The Second Republic and the Civil War

(from Grolier’s online)

The history of the Second Republic falls into four distinct phases:

(1)                          the Provisional Government, which lasted until the religious issue forced its resignation in October 1931,

(2)                          the governments of the Left Republicans and Socialists, which ruled from October 1931 and were defeated in the elections of November 1933, 

(3)                          the conservative government of the Radical Republicans and the Roman Catholic right from November 1933 to February 1936, which was punctuated by the revolution of October 1934 and ended with the electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936

(4)                          the government of the Popular Front and "the descent into violence" that culminated in the military rising of July 1936.

The Provisional Government was a coalition government, presided over by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a former monarchist converted to republicanism, whose Catholicism reassured moderate opinion. The coalition included all the groups represented at San Sebastián: Lerroux's Radicals, the Catalan left, the Socialists, and the Left Republicans dominated by Manuel Azaña y Diaz.

The elections to the Constituent Cortes strengthened the Socialists and Left Republicans and thus upset the parliamentary balance between moderate Catholic Republicans and the left. It was the left that imprinted its views on the constitution, especially its religious clauses. The historically conditioned anti-clericalism had already led the government to tolerate an outburst of church burning (May 1931). The Socialists and Left Republicans inserted in the constitution an attack on religious education and the regular orders, which forced the resignation of Alcalá Zamora and Miguel Maura, his minister of the interior.

This direct and, it would seem, ill-advised clash with Catholic sentiment was to provide a base for the construction of a party of the right devoted to the reversal of the church settlement. This party, the creation of the Catholic politician José María Gil Robles, became Acción Popular; it was to become the main component of the right-wing electoral grouping, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas; CEDA). To the left its "accidentalism" (the doctrine that forms of government were irrelevant provided the church could fulfill its mission) was suspect. (See Gil Robles y Quinoñes, José María.)

From October 1931 the government, with Azaña as premier, was in the hands of Left Republicans and Socialists, with the Catholic right, the Basque Catholics, the Navarrese Carlists, and Lerroux's Radicals in opposition. Azaña aimed to create a modern democracy; labour legislation would be the work of the Socialists, with the UGT (socialist labor union) leader, Francisco Largo Caballero, as minister of labour.

In April 1931 there was a danger that Catalonia might declare its independence within a federal state. Azaña's greatest achievement was the settlement of the Catalan question. He overcame conservative Republican opposition to limited home rule under the Generalitat, which was controlled by the Catalan left (Esquerra) under Lluis Companys. Largo Caballero's legislation provided labour with a strong negotiating position but could not, in itself, mitigate the mounting unemployment, which was particularly serious in the latifundios of the southwest. Since new machinery for the settlement of labour disputes was dominated by the UGT (socialist labor union), it was opposed by the CNT (anarchist labor union), now influenced by the extreme revolutionary apoliticism of an anarchist group, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica; FAI). Violent strikes were frequent.

Sedition from the right came to a head in General José Sanjurjo's pronunciamiento in Seville (Aug. 10, 1932). Politically more dangerous than Sanjurjo's abortive coup, however, were the steady growth of Gil Robles' Acción Popular and the Socialists' desertion of the Azaña coalition, as Largo Caballero wearied of cooperation with "bourgeois" parties. In the elections of November 1933, therefore, the left was divided and the right relatively united in the electoral union of the CEDA. Given an electoral law that favoured electoral coalitions, the CEDA and Lerroux's Radicals, now a respectable middle-class party, triumphed. The newly elected Cortes was dominated by Lerroux's Radicals and the CEDA. Lerroux could not govern without the support of Gil Robles. With power within sight, Gil Robles accentuated his legalism, to the distaste of the militant monarchists among his supporters. Nevertheless, his party was regarded by the Left Republicans and Socialists as a Catholic brand of the fascist trends now winning out in western Europe.

When CEDA entered Lerroux's government, the Socialists staged a revolution. Revolutionary councils were set up in the mining districts of Asturias, where there was considerable destruction of property. In Barcelona the revolution was the work of Catalan nationalists, who believed autonomy was imperiled by the actions of the Madrid government in overruling an agrarian law passed by the Generalitat. Unsupported by the CNT, the revolution was quickly suppressed.

The October Revolution of 1934 was the dividing point in the Second Republic. The Socialists, fearing the fate of their Austrian and German brothers, had revolted against a legal government and thereby established in the minds of the right the fear of "Red" rebellion. In the subsequent repression by the army lay the emotional origins of the Popular Front against "fascism"--a re-creation of the Azaña coalition of Left Republicans and Socialists in order to fight the elections of February 1936. The Popular Front won the election of February 1936 by a narrow majority. Spain had become polarized, and the division was to intensify. The Popular Front government was exclusively Republican. Under Largo Caballero (UGT), the left Socialists put increasing pressure on the government, using revolutionary language if not intending revolution. Largo Caballero's revolutionary rhetoric concealed his hope that the orthodox Republicans could be eased from power, leaving the field open to a pure Socialist government, which his followers chose to call, in Leninist language, the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Just as the fears of the "fascism" of the right justified the defensive reaction of the Socialists, so the right argued that the Republican government was a prisoner of the revolutionary left (they could point to a rapid growth of communist influence). The Falange, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the dictator, was a nationalist anti-Marxist grouping appealing to youth ready to engage in street affrays with the Socialist Youth. Conservatives rallied behind the right-wing National Front, which openly appealed to the military to save Spain from Marxism.

The army was the key factor; by the early summer a young officers' conspiracy was backed by Generals Emilio Mola, Manuel Goded, and, finally, Francisco Franco. The murder of José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the extreme right, with the connivance of government security forces was the final outrage for the right and the army.

The Civil War

The rising of the military started in Morocco on July 17, 1936, and spread to the garrisons of metropolitan Spain in the following days. The Civil War took place because the rising was successful only in Old Castile, in Navarre, where Carlist (monarchists) support was decisive, and, of the larger towns, in Saragossa, Seville, Cordova, Valladolid, and Cadiz. Galicia soon went over to the Nationalists, as did most of Andalusia. Catalonia and the Basque provinces were loyal to the government because the republic guaranteed their autonomy. In Madrid and Barcelona the security forces, helped by the workers who were armed belatedly by the government, defeated the officers. Thus, in broadest terms, the Republic held the centre, the Levant, Catalonia, and the Basque industrial zones; the Nationalists held the food-producing areas. One consequence was to be an increasingly acute food shortage in the Republican zone.

The role of the workers in defeating the rising made their organizations the power in the Republican zone. The legal government was bypassed or totally supplanted by local committees and trade unions; the workers' militia replaced the dissolved army. In many parts of Spain a social revolution took place in July 1936: factories and farms were collectivized. The English novelist George Orwell described Barcelona, where the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist labor union) was all-powerful, as "a town where the working class was in the saddle." The success of working-class control, in terms of increased production, is difficult to estimate.

This revolution was distasteful to the Left Republicans and to the Communist Party, which rapidly grew in number and in political influence because it controlled the supply of arms from the Soviet Union. In the name of an efficient war effort and the preservation of "bourgeois" elements in the Popular Front, the Communists pressed for a popular army and central government control. In September-November 1936, the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist labor union) was brought into the government of Catalonia and into Largo Caballero's ministry in Madrid--an astonishing step for a movement that had consistently rejected "bourgeois" politics. The CNT militants did not approve the leaders' "surrender" and the dismantling of the militia-backed revolution.

A small Marxist revolutionary party, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; POUM), which rejected the Popular Front in favour of a workers' government, set off a rebellion in Barcelona in May 1937. The Communists, Republicans, and anti-Caballero Socialists used this as an excuse to oust Largo Caballero, who proved insufficiently pliable to Communist demands. The government led by the Socialist doctor Juan Negrín was a Republican-Socialist-Communist concern. The great unions, the UGT and CNT, were replaced by the political parties.

The Communists were correct in arguing that the committee-militia system was militarily ineffective. General Franco's army, ferried over from Morocco, cut through the militia and arrived before Madrid by November 1936. The successful resistance of the city, which was stiffened by the arrival of the International Brigades and Soviet arms, meant that the Civil War would be prolonged for two years.

Victory would go to the side with the best army, with unified political control, and with adequate arms supply. The core of the Nationalist army was the African army commanded by General Franco. Given the confused political control in Republican Spain, the secure military and political command of Franco (from October 1936) was decisive. In April 1937 he incorporated the Falange and the Carlists into a unified movement under his leadership.

Both sides sought help from abroad. The Republic consistently hoped that France and Britain would allow them to acquire arms. Partly because of fear of a general war, partly because of domestic pressures, both powers backed nonintervention (i.e., self-imposed restriction of arms supply by all powers). General Franco appealed immediately to Hitler in Germany and to Mussolini in Italy, both of whom supplied aircraft early in the war. The Germans, in return for mineral concessions, supplied the Condor Legion (100 combat planes), and the Italians sent ground troops; both supplied tanks and artillery.

The Western democracies protested but did nothing. The Soviet Union alone responded to the breakdown of nonintervention by supplying arms to the Republican side. Soviet supplies were of great importance (tanks, aircraft, and a military mission) after October 1936. The Communist International also organized the International Brigades. In 1938, Soviet supplies dropped off, and the balance of arms supply was decisively in favour of the Nationalists. Once the Popular Army replaced the militia, the republic held Madrid and defeated two flanking attacks in the battles of Jarama (February 1937) and Guadalajara (March 1937), where the International Brigades decisively defeated a motorized Italian corps.

After his failure at Madrid, General Franco transferred his effort to the north, where the bombing of Gernika (Guernica), on April 26, 1937, by German planes outraged public opinion in the democracies: by October 1937, General Franco had captured the industrial zone, shortened his front, and won a decisive advantage.

When General Franco concentrated again on Madrid, the Republican army staged its most effective offensive in the Battle of Teruel (launched Dec. 15, 1937). General Franco recovered Teruel, drove to the sea, and committed his one strategic error in deciding on the difficult attack on Valencia. To relieve Valencia, the Republicans attacked across the Ebro (July 24, 1938); once more they failed to exploit the breakthrough, and the bloody battle exhausted the Popular Army.

The final Nationalist campaign in Catalonia was relatively easy. On the Republican side, the question of the feasibility of continued resistance, which was supported by the Communists and Negrín, caused acute political divisions. On March 7, 1939, a civil war broke out in Madrid between Communists and anti-Communists. On March 28 the Nationalist forces entered a starving capital.