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The Spanish Civil War in Light of Recent Historiography
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12975 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
11,341 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
July 18, 1986, was the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which came after the five troubled years of the Spanish Second Republic. In April 1931, Alfonso XIII, grandfather of the current king of Spain, abdicated his throne after a stormy election that his republican opponents appeared to have won. The republic, declared by the parties of the anticlerical and antimonarchist Left, passed through three distinctive phases -leftist control from June 28, 1931, to December 3, 1933; conservative domination from December 1933 until February 11, 1936; and a return to leftist rule starting of February 16, 1936. Rotation of power occurred as a result of general elections held for the Cortes, or national assembly, in which two massive, generally irreconcilable, blocs opposed each other. The Left favored the disestablishment of the Catholic Church and the inculcation of secular, democratic values in Spanish schools. The socialists and others on the Left advocated the redistribution of wealth and the breaking up of large landholdings. Allied to the Left were also Catalan and Basque regionalists who sought to win independence from the Spanish government. On the other side stood the defenders of the Catholic Spain, including Christian Democrats, monarchists of various types, landowners, and, finally, members of the Falange, a movement of Spanish national regeneration. There were, to be sure, some implausible alliances on both sides of what became after July 18, 1936, a shooting war. Deeply Catholic Basques fought alongside militantly secularist anarchists and communists in order to gain independence for their region. And despite their call for radical social reform, the Falangists sided with the landed class. The murder of their charismatic leader, Jose Antonia Primo de Rivera, during the opening days of the civil war by the Spanish Left and their commitment to a "unitary, Christian Spain" led the unruly falangistas into cooperating with the forces of order. Ironically, the civil war is the traditionalist side, whose members called themselves "nationalists," assumed the role of insurgents, staging an uprising against the Spanish Republic on July 18. Spanish leftists who rallied to the republic described themselves, with at least some plausibility, as "loyalists." In fact, both sides had been arming themselves in preparation for a struggle since the creation of the republic. The hotly contested national election of February 1936--in which the leftist Popular Front won 4.5 million votes and the rightist National bloc only 200,000 fewer--worsened even more the rift in Spanish society. Under the republic's last two presidents, Alcala Zamora and Manuel Azana, a wave of violence, which the government did little to prevent, overwhelmed Spain. Violent strikes erupted, which were made even more savage by the release of revolutionary anarchists from the
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