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    The Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939
    The Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939
    The Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939
    Ebook138 pages2 hours

    The Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939

    By Frances Lannon

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    About this ebook

    The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was of enormous international as well as national significance. In this gripping volume, Frances Lannon explains how this internal conflict between democracy and its enemies escalated to involve Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. We go behind the scenes to find out the true story of the bitter fighting within the sides, not just between them. The experiences of the men and women caught up in the fighting are highlighted. For them, and for a world on the brink of the Second World War, the stakes were agonisingly high.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472810069
    The Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939
    Author

    Frances Lannon

    Dame Frances Lannon DBE is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to higher education. She has published extensively on the cultural and political origins and significance of the Spanish Civil War, including 'Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain 1875–1975' (1987), and articles on women in the Civil War.

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      The Spanish Civil War - Frances Lannon

      Background to war

      The democratic experiment

      The Spanish Civil War began when army officers rose against the Second Republic in July 1936. But the potential for conflict was rooted in long-term, structural imbalances in Spanish society and the economy, and in the failure of successive regimes to construct a state system that enjoyed undisputed legitimacy. Political power had traditionally been concentrated in the hands of a small elite, who had not learned the trick of moderate reform aimed at co-opting the masses. On their great estates in south and west Spain, landowners faced a restive population of agricultural labourers and poor tenants, trapped by the lack of alternative employment opportunities. Their living standards were miserable, many were unemployed for parts of each year, and literacy levels in some areas were as low as 20 per cent. The state offered them little beyond the repressive presence of the Civil Guard, the militarised police force founded in the 1840s to keep order in the countryside.

      Industrial workers struggled with low wages, unregulated working conditions, poor housing and virtually no social welfare provision. Moreover, the rapidly expanding working-class areas of cities like Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid lacked an adequate urban infrastructure in the form of decent sanitation, paving and lighting, making them a danger to health. In both town and country, there were neither enough schools to provide even elementary education for all, nor basic medical services. The infant mortality rate among the poor remained depressingly high.

      It was no wonder that the propertyless masses of Spain, and the political modernisers who championed them, wanted to redress the imbalance of power and resources, and hailed the Second Republic as the great opportunity to do so. At the same time, many conservatives, including very modest property-owners as well as the wealthy, feared that once the balance began to shift, revolutionary claims for redistribution of wealth would overwhelm them.

      In these circumstances, the proclamation of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931 was an extraordinary turning point in Spanish history. The Bourbon monarchy, first established in Spain back in 1715 at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, had been overturned before, first by Napoleon in 1808, and then by disillusioned politicians and generals in 1868. Both times it had been restored. Since the end of the 19th century, however, it had experienced several major crises. In 1898, the calamitous defeat in war by the United States and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines virtually spelled the end of a once-great empire. Military disasters in the fragment of empire that remained, in north Africa, in the period 1909–22, were accompanied by political instability and domestic unrest. In 1923 General Primo de Rivera seized power, under the king, and suspended the constitution; the monarchy’s legitimacy was fatally undermined.

      Then in 1931, for the first time, popular opinion declared against the crown in a way that could be quantified, at the ballot box. The elections of 12 April 1931 were merely municipal elections, designed as the first step back to constitutional normality. Nationwide, more pro-monarchist than anti-monarchist candidates were successful. But it was recognised, not least by King Alfonso XIII himself, that these local elections were a plebiscite, and that the results which mattered were those in the big cities and provincial capitals, far from the control of traditional elites whose influence often falsified results in rural Spain. The free voice of urban Spain was loudly Republican or Socialist, and the king, after consultation with political and military advisers, left the country.

      If Alfonso had ignored the election results, or tried to impose martial law, he might have provoked revolution or civil war in 1931. Faced with this prospect, and the collapse of support even among erstwhile monarchists, he chose instead to depart. On 14 April the Republic was proclaimed amid scenes of euphoric jubilation in Madrid. An era was over, and those who welcomed the Republic as the beginning of a new age of genuine democracy and social justice were confident that – unlike the first Republic that had lasted only a year back in 1873–74 – it would stand and deliver. But others who were willing, with whatever misgivings, to give it a chance in 1931 took up arms against it only five years later. Their action in July 1936 plunged Spain into war. But over-ambitious Republican policies contributed greatly to their alienation, and were also a major cause of the civil war of 1936–39.

      What did the Republic represent to the Spanish population in the heady days of April 1931? Crucially, it represented not just a change of regime, but a turning upside-down of established values and hierarchies. The Republic had enormous symbolic potency. Its name immediately suggested not just the end of the monarchy, but also a challenge to the policies and institutions historically associated with it. One example was the insistent centralisation that had been one of the hallmarks of the Bourbon project since the early 18th century. So obvious was this implication of the word ‘Republic’ that, in the very first days, its government had to restrain exuberant Catalan nationalists from establishing a separate Catalan Republic. Devolution for Catalonia and potentially for the other historic regions of the Basque country and Galicia was inescapable, and was soon written into the new constitution.

      Similarly, no one expected the Republic to continue the church–state alliance that had existed between Catholicism and the crown. The separation of church and state and the introduction of religious freedom were inevitable concomitants of the historic turn to Republicanism. Many of the bishops feared something worse, namely an active attempt to secularise Spanish society and culture, and to limit the freedom of action of the church. Traditional religious privileges were clearly under threat; the question was how far the assault would go.

      If bishops were wary and pessimistic, so too were many of the generals. Monarchy had been identified historically with religion and empire. But the Republic symbolised change and modernisation. It would surely rationalise an oversized army left over from empire. Moreover, it was bound to assert the supremacy of civil authority over military as well as religious claims to embody national identity.

      In social and economic matters too, ‘Republic’ was not a neutral term. It implied a shift in public policy in favour of the working masses and the poor. Land reform, jobs, improved wages and better public provision for health and particularly education were essential items on the Republican agenda. It was the promise, however implicit, of work, schools and access to a better life that brought working men to the voting booths to topple the toffs of the old regime. The prospect of social justice as well as political renewal turned the proclamation of the Republic into a mass celebration. But the economic circumstances of the great depression cast a huge question mark over what any government would actually be able to achieve for the rural and urban working classes.

      ‘Republic’ was a code that Spaniards knew how to read. The old order had been monarchist, centralist, Catholic, imbued with the values of empire and arms, and run by and largely for the social and economic elites. The new order, therefore, was not merely a political system without a king. The Republic meant, for those who cheered its arrival, a democratic, civilian, secular order, in which the centre would have to be responsive to the periphery, and the top to the bottom. For those who were sceptical or hostile, it meant the abandonment of tradition, and a threat to stability, property and national unity. Within days of the Republic’s proclamation, the Catholic newspaper El Debate was trying to rally its readers under the slogan ‘Religion, Fatherland, Order, Family and Property’. The outlines of the two sides in the civil war of 1936–39 were already visible, even though war itself was far from inevitable.

      The weight of popular expectation on the new Republic was enormous. Although the monarchy had collapsed, the institutions and social sectors long identified with it – church, army, landlords, the barons of finance and industry – were all still in place. Except in politics, there had been no revolution. Instead, the Republic now set out to instigate and manage a transformation of Spanish society by democratic methods, and in exceptionally difficult economic circumstances, without provoking a backlash of angry reaction. This was a task that no one knew how to accomplish. To make matters worse, there was no consensus among those within the Republican camp about what kind and degree of transformation was desirable. Disagreement over this weakened and divided the Republic from its inception through to the last days of the civil war in 1939.

      The men who suddenly found themselves forming the Provisional Government of Spain had previously pledged themselves to the overthrow of the monarchy, in an agreement called the San Sebastián pact. But they represented a wide range of different views about what should happen next. The Prime Minister and later the first President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, was a Catholic, and a convert from monarchism, as was Miguel Maura, Minister of the Interior. For them, the Republic was itself a revolution and they saw no need for any other, although they recognised the urgency of social reform. The leader of the Radical party, Alejandro Lerroux, was famous for the demagogic anti-clericalism of his youth, but had no desire to see a social revolution overthrow property.

      Manuel Azaña, the single most important politician in the entire Republic, Minister for War in the Provisional Government, then Prime Minister, and eventually the second President, was a secularising intellectual who was offended by the public role and educational monopoly of the Catholic Church in Spain. He wanted the Second Spanish Republic to

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