Republic,Civil War and Dictatorship: The Peculiarities of Spanish History

The civil war is the central event in twentieth-century Spanish history. Since that summer of 1936, essayists and historians have attempted to explain its causes and consequences, the most intense conflicts and the politics that shaped them. No period in the history of Spain has generated so many books, testimonies, debates and such bitter disputes. Yet in spite of everything that has been said and written, propaganda, manipulations, subjective narratives and black-and-white explanations have made any basic agreement very difficult.

The long dictatorship of Franco, who for four decades, until the very end, killed, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated the defeated, those in the resistance and dissidents, blamed the Republic and its leading figures for having caused the war, stained its memory and millions of Spaniards grew up with that memory in national Catholic schools. The transition to democracy did nothing to recover its more positive side, that of its laws, reforms, dreams and hopes, lumping together the Republic, the war and the dictatorship, a tragic past it was best to forget.

Nor is it easy to overcome the quite widespread essentialist view that the civil war was the result of ancestral hatreds in a country with a historical identity and destiny very prone to ‘fraternal’ violence. Following decades of Francoist propaganda control over republican guilt, since the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy a kind of moral equivalence in sharing out the blame for the causes of the war and the violence unleashed, an inevitable conflict due to those unresolved festering historical animosities, gained ground.

Against that political use of the past, a diverse group of Spanish historians who came into the universities at the end of the dictatorship and the early years of the transition to democracy, following the path opened up by the work of Hispanists – particularly from Great Britain and North America, the first to challenge the myths of the Crusade with academic methods – uncovered new sources, discussed the various ways of interpreting the events and began to compare it with what had occurred in other societies.

The Francoists’ versions became outdated and discredited, mainly because they were poorly argued, with their principal apologists either dead or retired. There was no ‘war of the historians’ in Spain, as there was in Germany, because the collective responsibilities were less intense and less international, and historiographic revision, with all its nuances, meant the almost unanimous abandonment of the ideas that were the cogs of the Franco dictatorship's propaganda machine.

Most historians know, and we have proved it, that the Civil War was not caused by the Republic, or its rulers, nor the reds who wanted to destroy Christian civilization. Instead, clearly identified military groups broke their oath of loyalty to the Republic, and began a full-flown bid for power in July 1936. But for this uprising, there would not have been a Civil War. Other things would have happened, but certainly not this war of extermination. It was, therefore, the coup d’etat that buried political solutions and gave way to armed measures. And this counter-revolutionary coup d’etat, whose intention was to halt an alleged revolution, finally ended up unleashing one. Once the wheels of this military uprising and revolutionary response had started turning, it was only arms that had the right to speak.

Yet in recent years Spanish historiography has been going in different directions, and a division has emerged between those who consider the Republic to have been idealized by an ‘orthodox canon’ on this regime represented by left-wing historians; and those who believe that a new ‘revisionist’ academic tendency has emerged which, with its ‘new clothes’, has revived the thesis of the winners of the war when it comes to the ‘illegitimacy’ of the Republic. ¹

Against the orthodox ‘canon’, those historians who wrote in the JCJ Forum contend that left-wing republican elites and socialists, protected by the legislation that they created and promoted, manipulated national and class identities, encouraged a partisan mobilization against the right, and with their strikes, conflicts and insurrections, mainly with that of October 1934, provoked an inevitable reaction amongst Catholic and right-wing sectors that never intended to destroy the republican political regime in a violent manner. ²

In order to reconstruct those events beyond the myths and subjective narratives regarding the causes and nature of the conflict, I propose to broaden the focus, sources and techniques of interpretation. And introduce comparison, a research strategy alien to the academic training of most Spanish historians. Using comparison as a strategy, the key thing is not to present the past in an ‘objective’ way, because we already know that the events in question do not come to the historian in a pure way, but rather to search, through similarities and differences with other European countries, for any potential distinctive features in the history of Spain during that troubled period. ³

In the first few months of 1936, Spanish society was highly fragmented, with uneasiness between factions, and as was happening all over Europe, with the possible exception of Great Britain, a rejection of liberal democracy in favour of authoritarianism was rife. None of this need have led to a civil war.

The history of Spain in the first third of the twentieth century was not one of secular frustration sliding inevitably into an explosion of collective violence. It did not run its course independently of the rest of Europe, nor was it any stranger to the social, economic, political and cultural transformations experienced by the rest of the continent. There were many more similarities than differences, particularly with her southern European neighbours. Historians also know that there is no ‘normal’ model of modernization with which Spain could be contrasted as being an anomalous exception. Hardly any country in Europe resolved its conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s – the century’s dividing line – by peaceful means.

Despite all that has been said about the violence that preceded the Civil War, in an attempt to justify its outbreak, it is clear that the coup d’etat of July 1936 marked a watershed in twentieth-century Spanish history. Furthermore, for at least two decades after the end of the Civil War in 1939, there was no positive reconstruction, such as had occurred in other countries in Western Europe after 1945.

Up to the beginning of the Second Republic in April 1931, Spanish society seemed to have managed to avoid the problems and troubles that had beset most European countries since 1914. Spain had not taken part in the First World War, and therefore had not undergone the upheaval that this war had caused, with the fall of empires and their subjects, the demobbing of millions of ex-combatants and the massive debt caused by the vast spending on the war effort.

Between 1910 and 1931 various Republics emerged in Europe, democratic regimes, or with democratic aspirations, which replaced hereditary monarchies that had been established for centuries there. Most of them, significantly those such as the German, Austrian and Czech republics, had been established as a result of their defeat in the First World War. The sequence had begun in Portugal, with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1910, and the Spanish Republic was the last to be proclaimed. The only example that survived as a democracy during those years until the outbreak of the Second World War was the Irish Republic, created in 1922. All the others were overthrown by counter-revolutionary, military uprisings, authoritarian movements or Fascists. But the coup d’etat of July 1936 was the only one that led to a civil war. And this difference needs to be explained.

In Europe, after the First World War, the fall of monarchies, the economic crisis, the spectre of revolution and the spread of political rights to the masses caused a major sector of the property-owning class to perceive democracy as opening the door to government by the proletariat and the poorer classes. As Mark Mazower states, universal suffrage threatened the liberals with a marginal political role as opposed to the movements of the left and the Catholic, nationalist and newly-formed parties. Fearful of communism, they leaned towards authoritarian solutions. ⁴

It also happened that from the start these new parliamentary, constitutional regimes had to face a fragmentation of party loyalties of a nationalist, linguistic, religious, ethnic or class-related nature, which gave rise to a political system with a great many parties, all of them very weak. Forming a government became more and more difficult, with unstable coalitions that were constantly changing. In Germany no party ever achieved a solid majority under the proportional representation system laid down in the Weimar Constitution, but the same may be said of Bulgaria, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Spain during the later stages of the Republic.

The dictatorship option in much of Europe restored some of the traditional structures of authority that had been present before 1914, but it also had to look for new ways of organizing society, industry and politics. This was the case with Fascism in Italy, and this was the solution seized upon in the 1930s by the parties and forces of the Spanish right: how to control social change and put a brake on revolution at a time of an emerging politics of the masses.

The Spanish monarchy was overthrown not by a war, as happened in other countries in Europe, but by its inability to provide the Spanish with a smooth transition from an oligarchic and cacique-style regime to one of reform and democracy.

The political change of April 1931 arrived charged with hope and promise. No aspect of political or social life was excluded from the scope of reforms undertaken by the provisional Government or those led by Manuel Azaña between October 1931 and September 1933. Over two years of feverish legislative activity were given over to the reorganization of the Army, the separation of Church and State, and the implementation of comprehensive radical measures with regard to land ownership, workers’ wages, employment protection and public education.

But at the same time, the programme of political and social reforms that followed the proclamation of the Republic highlighted some of the tensions that had been germinating during the previous decades with industrialisation, urban growth and class conflicts. This opened up a breach between various clashing cultural worlds, between practising Catholics and hard-line anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution.

As a result of these clashes, the Republic had vast problems in consolidating itself and had to confront firm challenges from above and below. The first firm challenges, which were the most visible as they usually ended up as confrontations with the police, came from below, first as social protests and later as insurrections from anarchists and socialists. However, the coup de grâce, the challenge that finally overthrew the Republic by force of arms, came from above and from within, that is to say, the military command and the powerful ruling classes that had never tolerated it.

Against the republican reforms, anti-democratic postures and counter-revolution were advancing rapidly, and not only among the most influential sectors of society, such as businessmen, industrialists, landowners, the Church and the Army. After the first few months of disorganization among the right, political Catholicism burst onto the republican scene like a whirlwind. The close link between religion and land ownership could be seen in the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Catholic farmworkers, poor and ‘extremely poor’ landowners, and the almost total control wielded by landowners over organisations that were supposedly set up to improve the lot of these farmworkers.

Dominated by large landowners and urban professionals, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (The Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right – CEDA), the first mass party in the history of the Spanish right, was formed in February 1933 to defend ‘Christian civilization’, combat the ‘partisan’ legislation of the Republic and ‘revise’ the Constitution. It was the party that received the most votes in the election in November that year, and it governed with Alejandro Lerroux’s centrist republicans between October 1934 and December the following year. During that time, the CEDA was unable to meet its goal of halting the march of reform and revising the Republic on a corporative basis. Victory in the February 1936 election, the third and last held during the Republic, went to the leftist Frente Popular coalition, and because of this defeat, the Catholic right and the Fascists, unable as they were to win power by parliamentary means, agreed to consider the use of force as a response to the government and the Republic. ⁵

The Republic was also under threat from below, because there was a powerful anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain, organized around the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (National Labour Confederation – CNT), founded in 1910, which preferred revolution as an alternative to parliamentary government. ⁶ Some of the most hardline and radical groups of this movement initiated insurrections in January 1932 and January and December 1933, as a means of coercion against the established republican authority. Underlying these attempts at revolution, which were easily put down by the forces of order, was a rejection of the representative institutional system and the belief that force was the only way to eliminate class privilege and power abuse.

However, the history of the Republic shows that the use of force against the parliamentary regime was not limited to the anarchists; the democratic ideal did not seem to be deeply-rooted among certain republican politicians or socialists, and they mounted their first insurrection in October 1934, after being removed from power as a result of the general election the previous year. That revolution, which kept the republican authorities fully occupied for ten days in the mining region of Asturias, was put down, leaving approximately 1000 dead among those who supported the insurrection, some 2000 wounded and 300 dead among the police and the army.

With this rebellion, the socialists who supported it showed the same condemnation of the representative system as the most radical anarchist groups had done in previous years. After their defeat in the November 1933 elections, a group of leftist socialists broke with the democratic process and the parliamentary system as a means of rechannelling politics towards the reform projects of the first two years. The movement’s leaders who, at the instigation of its younger members, formed militias and developed a taste for a military framework, tried to copy the Bolshevik model in Spain.

After the Russian Revolution, any attempt at revolt or revolution by the left was defeated, in country after country, be it Germany, Hungary or Italy, and no liberal democracy, the dominant system in western Europe until Hitler’s rise to power, was defeated by the use of arms by the left. Wherever they tried it, the mechanisms of repression used by States, united in order to safeguard social order, either prevented it or left the way clear, with their consent and backing, to the setting up of Fascist or counter-revolutionary dictatorships.

In Spain, as happened with General Sanjurjo’s rebellion in August 1932, the anarchist and socialist violent disturbances hindered the survival of the Republic and the parliamentary system; they showed that violence was a resource employed by certain sectors of the left, by the army and by the guardians of traditional order, but they did not cause the end of the Republic, let alone the beginning of the civil war. And this was because when the army and the security forces were united and loyal to the regime, insurrectional movements were put down, albeit at the cost of heavy bloodshed.

The civil war came about because the military coup d’etat failed to achieve its basic objective at the outset, which was to seize power and overthrow the republican regime, and because, unlike the events in other republics of the time, there was comprehensive resistance, whether military and/or civil, to counter any attempt at imposing an authoritarian system. The breakdown of public order facilitated the rise of non-state military actors and the recruitment of militias. Had it not been for this combination of coup d’etat, division of the armed forces and resistance, there would never have been a civil war.

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history and in memory for the way it dehumanised its adversaries and for the horrific violence that it generated. Lawless, arbitrary shootings and massacres eliminated enemies, real or presumed, on both sides. If we go by the meticulous research carried out in the last few years, there were at least 150,000 victims who paid with their lives for the political violence of the war: close to 100,000 in the zone controlled by the military rebels and somewhat fewer than 60,000 in the Republican zone.

The Nationalists’ policy of extermination of the left was approved by large numbers of conservative people. Meanwhile where the army coup failed, many on the left saw this as the hour of revolution and of final judgment against the rich, and class hatred and vengeance spread like wildfire. While carrying out this extermination, the rebels were also given the inestimable blessing of the Catholic Church from the very beginning. The clergy and sacred objects, however, were the prime target of popular rage, of those who took part in defeating the military rebels and who played leading roles in the ‘popular terror’ that took place in the summer of 1936. Thus, the Catholic religion and anticlericalism were passionately included in the battle involving basic themes related to the organisation of society and the State that was being unleashed on Spanish soil.

From April 1939 onwards, Spain experienced the peace of Franco, the consequences of the war and of those that caused it. Spain was left divided between victors and vanquished. From before the ending of the war, the churches were filled with plaques commemorating those who had ‘fallen in the service of God and the Fatherland’. On the other hand, thousands of Spaniards killed by the violence initiated by the military rebels in July 1936 never even had an insignificant tombstone to remember them by, and their families are still searching for their remains today. The reformist project of the Republic and all that this type of government meant was swept away and the dust scattered over the tombs of thousands of Spaniards; and the workers’ movement and its ideas were systematically wiped out in a process that was more violent and long-lasting than that suffered by any of the other European movements opposed to Fascism. This was the ‘surgical operation on the social body of Spain’, ⁷ so vehemently demanded by the military rebels, the land-owning classes and the Catholic Church.

After the First World War and the triumph of the revolution in Russia, no civil war could be said to be solely ‘internal’ any more. When the Spanish Civil War began, the democratic powers were trying at all costs to ‘appease’ the Fascist powers, especially Nazi Germany, instead of opposing those who were really threatening the balance of power. The Republic found itself, therefore, at an enormous disadvantage in having to wage war on some military rebels who from the outset were the beneficiaries of this international situation that was so favourable to their interests. Dictatorships dominated by authoritarian governments of a single man and a single party were at that time replacing democracy in many countries of Europe, and except for the Soviet Union, all of these dictatorships were based on the ideas of order and authority of the extreme right.

With the defeat of fascism in 1945, the right-wing dictatorships disappeared in Europe, except in Portugal and Spain. Francisco Franco and Antonio Oliveira de Salazar were, therefore, the only dictators who, as they did not intervene officially in the Second World War, were able to carry on in power following the conflict. That is a major difference between the dictatorships of Eastern Europe, destroyed by the war, and those of the Iberian Peninsula; and between Franco and Salazar and all those dictators, whether fascist or not, who were executed or went into exile after 1945.

With Hitler and Mussolini dead, Franco carried on for another 30 years. Seen from this comparative perspective, the distinctive feature of the history of Spain in the twentieth century was the lengthy duration of the Franco dictatorship after the Second World War, from 1945 to 1975. This was no parenthesis, but rather the central element which dominated the scene in an absolute way during those three decades.

In recent years, there has emerged in Spanish historiography a clear clash of opinions (rather than debate) regarding the nature of the Republican regimen, the roots of the violence, and especially about whether the insurgents’ violence was part of a premeditated plan of extermination of those groups they considered ‘out of control’, or inimical to the kind of traditional, hierarchized society they wished to impose. Historians also still disagree over whether terms such as genocide or holocaust can be applied to what happened in insurgent territory immediately after the coup. But one clearly useful by-product of these debates is that they have facilitated a fruitful comparative consideration of the events in Spain, looking at how similar and different they are to the uses of extreme violence against civilian populations elsewhere in wartime Europe in the 1940s.

Paul Preston’s recent major work, The Spanish Holocaust, has as its underlying thesis the existence of a prior plan of extermination among the military rebels. Preston implicitly compares Francoist violence with that inflicted by the Nazis. Spain hardly had a ‘Jewish problem', of course – but as Preston indicates, Spanish ‘antisemitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but rather an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. He devotes the first two chapters of Spanish Holocaust to examining the roots of the escalating hatred and violence, in particular the theories and arguments of fascists, army officers and authoritarian Catholics, who alleged the existence of a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot and with it justified the extermination of the left. ⁸

In this book, Professor Paul Preston provides a comprehensive detailed catalogue of the victims and their tormentors, examining their lives and deaths. Just like a detective who delves into the seemingly most insignificant detail, Preston reconstructs all the pieces of the puzzle of a history of hatred and violence, of a culture of confrontation.

Nothing is omitted from his analysis, from the victims of the paseos and sacas to the executions carried out after sentences handed down by popular tribunals, as well as detailed descriptions of the drama of the jails and concentration camps, with the names of hundreds of players in this terrible story, both tormentors and victims. Thanks to that research, the history, myths and memories of the red and fascist terror, class- and gender-based violence, extermination of the adversary in the name of God and the Fatherland, and the cruel, obsessive persecution suffered by the clergy are all revealed to us.

However, Preston does not go into the sensitive area of the relationship between history and the current political debate. ⁹ He limits himself to trying to unearth the truth although he knows, as all good historians do, that it is sometimes partial and ambivalent. More than the testimony and the drama of those who suffered the violence, what Preston provides is a comprehensively diverse reconstruction, in which he combines the analytical and technical procedures of painstaking research with imagination and creative narrative. This is the most appropriate line to follow for reconstructing the parts of the past that have yet to be recovered. And this endorses The Spanish Holocaust as being the best-documented evidence of that time of hatred, its origins, its development and its consequences.

The Spanish Civil War was not the result of violence during previous years, but instead it was the coup d’etat and the war that followed which unleashed that unprecedented violence. To argue the former is to turn history on its head and start from the end. Although it is going to be difficult to do away with the myth on which this is based.