three
years of war. These murders on both sides have
been estimated to total a ghastly 130,000 (75,000
committed by the Nationalists and 55,000 by
the Republicans). To these losses must be added
deaths in battle – 90,000 Nationalists and
110,000 Republicans – and death from all other
causes, about 500,000, out of a total population
of 25 million.
The Republicans had the difficult task of
welding together an effective central government
in Madrid from all the disparate forces of the left,
and a cohesive army from the many military formations
that had gathered spontaneously. The
Communists, declaring that the ‘revolution’ had
to be postponed, joined the moderate Socialists
and Republicans. Largo Caballero headed a
Popular Front government in the autumn of
1936 which even the anarchists, dominant in
Catalonia and Barcelona, joined. But the left
could not maintain unity through the war. Their
‘fraternal’ strife, with the communists fighting the
anarchists and the anti-Stalinist Marxists (known
by their initials as POUM), was the main cause
of the ultimate defeat of the Republic. On the
other side, despite the heterogeneous political
complexion of the Nationalists, Franco and the
army dominated and created an effective unity
and an impressive fighting force.
After the Nationalist advances in August to
October 1936, the Republic still held half of Spain
– the whole east and south-east, as well as a strip in
the north. Madrid remained in government hands,
having repulsed the Nationalist advance. In 1937
the Nationalists finally overcame Basque resistance
in the north. In Madrid the government was reorganised
to take a stronger line against dissidents.
The Communists, whose strength rapidly grew,
took a lead in fighting against the POUM and the
anarchists. Caballero was replaced as premier by a
socialist professor, Dr Juan Negrin. By now the
Republicans had organised a well-disciplined army.
In the winter of 1937 the Republican army
launched an offensive against the Nationalists.
Franco’s counter-offensive, however, recovered all
the lost territory and went on to split the Republic
in half, separating Barcelona and Catalonia from
central and southern Spain. The defeat of the
Republic appeared imminent. Unexpectedly the
Republicans won a short-lived victory in the summer
of 1938, but then in the autumn suffered a
catastrophic defeat when Franco counter-attacked.
Internationally the Republic simultaneously sustained
devastating blows. France, which intermittently
had allowed arms to pass the Pyrenees
frontier, closed it, and Stalin gave up sending aid to
the Republic. Franco’s victories and the desertion
of the Soviet Union and France doomed the
Republic. In January 1939 Barcelona fell. Still
Negrin inspired the final resistance. The Republic
came to an end in confusion, with part of its own
armed forces in rebellion. At the end of March
1939, Madrid finally capitulated to Franco’s army.
The Spanish Civil War was over. It had
dragged on with enormous loss of life. Refugees
now flooded across the Pyrenees into France. But
Europe’s attention was only momentarily fixed on
the final agony. War between the European
powers had been only narrowly averted in the
autumn of 1938, and now in March 1939 Hitler
again held the centre of the stage. The world
would soon turn upside down. The Communists,
seen by the left-wing idealists as the real opponents
of the Fascists and Nazis in Spain, would
that same year, in September 1939, praise Hitler
and condemn the imperialist-capitalist Western
democracies for going to war to check Nazi
expansion in Europe.
German and Italian help had been critical in
the early stages of the war and favoured Franco’s
advance to the gates of Madrid. But massive
Soviet military assistance including planes and
tanks saved Madrid in November 1936. Britain
and France, ostensibly with German, Soviet and
Italian agreement, set up a Non-Intervention
Committee whose undertaking not to send
weapons to either side was honoured only by the
two Western democracies. The Germans sent
tanks and experts and the notorious Condor
Legion, which, with a hundred planes, played an
important role and horrified the democracies by
bombing defenceless towns. The wanton destruction
of Guernica (26 April 1937) symbolised the
terror of war on civilians. The lesson was not lost
on the British who week after week saw on their
cinema screens the horrible effects of those air
raids. Not surprisingly it strengthened the desire
of the British people to keep out of war and to
support those politicians who were trying to do
so, though the committed did go to fight in
Spain. Mussolini sent over 70,000 volunteer
troops. The Russians, from headquarters in Paris,
organised the volunteer International Brigades
and sent tanks and planes. All this foreign aid succeeded
in staving off defeat for either side for a
time, but it was not sufficient to ensure a victory.
World History
