Second Spanish Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Spanish Republic, commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic, was proclaimed on the 14th of April 1931, and King Alfonso XIII left the country for exile. Eight years later, on the 1st of April 1939, it dissolved after surrendering the Spanish Civil War to Nationalist rebels led by General Francisco Franco. In between, the same government cycled through eight prime ministers across nineteen cabinets. How did a country replace a monarchy with a republic almost overnight? What did the new government write into its founding law that so alarmed the political right? And what finally convinced army officers, many of whom had stayed loyal for years, to turn against their own government?

• 2. From Dictatorship To Democracy

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  General Miguel Primo de Rivera had ruled Spain as a military dictator since September 1923. On the 28th of January 1930, his government was overthrown. Republican factions from very different backgrounds, conservatives, socialists, and Catalan nationalists among them, joined forces in the aftermath.

  The Pact of San Sebastián became the key document of that alliance, signed by representatives of Spain's main Republican forces. It let republicans of every tendency campaign jointly against the monarchy, while large sectors of the public rejected the Bourbon dynasty outright.

  On the 12th of April 1931, municipal elections delivered a landslide victory for republican candidates across Spain's major cities. A provisional government soon formed under Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, tasked with steering the young republic toward a permanent constitution.

  In Madrid and Sevilla, Catholic churches and other church buildings were set on fire on the 11th of May 1931. It was an early sign of the anticlerical anger that would soon shape the republic's founding law.

• 3. A Constitution Against The Church

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  In June 1931, Spain elected a Constituent Cortes charged with drafting a new constitution, which came into force that December. It guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of association. It also extended the vote to women in 1933, legalized divorce, and stripped the Spanish nobility of any special legal status.

  Catholicism lost its status as the state religion, and the new constitution imposed strict limits on religious orders, including a ban on teaching. Those anticlerical provisions were moderated slightly during debates later that year. Articles 26 and 27 still imposed tight controls on Church property and barred religious orders from education. Scholars have since called the document hostile to religion, with one historian describing it as among the most hostile constitutions of the twentieth century. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset said, "the article in which the Constitution legislates the actions of the Church seems highly improper to me." Pope Pius XI went further, condemning the loss of Catholic civil liberties in his encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.

  The legislature became a single chamber, the Congress of Deputies. The constitution also set legal procedures for nationalizing public services, land, banks, and railways. It gave Spain new national symbols too: the Himno de Riego as its anthem and a red-yellow-purple Tricolor as its flag.

  Regions gained the right to seek autonomy under the new constitution. Catalonia exercised that right in 1932 and the Basque Country followed in 1936, while Galicia's own statute never took effect because of the war. Aragon, Andalusia, and Valencia were still negotiating autonomy when the civil war broke out.

  Manuel Azaña, the lawyer who would soon lead the government built on this constitution, inherited a document that had already made enemies before a single reform bill reached parliament.

• 4. Reform And The Right's Answer

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  Once the constitution was approved in December 1931, the constituent assembly was expected to arrange fresh elections and adjourn. Instead, the Radical and Socialist majority postponed those elections, fearing rising opposition, and stayed in power two more years. Under Manuel Azaña, the government pursued reforms it described as modernizing the country.

  Landowners had their estates expropriated under a moderate agrarian reform program. Catholic churches in major cities faced fresh arson attacks in 1932, and Málaga saw a revolutionary strike action that same year. A Catholic church in Zaragoza was burned down in 1933.

  By 1933, every remaining religious congregation was required to pay taxes and was banned from working in industry, trade, and education. Police enforced the ban with severity, and mob violence spread along with it.

  Monarchist generals, backed by exiled monarchist ministers, planned the first military coup against the Republic; it became known as the Sanjurjada, and it failed. Several hundred generals were dismissed, prominent monarchists were jailed or fled the country, and the aristocracy faced a more radical agrarian reform as punishment. The failed coup pushed the political left further toward radicalization.

  The extreme right did not retreat either. The Spanish Renovation and a small fascist party, Falange Española, were founded. The militant Carlist movement grew through its Traditionalist Communion and Requeté militias, while groups like Acción Española spread propaganda legitimizing a military uprising. Historian Julián Casanova later described the culture of Spain's anti-Republican right as proto-fascist, comparable to Italy's "pre-Fascism" and Germany's Völkisch movement. It drew support from inside both the Church and the army.

  An anarchist insurrection, meanwhile, ended in the Casas Viejas massacre and a wave of state repression. It was an episode that would soon cost Azaña the parliamentary support he needed to keep governing.

• 5. CEDA And The Black Biennium

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  In September 1933, President Alcalá-Zamora forced Manuel Azaña's resignation after Azaña lost his parliamentary majority. The election that followed handed a plurality to the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, known as CEDA. Alcalá-Zamora refused to invite its leader, Gil Robles, to form a government, fearing CEDA's monarchist sympathies. He chose Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party instead, and CEDA was kept out of the cabinet for nearly a year despite winning the most votes.

  Kept out of formal power, CEDA still exerted heavy influence. The government depended on its support in parliament, and CEDA could threaten to withdraw it. Gil Robles later claimed the Radical party in office was simply "carrying out CEDA's programme." Ricardo Samper, who briefly held the premiership during this period, resigned within months under direct CEDA pressure.

  The left viewed CEDA as more than a threat to reform, seeing it as a threat to the Republic itself. CEDA and Gil Robles had proclaimed their own goals openly. They wanted to dissolve workers' movements and parliamentary democracy, purge "Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews," and build an authoritarian corporate state. Gil Robles praised Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy, Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, and Austria's Engelbert Dollfuss as models.

  Inside the PSOE and the UGT, Francisco Largo Caballero answered by adopting revolutionary Marxist rhetoric, a break from the party's usual reformist tradition. He framed it as necessary to combat rising fascism, and the CNT's anarchists took a similar line. Historian Paul Preston has argued that Largo Caballero believed CEDA would never actually enter government. So socialists made few real preparations for the uprising they threatened.

  Historian Stanley G. Payne points to a deeper problem: Left Republicans equated the Republic itself with one specific set of left-wing policies and politicians. Any deviation from that program, even a democratic one, was treated as treasonous.

  After a year of pressure, CEDA finally forced its way into three government ministries on the 1st of October 1934. It was a change of only three seats, and it would ignite a nationwide revolt.

• 6. The Asturian Revolt

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  In Catalonia, nationalist leader Lluís Companys used the moment to proclaim a "Catalan State," but it lasted only ten hours before collapsing. An attempted general strike in Madrid failed to hold, leaving Asturian miners to fight essentially alone.

  Miners in Asturias occupied the regional capital, Oviedo, killing officials and clergymen there. Fifty eight religious buildings, including churches, convents, and part of the university, were burned or destroyed. The miners went on to occupy other towns, most notably the industrial center of La Felguera, where they set up "revolutionary committees" to govern. Thirty thousand workers were mobilized for the fight within just ten days.

  In the territory they controlled, the rebels declared a proletarian revolution and abolished regular money outright. The moderate socialist leaders Ramón González Peña and Belarmino Tomás tried to restrain the violence of the committees they had helped create. Even so, a number of captured priests, businessmen, and civil guards were summarily executed in the towns of Mieres and Sama.

  The uprising lasted two weeks before the army, commanded by General Eduardo López Ochoa, crushed it completely. The victory earned López Ochoa the lasting nickname "Butcher of Asturias." Companys's separate rebellion by the Catalan autonomous government was suppressed too, followed by mass arrests and trials.

  The defeat in Asturias, combined with the suspension of earlier land reforms, pushed the PSOE further left. The moderate Indalecio Prieto lost ground to Francisco Largo Caballero, who now argued openly for socialist revolution. Prime Minister Joaquín Chapaprieta, in office less than three months, resigned soon after amid the Straperlo and Nombela corruption scandals. The scandals weakened the governing centrist party and sharpened the divide between right and left.

  By 1935, President Alcalá-Zamora, long hostile to the sitting government, responded to the chaos differently. Rather than invite CEDA to lead, he called the country back to the polls.

• 7. The Road To Rebellion

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  On the 7th of January 1936, Spain's government called new elections. Despite deep rivalries, socialists, Communists, and left-wing Republicans from Catalonia and Madrid united under a single banner, the Popular Front. On the 16th of February 1936, the coalition won 263 seats against 156 for the right-wing National Front, an alliance of CEDA, Carlists, and Monarchists. The moderate centre all but disappeared; Lerroux's party alone fell from 104 seats to just 9.

  American historian Stanley G. Payne argues the election involved major fraud and widespread violation of electoral law. In 2017, Spanish scholars Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García published research reaching the same conclusion, that the vote had been rigged. Historians Eduardo Calleja and Francisco Pérez disputed this, arguing the Popular Front would likely have won a slim majority regardless.

  In the thirty-six hours after the results were announced, sixteen people were killed and thirty-nine seriously injured. Fifty churches and seventy right-wing political centres were attacked or set on fire in that same window. A group of monarchists asked Gil Robles to lead a coup, but he refused. He did ask Prime Minister Manuel Portela Valladares to declare a state of war. Franco made a similar approach, seeking martial law as what he called a "police action" against leftist unrest rather than a coup. Valladares resigned before a new government could even be formed.

  Manuel Azaña was called to form a government before the vote count had even finished. He then used a constitutional loophole, the rule letting the Cortes remove a president after two early dissolutions, to replace Alcalá-Zamora as president himself. Shocked by crowds in the streets and the release of prisoners despite the new cabinet's moderate makeup, the right abandoned parliamentary politics. It began plotting to overthrow the Republic rather than contest it again at the ballot box.

  The fascist-inspired Falange Española, led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the former dictator, had won only 0.7 percent of the February vote. By July 1936 it still counted roughly 40,000 members among millions of Spaniards. That same June, the writer Miguel de Unamuno, disillusioned with events, told a reporter, quoted in the newspaper El Adelanto, that President Azaña should commit suicide as a patriotic act.

  On the 12th of July 1936, Lieutenant José Castillo, a member of the anti-fascist military group UMRA, was shot dead by Falangist gunmen. In response, Guardia de Asalto officers and other leftist militiamen, led by Civil Guard Fernando Condés, went to the home of opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo in the early hours of the 13th. Sotelo was arrested and later shot dead inside a police truck; his body was left at the entrance of a Madrid cemetery. Later investigations named the gunman as Luis Cuenca, a socialist known as the bodyguard of PSOE leader Indalecio Prieto.

  Calvo Sotelo had been one of Spain's most prominent monarchists, calling the government's actions Bolshevist and anarchist. He had urged the army to intervene, declaring Spanish soldiers would save the country from communism "if there are no politicians capable of doing so." When Castillo and Calvo Sotelo were buried on the same day in the same Madrid cemetery, fighting broke out between the Police Assault Guard and fascist militias nearby, killing four more people.

  Historian Stanley Payne notes that before the assassination, support for a coup among army officers had weakened. General Emilio Mola estimated only 12 percent of officers were reliably behind it, and at one point he considered fleeing the country. The killing of Calvo Sotelo transformed what Payne calls a "limping conspiracy" into a revolt capable of triggering civil war. Within hours, Franco, who had not previously joined the plotting, changed his mind and sent Mola a message committing himself firmly to the rebellion.

  Three days later, on the 17th of July 1936, the revolt began with an army uprising in Spanish Morocco. Prime Minister Santiago Casares, only 67 days into the job, resigned as the coup spread through Spain's cities.

• 8. War, Ruin, And Exile

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  General Emilio Mola's plan for the new regime imagined a "republican dictatorship," modeled on Salazar's Portugal rather than a full totalitarian state. An all-military "Directory" would govern at first, and General Sanjurjo, widely liked within the military despite little political talent, was to head it as a largely symbolic figurehead. The 1931 Constitution would be suspended and replaced by a new constituent parliament, chosen by a purged electorate, to decide between republic and monarchy. Mola intended the coup to remain fundamentally an Army affair, insulated from outside interests, with violence used to defeat opposition. He had not foreseen, though, the scale of atrocity the war would ultimately bring.

  Franco's own uprising was meant to seize power immediately, but it met serious resistance instead. Most of Spain's main cities, and great stretches of the country, stayed loyal to the Republic. Rather than lose heart at the stalemate, the coup's leaders settled into a slow, deliberate war of attrition against the Republican government in Madrid.

  Underlying all of this was an economy historians have often called a "backward nation," still mostly agrarian. Spain's major industries sat in the Basque region, home to some of Europe's best high-grade non-phosphoric ore, and in Catalonia, far from the country's raw material reserves. Mountainous terrain made transporting resources between the two immensely costly, compounding a national economy already weakened by low exports and an overwhelmingly domestic manufacturing base. Widespread poverty left many Spaniards receptive to extremist political parties promising a solution.

  Three successive Republican governments led the war effort. José Giral led the first, from July to September 1936, a period in which revolution inspired by libertarian socialist, anarchist, and communist principles broke out across Republican territory. Francisco Largo Caballero of the PSOE led the second, with the UGT and the CNT driving the accompanying social revolution. The socialist Juan Negrín led the third and final wartime government, until a military coup led by Segismundo Casado ended Republican resistance and cleared the way for Nationalist victory.

  Franco led the Spanish Army of Africa north from Morocco while General Mola's forces pushed south from Navarre, and other military units seized government institutions elsewhere in Spain. By October 1936, Time Magazine declared that the "façade of the Spanish Republic was crumbling," as the Army of Africa took much of the south and west. Bloody purges followed in each piece of newly captured Nationalist territory.

  Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and neighboring Portugal gave the rebels far greater and more effective aid than the Republicans received from the Soviet Union, Mexico, and volunteers of the International Brigades. France, Britain, and other European governments instead pursued non-intervention, formalized through the Non-Intervention Committee. That policy of neutrality ended up favoring the future Axis powers' own interests.

  Early in the war, the rebels won a long siege at the Alcázar in Toledo. The Republicans held Madrid despite a Nationalist assault in November 1936 and beat back further offensives at Jarama and Guadalajara in 1937. The rebels then eroded Republican territory steadily, starving Madrid and advancing east; the north, including the Basque Country, fell in late 1937, and the Aragon front collapsed soon after.

  The bombing of Guernica became probably the most infamous single event of the war, later inspiring Pablo Picasso's painting of the same name. Germany's Luftwaffe used the attack as a testing ground for its Condor Legion. The Battle of the Ebro, fought between July and November 1938, was the Republicans' final desperate attempt to turn the tide. When it failed, and Barcelona fell to the rebels in early 1939, the war's outcome was clear. The remaining Republican fronts collapsed, and Madrid itself fell in March 1939.

  Historians estimate that around half a million people died in the war, though the figure is disputed and some researchers have suggested as many as a million. Modern research has generally settled on the lower figure as the more accurate count.

  The Republican government did not entirely vanish with Madrid's fall. It survived in exile and kept an embassy running in Mexico City until 1976, dissolving formally only the following year, after democracy had returned to Spain.