Spanish Civil War
1936–1939 civil war in Spain / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Spanish Civil War?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española)[note 2] was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, and consisted of various socialist, communist, separatist, anarchist, and republican parties, some of which had opposed the government in the pre-war period.[13] The opposing Nationalists were an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists led by a military junta among whom General Francisco Franco quickly achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets and was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, and between fascism and communism.[14] According to Claude Bowers, U.S. ambassador to Spain during the war, it was the "dress rehearsal" for World War II.[15] The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.
Spanish Civil War | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the interwar period | |||||||
Clockwise from top-left: Members of the XI International Brigade at the Battle of Belchite; Granollers after being bombed by the Aviazione Legionaria in 1938; Bombing of an airfield in Spanish Morocco; Republican soldiers at the siege of the Alcázar; Nationalist soldiers operating an anti-aircraft gun; The Lincoln Battalion | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Strength | |||||||
1936 strength:[1]
|
1936 strength:[4]
| ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
c. 400,000–450,000 total killed[note 1] |
The war began after the partial failure of the coup d'état of July 1936 against the Republican government by a group of generals of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces, with General Emilio Mola as the primary planner and leader and having General José Sanjurjo as a figurehead. The government at the time was a coalition of Republicans, supported in the Cortes by communist and socialist parties, under the leadership of centre-left President Manuel Azaña.[16][17] The Nationalist faction was supported by a number of conservative groups, including CEDA, monarchists, including both the opposing Alfonsists and the religious conservative Carlists, and the Falange Española de las JONS, a fascist political party.[18] After the deaths of Sanjurjo, Emilio Mola and Manuel Goded Llopis, Franco emerged as the remaining leader of the Nationalist side.
The coup was supported by military units in Morocco, Pamplona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Valladolid, Cádiz, Córdoba, and Seville. However, rebelling units in almost all important cities—such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, and Málaga—did not gain control. Those cities remained under the control of the government, leaving Spain militarily and politically divided. The Nationalists and the Republican government fought for control of the country. The Nationalist forces received munitions, soldiers, and air support from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Portugal, while the Republican side received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, continued to recognise the Republican government but followed an official policy of non-intervention. Despite this policy, tens of thousands of citizens from non-interventionist countries directly participated in the conflict. They fought mostly in the pro-Republican International Brigades, which also included several thousand exiles from pro-Nationalist regimes.
The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west, capturing most of Spain's northern coastline in 1937. They also besieged Madrid and the area to its south and west for much of the war. After much of Catalonia was captured in 1938 and 1939, and Madrid cut off from Barcelona, the Republican military position became hopeless. Following the fall without resistance of Barcelona in January 1939, the Francoist regime was recognised by France and the United Kingdom in February 1939. On 5 March 1939, in response to an alleged increasing communist dominance of the republican government and the deteriorating military situation, Colonel Segismundo Casado led a military coup against the Republican government, with the intention of seeking peace with the Nationalists. These peace overtures, however, were rejected by Franco. Following internal conflict between Republican factions in Madrid in the same month, Franco entered the capital and declared victory on 1 April 1939. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled to refugee camps in southern France.[19] Those associated with the losing Republicans who stayed were persecuted by the victorious Nationalists. Franco established a dictatorship in which all right-wing parties were fused into the structure of the Franco regime.[18]
The war became notable for the passion and political division it inspired worldwide and for the many atrocities that occurred. Organised purges occurred in territory captured by Franco's forces so they could consolidate their future regime.[20] Mass executions on a lesser scale also took place in areas controlled by the Republicans,[21] with the participation of local authorities varying from location to location.[22][23]
This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. (November 2023) |
Absolutism and liberalism
The 19th century was a turbulent time for Spain. Those in favour of reforming the Spanish government vied for political power with conservatives who intended to prevent such reforms from being implemented. In a tradition that started with the Spanish Constitution of 1812, many liberals sought to curtail the authority of the Spanish monarchy as well as to establish a nation-state under their ideology and philosophy. The reforms of 1812 were short-lived as they were almost immediately overturned by King Ferdinand VII when he dissolved the aforementioned constitution. This ended the Trienio Liberal government.[24] Twelve successful coups were carried out between 1814 and 1874.[24] There were several attempts to realign the political system to match social reality. Until the 1850s, the economy of Spain was primarily based on agriculture. There was little development of a bourgeois industrial or commercial class. The land-based oligarchy remained powerful; a small number of people held large estates called latifundia as well as all of the important positions in government.[25] In addition to these regime changes and hierarchies, there was a series of civil wars that transpired in Spain known as the Carlist Wars throughout the middle of the century. There were three such wars: the First Carlist War (1833–1840), the Second Carlist War (1846–1849), and the Third Carlist War (1872–1876). During these wars, a right-wing political movement known as Carlism fought to institute a monarchial dynasty under a different branch of the House of Bourbon descended from Don Infante Carlos María Isidro of Molina.
Glorious Revolution and First Republic
In 1868, popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon. Two distinct factors led to the uprisings: a series of urban riots and a liberal movement within the middle classes and the military (led by General Joan Prim), which was concerned about the ultra-conservatism of the monarchy. In 1873, Isabella's replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated due to increasing political pressure, and the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed.[26][27] The Republic was marred with political instability and conflicts and was quickly overthrown by a coup d'état by General Arsenio Martínez Campos in December 1874, after which the Bourbons were restored to the throne in the figure of Alfonso XII, Isabella's son.[28]
Restoration
After the restoration, Carlists and anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy.[29][30] Alejandro Lerroux, Spanish politician and leader of the Radical Republican Party, helped to bring republicanism to the fore in Catalonia—a region of Spain with its own cultural and societal identity in which poverty was particularly acute at the time.[31] Conscription was a controversial policy that was eventually implemented by the government of Spain. As evidenced by the Tragic Week in 1909, resentment and resistance were factors that continued well into the 20th century.[32]
Spain was neutral in World War I. Following the war, wide swathes of Spanish society, including the armed forces, united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government of the country in Madrid, but these circles were ultimately unsuccessful.[33] Popular perception of communism as a major threat significantly increased during this period.[34]
Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera
In 1923, a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power. As a result, Spain transitioned to government by military dictatorship.[35] Support for the Rivera regime gradually faded, and he resigned in January 1930. He was replaced by General Dámaso Berenguer, who was in turn himself replaced by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar-Cabañas; both men continued a policy of rule by decree.
There was little support for the monarchy in the major cities. Consequently, King Alfonso XIII of Spain relented to popular pressure and called municipal elections for 12 April 1931. Left-wing entities such as the socialist and liberal republicans won almost all the provincial capitals and, following the resignation of Aznar's government, Alfonso XIII fled the country.[36] At this time, the Second Spanish Republic was formed. This republic remained in power until the beginning of the civil war five years later.[37]
Second Republic
The revolutionary committee headed by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora became the provisional government, with Alcalá-Zamora himself as president and head of state.[38] The republic had broad support from all segments of society.[39]
In May[year needed], an incident where a taxi driver was attacked outside a monarchist club sparked anti-clerical violence throughout Madrid and south-west portion of the country. The slow response on the part of the government disillusioned the right and reinforced their view that the Republic was determined to persecute the church. In June and July, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) called several strikes, which led to a violent incident between CNT members and the Civil Guard and a brutal crackdown by the Civil Guard and the army against the CNT in Seville. This led many workers to believe the Spanish Second Republic was just as oppressive as the monarchy, and the CNT announced its intention of overthrowing it via revolution.[40]
Constituent Cortes and left-wing government (1931–1933)
Elections in June 1931 returned a large majority of Republicans and Socialists.[28] With the onset of the Great Depression, the government tried to assist rural Spain by instituting an eight-hour day and redistributing land tenure to farm workers.[41][42] The rural workers lived in some of the worst poverty in Europe at the time and the government tried to increase their wages and improve working conditions. This estranged small and medium landholders who used hired labour. The Law of Municipal Boundaries forbade the hiring of workers from outside the locality of the owner's holdings. Since not all localities had enough labour for the tasks required, the law had unintended negative consequences, such as sometimes shutting out peasants and renters from the labour market when they needed extra income as pickers. Labour arbitration boards were set up to regulate salaries, contracts and working hours; they were more favourable to workers than employers and thus the latter became hostile to them. A decree in July 1931 increased overtime pay and several laws in late 1931 restricted whom landowners could hire. Other efforts included decrees limiting the use of machinery, efforts to create a monopoly on hiring, strikes and efforts by unions to limit women's employment to preserve a labour monopoly for their members. Class struggle intensified as landowners turned to counterrevolutionary organisations and local oligarchs. Strikes, workplace theft, arson, robbery and assaults on shops, strikebreakers, employers and machines became increasingly common. Ultimately, the reforms of the Republican-Socialist government alienated as many people as they pleased.[43]
Republican Manuel Azaña became prime minister of a minority government in October 1931.[46][47] Fascism remained a reactive threat and it was facilitated by controversial reforms to the military.[48] In December, a new reformist, liberal, and democratic constitution was declared. It included strong provisions enforcing a broad secularisation of the Catholic country, which included the abolition of Catholic schools and charities, a move which was met with opposition.[49] At this point, once the constituent assembly had fulfilled its mandate of approving a new constitution, it probably should have arranged for regular parliamentary elections and adjourned. However, fearing the increasing popular opposition, the Radical and Socialist majority postponed the regular elections, prolonging their time in power for two more years. Diaz's republican government initiated numerous reforms to, in their view, modernize the country. In 1932, the Jesuits, who were in charge of the best schools throughout the country, were banned, and their property was confiscated. The army was reduced. Landowners were expropriated. Home rule was granted to Catalonia, with a local parliament and a president of its own.[50] In June 1933, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis, "On Oppression of the Church of Spain", raising his voice against the persecution of the Catholic Church in Spain.[51]
Right-wing government (1933–1936)
In November 1933, the right-wing parties won the general election.[52] The causal factors were increased resentment of the incumbent government caused by a controversial decree implementing land reform[53] and by the Casas Viejas incident,[54] and the formation of a right-wing alliance, Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups (CEDA). Another factor was the recent enfranchisement of women, most of whom voted for centre-right parties.[55] According to Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios Tapias, left Republicans attempted to have Niceto Alcalá Zamora cancel the electoral results but did not succeed. Despite CEDA's electoral victory, president Alcalá-Zamora declined to invite its leader, Gil Robles, to form a government fearing CEDA's monarchist sympathies and proposed changes to the constitution. Instead, he invited the Radical Republican Party's Alejandro Lerroux to do so. Despite receiving the most votes, CEDA was denied cabinet positions for nearly a year.[56]
Events in the period after November 1933, called the "black biennium", seemed to make a civil war more likely.[57] Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party (RRP) formed a government, reversing changes made by the previous administration[58] and granting amnesty to the collaborators of the unsuccessful uprising by General José Sanjurjo in August 1932.[59][60] Some monarchists joined with the then fascist-nationalist Falange Española y de las JONS ("Falange") to help achieve their aims.[61] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[62] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful democratic means as solutions.[63] A small insurrection by anarchists occurred in December 1933 in response to CEDA's victory, in which around 100 people died.[64] After a year of intense pressure, CEDA, the party with the most seats in parliament, finally succeeded in forcing the acceptance of three ministries. The Socialists (PSOE) and Communists reacted with an insurrection for which they had been preparing for nine months.[65] The rebellion developed into a bloody revolutionary uprising, against the existing order. Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdered numerous policemen, clergymen, and civilians, and destroyed religious buildings including churches, convents, and part of the university at Oviedo.[66] Rebels in the occupied areas proclaimed revolution for the workers and abolished existing currency.[67] The rebellion was crushed in two weeks by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco.[68] Azaña was in Barcelona that day, and the Lerroux-CEDA government tried to implicate him. He was arrested and charged with complicity. In fact, Azaña had no connection with the rebellion and was released from prison in January 1935.[69]
In sparking an uprising, the non-anarchist socialists, like the anarchists, manifested their conviction that the existing political order was illegitimate.[70] The Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga, an Azaña supporter and an exiled vocal opponent of Francisco Franco, wrote a sharp criticism of the left's participation in the revolt: "The uprising of 1934 is unforgivable. The argument that Mr Gil Robles tried to destroy the Constitution to establish fascism was, at once, hypocritical and false. With the rebellion of 1934, the Spanish left lost even the shadow of moral authority to condemn the rebellion of 1936."[71]
Reversals of land reform resulted in expulsions, firings, and arbitrary changes to working conditions in the central and southern countryside in 1935, with landowners' behaviour at times reaching "genuine cruelty", with violence against farmworkers and socialists, which caused several deaths. One historian argued that the behaviour of the right in the southern countryside was one of the main causes of hatred during the Civil War and possibly even the Civil War itself.[72] Landowners taunted workers by saying that if they went hungry, they should "Go eat the Republic!"[73][74] Bosses fired leftist workers and imprisoned trade union and socialist militants, and wages were reduced to "salaries of hunger".[75]
In 1935, the government led by the Radical Republican Party went through a series of crises. After a number of corruption scandals, President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, who was hostile to this government, called another election.
Popular Front's victory and escalation
The Popular Front narrowly won the 1936 general election. The revolutionary left-wing masses took to the streets and freed prisoners. In the thirty-six hours following the election, sixteen people were killed (mostly by police officers attempting to maintain order or to intervene in violent clashes) and thirty-nine were seriously injured. Also, fifty churches and seventy conservative political centres were attacked or set ablaze.[76] Manuel Azaña was called to form a government before the electoral process had ended. He shortly replaced Zamora as president, taking advantage of a constitutional loophole. Convinced that the left was no longer willing to follow the rule of law and that its vision of Spain was under threat, the right abandoned the parliamentary option and began planning to overthrow the republic, rather than to control it.[77]
PSOE's left wing socialists started to take action. Julio Álvarez del Vayo talked about "Spain' being converted into a socialist Republic in association with the Soviet Union". Francisco Largo Caballero declared that "the organized proletariat will carry everything before it and destroy everything until we reach our goal".[78] The country had rapidly become anarchic. Even the staunch socialist Indalecio Prieto, at a party rally in Cuenca in May 1936, complained: "we have never seen so tragic a panorama or so great a collapse as in Spain at this moment. Abroad, Spain is classified as insolvent. This is not the road to socialism or communism but to desperate anarchism without even the advantage of liberty".[78] The disenchantment with Azaña's ruling was also voiced by Miguel de Unamuno, a republican and one of Spain's most respected intellectuals who, in June 1936, told a reporter who published his statement in El Adelanto that President Manuel Azaña should commit suicide "as a patriotic act".[79]
Laia Balcells observes that polarisation in Spain just before the coup was so intense that physical confrontations between leftists and rightists were a routine occurrence in most localities; six days before the coup occurred, there was a riot between the two in the province of Teruel. Balcells notes that Spanish society was so divided along Left-Right lines that the monk Hilari Raguer stated that in his parish, instead of playing "cops and robbers", children would sometimes play "leftists and rightists".[80] Within the first month of the Popular Front's government, nearly a quarter of the provincial governors had been removed due to their failure to prevent or control strikes, illegal land occupation, political violence and arson. The Popular Front government was more likely to prosecute rightists for violence than leftists who committed similar acts. Azaña was hesitant to use the army to shoot or stop rioters or protestors as many of them supported his coalition. On the other hand, he was reluctant to disarm the military as he believed he needed them to stop insurrections from the extreme left. Illegal land occupation became widespread—poor tenant farmers knew the government was disinclined to stop them. By April 1936, nearly 100,000 peasants had appropriated 400,000 hectares of land and perhaps as many as 1 million hectares by the start of the civil war; for comparison, the 1931–33 land reform had granted only 6,000 peasants 45,000 hectares. As many strikes occurred between April and July as had occurred in the entirety of 1931. Workers increasingly demanded less work and more pay. "Social crimes"—refusing to pay for goods and rent—became increasingly common by workers, particularly in Madrid. In some cases, this was done in the company of armed militants. Conservatives, the middle classes, businessmen and landowners became convinced that revolution had already begun.[81]
Prime Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga ignored warnings of a military conspiracy involving several generals, who decided that the government had to be replaced to prevent the dissolution of Spain.[82] Both sides had become convinced that, if the other side gained power, it would discriminate against their members and attempt to suppress their political organisations.[83]