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Spanish Civil War 1936-39

The Spanish Civil War is crucial to understand modern Spain. The transition to the current Democracy would not have been possible without the widespreed desire across Spanish society not to repeat another cruel war between brothers.

After Spain lost her empire in the Spanish American War, followed by the First World War and then the 1929 stock market crash, economic problems, aristocratic privilege, and peasant misery worked against successful democratic or parliamentary government in the Iberian peninsula. None of the political parties could deal adequately with Spain's problems in the 1920s. Revolts and strikes plagued the country until 1931, when the king abdicated and left the country. At the end of the year, a new liberal constitution was adopted, and a republic was proclaimed. The new constitution was extremely liberal, but it had the support of neither the left nor the right. Mob violence and the threat of military coups continually harassed the republic. By 1936 the peasants and workers were beginning to take matters into their own hands, while the military pursued its own political ends. In July, the army made its move and attacked the republican government. Even without Generalissimo Francisco Franco, there would have been a civil war in Spain. It would have come from the country's purely indigenous social antagonisms.

The Nationalist Revolution

By 1936 the Spanish republic was disintegrating. It had brought neither prosperity nor stability to Spain. Reactionary forces had tried to gain control of the government while left-wing groups had resorted to terrorism. The liberal approach had failed, and in the summer of 1936 the army revolted against the legal government in Madrid.

Francisco Franco (1892-1975), El Caudillo, had been essentially exiled by the Republican Government in February 1936 to an obscure command in the Canary Islands. The following July , with other right-wing military officers, he lead his Army of Morocco in a revolt against the republic. He was secretly flown by German Nazis from Africa to Cáceres where in the Golfines Palace Franco was named "Generalisimo" of Spain.

General Franco commanded the insurgents, who included in their ranks most of the regular army troops. Mussolini and Hitler strongly backed Franco, and the rightist forces expected a quick victory. However, many groups stood by the republic, and they put up a strong resistance against the insurgents, stopping them at the outskirts of Madrid.

The insurgents capitalized on the Soviet support received by the republic, and Franco pronounced his cause to be strictly an anti-communist crusade - a cunning oversimplification that would not have any validity except "for a few months (in 1938) when the communists were in firm control of a remnant of republican Spain," before Stalin decided to pull out his support.

Each side had gained the backing of a complicated alliance of forces. Franco had the support of the Italians, who sent large numbers of planes, troops, and weapons, and the Germans, who tested their latest military technology against the republicans. While Spain bled, suffering more than 700,000 deaths, outside forces took advantage of the tragic situation for their own selfish purposes.

The republic gained the support of the Soviet Union and Mexico, which sent arms, "advisers," and other supplies and large numbers of disorganized but idealistic anti-fascist fighters, including a number from Britain and the United States. More than 30.000 people from all over the world came to Spain to fight against fascism in the International Brigades (there were two North American Battalions among them: the George Washington and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion). Several intellectuals came to Spain to support the Republic: Orwell, Hemingway, Malroux. For them the Spanish civil war became the symbol of the fight against fascism very deeply felt by many in Europe and America.

But the democratic powers - Great Britain, France, and the United States - attempted to stay officially out of the conflict. Britain did not want to risk a continental war. France suffered from internal divisions that made its leaders fear that their country, too, might have a civil war. The United States clung to its isolationism and declared its official neutrality. Instead of permitting arms to be sent to the recognized, legally constituted republican government which had the right under international law to purchase weapons for self-defense, Great Britain and France set up a nonintervention system by which the nations of Europe agreed not to send arms to either side. This arrangement, meant to limit the scope of the conflict, was adhered to only by the democracies. The various dictators continued to send their support to their respective sides. Franco received a generous military aid from both Hitler and Mussolini (arms, instructors, planes and soldiers) which was to decide the course of the war.

Madrid finally fell in March 1939, and the Spanish republic was no more. Franco, at the head of the new state, gained absolute power, which he held until his death in 1975. The Spanish civil war was a national catastrophe that left permanent scars on a proud and gallant people.

The Spanish Civil War, which pitted the loyalist defenders of the Spanish republic against the rebel fascist nationalists, served as a bloody and tragic prelude to World War II. Hitler's Stuka dive bombers and blitzkrieg tactics, were battle tested and perfected on Spanish.republicans defenders. The following year these same seasoned Nazi forces would sweep across Poland, France and the entire European continent, .

The Spanish civil war left the country demolished. While ostensibly neutral during the Second World War, Spain under Franco was pro-Nazi. Hitler failed to persuade Franco to declare war on the Anglo-American allies and join the Axis forces.

During and after the Civil war there was a cruel repression by Franco of all the people related to the groups that had supported the Republic. Thousands were assassinated in public executions or sent to prison and later purged. Many people were exiled, including most intellectuals who were either killed (Lorca) or sent to jail to die in prison. (Miguel Hernández). The cruelty of the Spanish civil war including mass executions resembles similar recent atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Spain after WWII

In the four decades after the Second World War, Spain passed from the Franco dictatorship to a rapidly industrializing, modern European state. Franco ruled over an almost ruined country after taking control in 1939. Many of Spain's most talented and productive people had fled, and 700,000 people had died in the civil war. So horrible was the conflict and so great the losses, that Franco gained a grudging toleration from the majority of the exhausted population. Those who did not cooperate faced his secret police.

Cold War tensions eased Spain's reentry into the community of nations in the 1950s. The United States resumed diplomatic relations and Spain became a member of the UN in 1955. The following year the Pact of Madrid provided naval and air bases for the Americans, in return for which Spain received more than $2 billion a year in aid. In the 1960s and 1970s the widespread poverty and backwardness that had long characterized Spain began to diminish. Inspired by the Portuguese revolution of 1974, workers and students began to demonstrate and show their unrest. In the summer of 1975 Franco died. He had named Prince Juan Carlos as his successor, thereby indicating his wish that the monarchy be restored.

Post Franco Spain

The young king was crowned in November 1975, and in his speech of acceptance he promised to represent all Spaniards, recognizing that the people were asking for "profound improvements." In 1976, the reformed government announced amnesty for political prisoners, freedom of assembly, and more rights for labor unions. An orderly general election took place in the spring of 1977. Post-Franco Spain began its parliamentary-monarchy phase with impressive stability. Underneath, deep ideological divisions remained, which decreased over time. The major crisis came in February 1981 when radical elements of the army invaded the parliament building to attempt a coup. It immediately became apparent that there was no support for the coup either in the military or among the public at large, and the attempt was brushed aside.

In May 1982 Spain joined NATO and, later that year, elected the Socialist party led by Felipe Gonzales to run the country. Gonzales brought Spain into the Common Market and worked hard to diversify the country's economy. He strengthened his position in the 1986 elections and by 1990 was governing a country attractive to investors in high-tech industries. Spain hosted the 1992 Olympic games.