It is impossible to understand the 20th century without understanding this conflict, one that continues to resonate to this day

Author’s Note:

I was recently asked to write about the Spanish Civil War and why people turned against the Republican regime and sided with Francisco Franco and other military figures who attempted to launch a coup d’état to overthrow the government in July of 1936. This essay will attempt to answer this question by painting a broad portrait of the events that lead up to that bloody conflict. This will not be a comprehensive treatment of the subject of what led Spain to fall apart that summer, as it will mainly focus on the interests, concerns, and arguments of one side (which contained many different factions, often at odds with one another). Therefore, it will not be an objective look, and will instead be very partial to one side in order to answer the question that was posed to me. A lot of obvious (and less well-known) facts will be missing from this piece due to the constraints put on it by the question I intend to answer, and for the sake of brevity.

If this essay generates enough interest, I will happily continue the story, beginning with the conservatives forming a government led by Gil Robles and CEDA…but this is entirely up to you.

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The above excerpt is a piece of historical fiction courtesy of American author and legend, Ernest Hemingway. At a crossroads in his life, he decided to go to Spain to cover the conflict for a newspaper chain. Out of his experiences in that war came “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), one of his most celebrated novels. In this excerpt, he uses the female character ‘Pilar’ to relate the story of how Republican forces massacred a group of people in a small town who were opposed to the government and supported the Spanish Generals seeking to overthrow it. Derided as “fascists”, each of the men were forced to pass a line of pro-government peasants who would beat them with flails before throwing them off of a cliff. Civil wars are indeed the most vicious, even in fictional depictions like this one.

The Spanish Civil War is odd for two reasons, the first one being that more than any other war that I can think of, historians have placed a much stronger focus on the politics of the conflict to the detriment of its military aspects. The second reason is much more important overall, and particularly germane to the subject of this essay: it is the only war that I can think of where the histories have been overwhelmingly written by the losers.

If you ask a random, somewhat educated person in the West about the Spanish Civil War, they will generally say that “Franco was a fascist who allied himself to Hitler and Mussolini and won the civil war in the most brutal fashion possible. He was a dictator who hated democracy and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people.” Beyond that, they might make mention of Hemingway and his novel, or even Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica”, that depicts the victims of the German Luftwaffe bombardment of that small Basque town in the north of Spain. Others still will relay the fact that the term “Fifth Column” came out of the Spanish Civil War. Added up all together, the most simplified take becomes “Franco bad, Republicans good”.

Of course this take is wrong, as this conflict was too complex to arrive at such a ridiculous reductionist conclusion no matter which side you sympathize(d) with. To give you a quick illustration of just how complex this conflict was, here is a list of the major domestic factions that took part in it:

Spanish Republican Side:

• People’s Army (the armed forces of the Spanish Republic)


• Popular Front (left-wing electoral alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists)


• UGT (very large trade union affiliated with the Spanish Socialists)


• CNT-FAI (massive trade union of anarchist militants)


• POUM (anti-Stalinist communists, including some Trotskyites)


• Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Autonomists)


• Euzko Gudarostea (Army of the Basque Nationalists)

Spanish Nationalist Side:

• Spanish Renovation (monarchists supporting the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Alfonso XIII, who abdicated in 1931)


• CEDA (the main conservative party, Catholic conservatives)


• Requetés (traditionalist Catholic monarchist militants who supported the Carlist Dynasty, mainly from the region of Navarre)


• Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Fascists)


• The Army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion (Spanish Army in Spain’s then-colony of Morocco, with many Moroccans serving in it)

Add to this mix the International Brigades that fought on the side of the government, and the German and Italian forces who backed the rebels. To list off all the political groupings that participated in the war is a mouthful, but necessary to hammer home the point of the complexity of this conflict. So here goes: nationalists, monarchists (from two competing royal houses), fascists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists (from two competing camps), anarchists, and regional autonomists. In short, this war had something for everyone, which is why it caught the attention of so many foreigners (especially famous ones) at the time. But before we dive into the run up to the civil war, we need to understand some of the history of Spain that lead up to this “world war in miniature”.

Together with Portugal, the Spanish Empire led the world in the exploration of the globe and its colonization, opening up trade routes across oceans to exploit the natural wealth that they found in these new lands. Silver came first, and then gold. This propelled Spain to be the world’s foremost power in the 16th century, ruling the waves until its Armada was defeated by the English in 1588. Despite expanding in the 18th century, the Spanish Empire was already in decline by the mid 17th century, as the French, English/British, and Dutch overtook them diplomatically, militarily and technologically.

The 17th century was marked by economic stagnation and decline, as inflation, heavy taxation and mismanagement of the economy (including repeated plundering of the royal treasury by the nobility) were rampant, leading many Spaniards to emigrate to the colonies in the New World. Some parts of Spain even began to deindustrialize during this era, compounding its woes.

By the early 18th century, a Spanish nation-state began to emerge as Castile began to exert its dominance over the Iberian Peninsula, and the various non-Castilian peoples on it like the Aragonese, Galicians, Basques, and Catalonians. Castile would form the core of Modern Spain, a condition that prevails to this day.

In 1715, the Wars of the Spanish Succession ended with a Bourbon victory over the Habsburgs, transferring control of Spain and its empire to the victors. Despite some reforms that improved the economy, empire, aristocracy, and the Church were still its main concerns, with The Enlightenment (that was spreading across much of Europe at that time) almost completely passing it by. Spain became involved in the tug-of-war between Britain and France over the next century, ending in disaster during the Peninsular War when erstwhile ally Napoleon occupied Spain, leading to a bloody rebellion that economically devastated it. It also sparked a series of rebellions in its colonies in North and South America, resulting in the loss of possession of all of them (except Cuba and Puerto Rico) by 1826. With the loss of those colonies, Spain’s international presence, importance, and prestige were significantly eroded.

A much reduced Spain was firmly in the hands of the nobles and the Church, with a large landowning aristocracy, and a very large peasant class that either owned tiny plots of land to cultivate, or no land whatsoever. A middle class did began to grow in size in urban settings, providing a new addition to the social dynamic during that period. But the devastation wrought by the French occupation (and the rebellion against it) combined with the loss of its colonies impoverished the Spanish Kingdom. Outside of Catalonia, industrialization was absent. The exploitation of natural resources like coal were hampered by a primitive transportation system. Demographic decline set in with massive emigration to former colonies in the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1812, a very liberal constitution (the Constitution of Cadiz) was adopted by the Spanish royals. Despite its formal adoption, significant resistance to it from Ferdinand VII and his conservative allies made it little more than a piece of toilet paper, at least to them. It was this fight between liberals and absolutists that would colour the rest of 19th century Spain, one dominated by conspiracies, palace intrigues, coups, and military interventions. So riven was Spain by factionalism between parties and within parties that Amadeus of Savoy, elected to be its King Amadeo I, famously concluded that the Spanish people were ungovernable. He immediately abdicated the throne and left the country for good.

Amadeus’ flight into exile created a political vacuum, one that was quickly filled by radicals and Republicans who declared the First Spanish Republic. This initial foray into republicanism ended in a little over a year due to the immense opposition it encountered from monarchists, the Catholic Church, and military figures who launched a successful coup that restored the Bourbons to the throne. This republic also saw regional unrest and rebellions in Catalonia and Navarre, and just as significantly, it also was witness to pro-republican socialists demanding revolution i.e. redistribution of land.

In 1898, Spain experienced a “disaster”; the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and The Philippines to the USA in the Spanish-American War. The so-called Spanish Empire was reduced to colonial holdings in Morocco, the Sahara, and Guinea. It had finally been evicted from the Americas and the Pacific as well. This resulted in a turn towards liberalism from intellectuals and politicians who felt that Spain’s anachronistic system was hopelessly uncompetitive against its modernizing rivals. On the other hand, Geoffrey Jensen argues that it was this catastrophic defeat that led the once relatively liberal military officer class to turn to the right.

Even though Spain avoided the First World War and actually economically profited from it, the regime was still very unstable due to regional nationalism, widespread poverty, and severe political factionalism that paralyzed the state. The coup de grace was delivered by another military disaster: a serious defeat of the Spanish Army in Northern Africa at the hands of Berber tribesmen in 1921 at the beginning of the Rif War. 9,000 Spanish soldiers were killed or executed in this catastrophe in a matter of days, shaking Spain to its core.

King Alfonso XIII gave his secret backing to yet another military coup that resulted in a dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera, lasting from 1923 until 1930. During this period, Spain ended the rebellion in the Rif thanks to aid from France. Economic conditions improved over the course of the decade, but the arrival of the Great Depression quickly erased all those gains, leading to a collapse in support for both Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII. The king removed the dictator from power, but this action only bought him a short window of time, as he had already lost the support of the urban masses of the lower and middle classes. In April of 1931, local elections proved to be a plebiscite on the Spanish Monarchy, with republican parties overwhelmingly winning the vote. Alfonso XIII read the writing on the wall, abdicated his throne, and headed into exile.

This was finally it! The moment that millions of Spaniards had been waiting for had finally arrived! Shorn of its ‘regressive’ Monarchy, Spain and its citizens could finally enter modernity with pride and say goodbye to its backward past once and for all. Liberalism had finally won and Spain could now look to the future with an optimism so sunny that even an Andalusian summer would envy. Poverty and illiteracy would be eliminated, reason would replace superstition, and land would be redistributed to the poor.

Most of you reading this essay are American, and many of you are not familiar with this slice of history. When you see, read, or hear the word “republicanism”, you will naturally mentally associate it with your country’s version of it. Us non-Americans are very used to Americans informing us that the USA “is not a democracy, but is instead a constitutional republic”. I do like to mention from time to time that I have always admired how civics lessons were drilled into the heads of American students from a very young age. In your minds, republicanism is not a negative concept, and you would be right to view it that way considering just how stable and successful your country has been serviced by this system of governance.

Not all republics are created equal, nor do they all perform at an equal level. The First Spanish Republic ended in less than two years thanks to enormous resistance and a military coup that overthrew it. The Second Spanish Republic lasted eight years, with a military coup that attempted to overthrow it five years into its existence, failing to do so, resulting in a horrible, tragic, and bloody civil war. The story of the Second Spanish Republic is the story of a centre that could not hold, with powerful and passionate forces far from its centre pulling in totally opposite directions, tearing the country into two pieces.

In the first election for the Spanish Cortes (parliament) since the proclamation of the Second Republic, the Spanish right was in disarray and wholly unorganized due to the shock of Alfonso XIII’s abdication. With little options for an alternative to the new state of affairs, conservatives and right wingers largely threw their lots in with the Radical Republican Party, as its platform was viewed to be the least damaging to their interests. Others backed the Liberal Republican Right (DLR) as it openly defined itself as Catholic, the only major party to do so in this campaign.

The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) fared the best overall, urging a “legal revolution” to resolve Spain’s economic and social ills. Despite this pledge to uphold legality, the party contained many extremist factions who sought to either use incrementalism to usher in a socialist state, or radicalism to do it quickly. These radicals were almost a carbon copy of the Radical Socialist Party (PRRS), a grouping who sought immediate socialist revolution for Spain, as “there is nothing to be conserved”.

These Republicans and Socialists were in an electoral coalition, allowing them to win the elections handily. Now it was time for them to govern.

Covering the centre-right, bourgeois left, and socialists, Spain’s first republican government found itself to be swimming against the anti-democratic tide sweeping Europe. Democracy was seen as not capable to solve the many, many debilitating issues caused by the Great Depression, with authoritarianism of the left or right viewed as better suited to tackle them. The fact of the matter is that this democratic system did work to impede many of the reforms sought by the coalition government, and by millions of Spaniards as well. Paralysis in government, caused at first by unwieldly governing coalitions, and then by unrest, strikes, and violent rebellions, led many who were initially enthusiastic about the democratic aspects of republicanism to quickly conclude that the democracy part should be done away with.

Stanley Payne describes for us the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the party that captured the most votes:

The Republican left formed only the left-center of the new governing alliance, whose left wing was the Socialist Party. Founded in 1879, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) was a classic movement of the Second International that for decades had been one of the weakest Socialist parties in Europe.

……..

Always treated leniently by the Spanish government, the Socialists had on most occasions followed more moderate policies, participating in elections and slowly building a trade union base. The profound structural changes of the 1920s and the coming of democracy enabled the Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers; UGT), to expand into a mass movement, reaching more than a million members by 1932. The Second Republic offered the Socialists their first opportunity to participate in a government — something that the French Socialists had not yet done — an opportunity that they accepted without having fully resolved the issues of reformism versus revolutionism in their doctrine. The dominant tendency was to take the position that the Republic would produce decisive changes, opening the way peacefully for a Socialist system to be achieved without revolutionary violence. The UGT leader Francisco Largo Caballero declared at the outset of the new regime that as a result violent revolution “would never put down roots in Spain.” The Socialists also viewed the Spanish changes within a larger context as a new tide of democracy and progressivism that would roll back the trend toward fascism initiated by Mussolini a decade earlier.

At first they were dedicated to constitutional legalism, but much of the party began to radicalize very quickly, especially Largo Caballero. Almost immediately, the Socialists clashed with the Radical Republicans over the question of private property, with the Socialists seeking to expropriate land from wealthy landowners to redistribute to campesinos. This led to the departure of the Radical Republicans from government with its remaining coalition partners.

The “Agrarian Question” was one of the key issues that Spain faced for some time. In 1931, some two million Spaniards were landless peasants, forced to work on the big latifundia estates owned by incredibly rich landlords who paid them a pittance to farm their holdings. This issue was highly divisive, as it pitted the wealthy landowning aristocracy and its allies in the Catholic Church against a very large and dirt poor mass that was already politically radicalized, with most supporting anarchism as the best political option to pursue their interests. These anarchists, mainly found in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andalusia, were radicalizing even further, as physical violence was seen as an acceptable tool to seize land from these rich landowners. The campesinos were impatient and demanded land redistribution immediately, “or else”. Furthermore, the various parties supporting republicanism made land redistribution a core issue of their platform. They had to deliver on their promises.

Land redistribution implies forceful seizure of property by government, a very radical act. The emphasis on this issue put the fear of God into many landowners, and into other holders of private property (especially industrialists) as they feared that they would be the next target.