Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalist rebels, and it ended with a dictatorship that ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975. A taxi driver attacked outside a monarchist club in May 1931 sparked anti-clerical violence across Madrid. Children in one parish stopped playing cops and robbers and began playing leftists and rightists. Six days before the coup, leftists and rightists rioted in Teruel. This was a country splitting along a single line.
General Francisco Franco arrived in Spanish Morocco on the 19th of July 1936, ferried from the Canary Islands aboard a chartered Dragon Rapide aircraft. Within three years he would enter Madrid and declare victory. How did a partial failure of a military coup harden into one of the most divisive wars of the century? Why did Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union all reach into a single Spanish conflict? And how did tens of thousands of foreigners come to fight in a war that was not their own?
The Second Spanish Republic was formed after King Alfonso XIII fled the country, having called municipal elections for the 12th of April 1931. Left-wing entities such as the Socialists and Liberal Republicans won almost all the provincial capitals, and the monarchy collapsed under popular pressure. Niceto Alcala-Zamora became the provisional government's president and head of state.
According to Jose Angel Sanchez Asiain, the first plans of a counter-revolution were discussed on the very day the Republic was proclaimed. Representatives of monarchist circles, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, and Jose Calvo Sotelo met to lay down the financial foundations for subverting the new state. By March 1934, the conspirators convinced Benito Mussolini to agree to aid a future coup.
Manuel Azana became prime minister of a minority government in October 1931, and a new liberal constitution arrived in December. Its strong provisions for secularisation included the abolition of Catholic schools and charities. Articles 24 and 26 of the 1931 constitution banned the Society of Jesus, a proscription that deeply offended many within the conservative fold.
The monarchist generals struck first. Their attempted coup, known as the Sanjurjada, ended in failure, and several hundred generals were dismissed while prominent monarchists were imprisoned or fled abroad. In November 1933, right-wing parties won the general election. The recent enfranchisement of women, most of whom voted for centre-right parties, was among the causal factors.
The Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups, known as CEDA, joined the victorious coalition of 1933, and its leader Gil Robles praised Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Engelbert Dollfuss of the Austrian Standestaat. CEDA proclaimed goals to dissolve workers' movements and to purge what it called Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews. The left viewed it not just as a threat to reform but as a fascist party.
On the 4th of October 1934, Lerroux formed a government with three members of CEDA, and the Socialists launched what became the Revolution of 1934. In most of Spain it was suppressed with little resistance. In the province of Asturias, well-armed revolutionaries took the whole province, killing policemen, clergymen and civilians and destroying churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo. The uprising was crushed in two weeks, the army using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco.
Landowners taunted starving workers by telling them to go eat the Republic, and wages were cut to what one account called salaries of hunger. One historian argued this behaviour in the southern countryside was among the main causes of hatred during the war, and possibly of the war itself.
The left-wing Popular Front narrowly won the 1936 general election. In the thirty-six hours that followed, sixteen people were killed and thirty-nine seriously injured, while fifty churches and seventy conservative political centres were attacked or set ablaze. The respected intellectual Miguel de Unamuno told a reporter in June 1936 that President Manuel Azana should commit suicide as a patriotic act. By April 1936, nearly 100,000 peasants had appropriated 400,000 hectares of land.
By the end of April 1936, General Emilio Mola emerged as the leader of a national conspiracy network, working as chief planner and second in command. General Jose Sanjurjo became the figurehead, and Mola's plan envisioned not a fascist totalitarian state but a republican dictatorship modelled after Salazar's Portugal. The 1931 Constitution would be suspended and replaced by a new constituent parliament.
On the 12th of July 1936, Falangists in Madrid killed police officer Lieutenant Jose Castillo of the Assault Guard. The next day, a squad went to arrest Jose Maria Gil-Robles, but he was not home, so they went to the house of Jose Calvo Sotelo. Luis Cuenca, known as the bodyguard of PSOE leader Indalecio Prieto, summarily executed Sotelo. The murder of a parliamentary leader by state police was unprecedented.
The uprising's timing was originally set for 17:01 on the 17th of July 1936. The men in the Morocco protectorate were to rise at 05:00 on the 18th of July so that Spanish Morocco could be secured first. The plan was discovered in Morocco on the 17th, prompting the conspirators to act immediately. The rebels shot 189 people there.
The rising was intended as a swift coup, but the government retained control of most of the country. The rebels failed to take most major cities, with the critical exception of Seville, secured by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, which gave Franco's African troops a landing point. The result was a Nationalist area containing 11 million of Spain's population of 25 million. Coup leader Sanjurjo was killed in a plane crash on the 20th of July.
Arming the workers' movements led to a vast social revolution, especially in Aragon and Catalonia, where workers and peasants implemented collective farming and collective democratic management of industry. Power was held by local committees and councils running parallel to the Republican government, which was briefly paralysed and treated as little more than a tool for foreign relations and propaganda.
The anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI, the revolutionary Marxists of the UGT and PSOE, and the anti-Stalinist communists of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM, carried out the main efforts of reorganisation. These factions were competitive or even hostile to one another. Stalinist communists of the Communist Party of Spain campaigned against the radical reorganisation and the loss of civil property rights.
As the war progressed, the government and the communists exploited their access to Soviet arms to restore control over the war effort. The anti-Stalinists of POUM were outlawed and denounced as an instrument of the fascists. In the May Days of 1937, many thousands of anarchist and communist Republican soldiers fought for control of strategic points in Barcelona.
The coup divided regular forces fairly evenly. Out of some 66,000 military under arms in July 1936, around 52 percent were in the Republican zone and 48 percent in the Nationalist one. Among the armed police services, the Guardia Civil, Assault Guards and Carabineros, some 59 percent joined the loyalists. The Republican army had just 18 tanks of a sufficiently modern design, and the Nationalists took control of 10.
Franco was a key player because of his prestige as a former director of the military academy and as the man who suppressed the Asturian miners' strike of 1934. Officers who joined the rebellion were often africanistas, men who fought in North Africa between 1909 and 1923, where promotion came by battlefield merit rather than seniority. The peninsulares resented watching them leapfrog through the ranks. The label of a rebellion of the generals is not correct: of the eighteen division generals, only four rebelled, and of roughly 15,301 officers, just over half did.
Religious fervor was a major source of emotional support for the Nationalists. Indalecio Prieto remarked that the enemy he feared most was the requete who has just received communion. Devout Catholics such as seminary students often volunteered to fight and died in disproportionate numbers. The revolution in the Republican zone killed 7,000 clergy and thousands of lay people, deepening Catholic support for the rebels.
The pre-war Falange was a small party of some 30,000 to 40,000 members. After the Republicans executed its leader, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the party swelled to several hundred thousand. Franco co-opted it, unified the right-wing groups into the Falange Espanola Tradicionalista, and presented 26 out of its 27 points as the party's programme, appointing himself chief. A few well-known figures fought for the Republic: English writer George Orwell, who wrote Homage to Catalonia in 1938, and Canadian thoracic surgeon Norman Bethune, who developed a mobile blood-transfusion service.
Only two countries openly and fully supported the Republic: the Mexican government and the USSR. Britain and France led a political alliance of 27 nations that pledged non-intervention and an arms embargo. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union signed the agreement officially but ignored it. The League of Nations' reaction was shaped by a fear of communism and was insufficient to contain the importation of arms.
Benito Mussolini joined to secure Fascist control of the Mediterranean, his confidence raised by the conquest of Ethiopia. The Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie supplied the Nationalists with 50,000 men, and Italian air raids targeted mainly cities and civilians. Nazi Germany formed the Condor Legion, flew the Army of Africa to mainland Spain, and trained 56,000 Nationalist soldiers. German aid amounted to roughly 43,000,000 pounds in 1939 prices. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar semi-officially endorsed the Viriatos volunteer force of 8,000 to 20,000, and the Nationalists called Lisbon the port of Castile.
Joseph Stalin became the Republicans' only source of major weapons, but tried to do it covertly, unlike Hitler and Mussolini. Estimates of Soviet material range between 634 and 806 aircraft and between 331 and 362 tanks. Ships hid arms under false decks, and Soviet captains used deceptive flags and paint schemes. The Soviets also ran the NKVD inside the Republican rearguard. Mexico provided 2,000,000 dollars in aid, including 20,000 rifles, and arranged sanctuary for some 50,000 Republican refugees.
About 32,000 fought in the International Brigades, which claimed to represent 53 nations, with significant numbers from France, Germany and Austria, and Italy. The Thalmann Battalion of Germans and the Garibaldi Battalion of Italians distinguished themselves during the siege of Madrid, while Americans formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Canadians the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. About 600 followers of Eoin O'Duffy formed an Irish Brigade to fight for Franco.
Franco relieved the siege of the Alcazar in Toledo on the 27th of September 1936, where Colonel Jose Moscardo Ituarte had held out since the rebellion began. Two days later Franco proclaimed himself Caudillo while forcibly unifying the Nationalist factions. The diversion to Toledo gave Madrid time to prepare its defense.
The Nationalist assault on Madrid was repulsed in fierce fighting between the 8th and the 23rd of November 1936, helped by the Fifth Regiment and the arrival of the International Brigades, though only about 3,000 foreign volunteers took part. The Republican government had already shifted from Madrid to Valencia on the 6th of November. On the 19th of November, the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was fatally shot under unclear causes.
The Battle of Guadalajara in 1937 was the only publicised Republican victory of the war, costing the Nationalists 5,000 casualties. On the 26th of April 1937, the Condor Legion bombed the town of Guernica, the most controversial event of German involvement, killing perhaps 200 to 300 civilians.
The armies grew enormous. By the turn of 1937 to 1938 each numbered about 700,000, and just before the Battle of Ebro the Republicans reached their all-time high, slightly above 800,000, while the Nationalists numbered 880,000. The Ebro and the fall of Catalonia caused a great shrinking of Republican troops; by late February 1939 their army was 400,000 against more than double that number of Nationalists.
On the 5th of March 1939, Colonel Segismundo Casado led a coup against the Republican government, hoping to seek peace, but Franco rejected the overtures. Franco entered the capital and declared victory on the 1st of April 1939. Hundreds of thousands associated with the Republicans fled, mostly to refugee camps in southern France, and many who stayed were persecuted. The total number of Spaniards serving in the Republican forces was officially stated as 917,000.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When was the Spanish Civil War and who fought in it?
The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalist rebels. The Republicans, loyal to the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, included socialists, anarchists, communists, and separatists. The Nationalists were an alliance of fascist Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists.
Who won the Spanish Civil War?
The Nationalists won the Spanish Civil War in early 1939. General Francisco Franco entered Madrid and declared victory on the 1st of April 1939, and he ruled Spain until his death in November 1975.
What foreign countries were involved in the Spanish Civil War?
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supported the Nationalists, while the Soviet Union and Mexico supported the Republicans. Britain and France led a political alliance of 27 nations that pledged non-intervention, though tens of thousands of foreigners fought anyway, mostly in the pro-Republican International Brigades.
What started the Spanish Civil War?
The Spanish Civil War began after the partial failure of a coup d'etat in July 1936 against the Popular Front government by a group of generals. Rebelling units failed to take most major cities, leaving Spain militarily and politically divided and triggering the war.
What was the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War?
On the 26th of April 1937, Nazi Germany's Condor Legion bombed the town of Guernica, killing perhaps 200 to 300 civilians. It was the most controversial event of German involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
What was the Spanish Revolution during the Spanish Civil War?
The Spanish Revolution was the social transformation in the Republican zone, especially in Aragon and Catalonia, after workers' movements were armed in 1936. Workers and peasants implemented collective farming and collective democratic management of industry, with power held by local committees parallel to the Republican government.
How did Francisco Franco come to lead the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War?
Francisco Franco was appointed supreme leader on the 1st of October 1936 and was confirmed head of state and armies in Burgos. He had prestige as a former director of the military academy and as the man who suppressed the Asturian miners' strike of 1934, and he co-opted the Falange to consolidate his control.
All sources
76 references cited across the entry
- 1Aspectos militares de la Guerra Civil españolaR. Salas Larrazáhal
- 3BookWojna domowa w Hiszpanii 1936-1939Tadeusz Zubiński — Fronda — 2015
- 4BookChecas de MadridCésar Vidal — Debolsillo — 2004
- 5BookThe Popular Front in EuropeHelen Graham et al. — Palgrave Macmillan — 1987
- 6BookUn siglo de España. Política y sociedadSantos Juliá — Marcial Pons — 1999
- 8BookBlood of SpainRonald Fraser — Allen Lane — 1979
- 9JournalThe endurance of Francoist myths in democratic SpainÁngel Viñas — 2012
- 10JournalEl martirio de los libros: una aproximación a la destrucción bibliográfica durante la Guerra CivilMariano Boza Puerta et al. — 2007
- 12BookHitler And Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939Robert H. Whealey — University Press of Kentucky — 1989
- 13JournalTerror and Violence: The Dark Face of Spanish AnarchismJulián Casanova — 2005
- 14BookPoland and Spain in the interwar and postwar periodJosé Luis Orella Martínez et al. — Schedas, S. L. — 2015
- 15JournalEl «desordenado empuje del Frente Popular». Movilización y violencia política tras las elecciones de 1936Manuel Álvarez Tardío — 29 September 2017
- 16BookFranco: A Personal and Political BiographyStanley Payne et al. — The University of Wisconsin Press — 2014
- 17BookMiguel de Unamuno: BiografíaJean-Claude Rabaté et al. — Taurus — 2009
- 18BookThe Spanish Civil WarDante A. Puzzo — Van Nostrand Reinhold — 1969
- 19BookFranco: soldier, commander, dictatorGeoffrey Jensen — Potomac Books — 2005
- 20BookEl puente aéreo del EstrechoRafael Permuy — La Razon — 2011
- 21BookAmerican Power and the New MandarinsNoam Chomsky — Pantheon Books — 1969
- 22BookLa guerra civil española en el marMichael Alpert — Crítica — 2008
- 23BookOrden, circular, creando un Comisariado general de Guerra con la misión que se indicaGaceta de Madrid: diario oficial de la República — 16 October 1936
- 24BookSimone Weil: A LifePétrement, Simone — Schocken Books. — 1988
- 25Quiet fronts in the Spanish civil warMichael Seidman
- 26BookRight-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914-45Alejandro Quiroga — Bloomsbury — 12 July 2012
- 27The role of the Catholic hierarchy in the rise to power of General FrancoNicola Rooney — Queen's University, Belfast
- 29BookInternational PracticesEmanuel Adler et al. — Cambridge University Press — 2011
- 30NewsSpain:Business & BloodTime — 19 April 1937
- 31BookSpain and the great powers in the twentieth centurySebastian Balfour et al. — Routledge — 2009
- 32JournalA fascist warfare? Italian fascism and war experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39)Javier Rodrigo — 2019
- 33NewsThe legacy of GuernicaDanny Wood — 26 April 2007
- 34Journal'Defeat, Victory, Repeat': Russian Émigrés between the Spanish Civil War and Operation Barbarossa, 1936–1944Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Oleg Beyda — 27 March 2023
- 35Jaime Cortesão e os antifascistas portugueses na Espanha republicana e na guerra civilÁlvaro Arranja — 30 January 2021
- 38BookDurruti en la revolución españolaAbel Paz — Fundación de Estudios Libertarios Anselmo Lorenzo — 1996
- 39BookDurruti en la revolución españolaAbel Paz — La Esfera de los Libros — 2004
- 40Spain: Repression under Franco after the Civil WarProfessor Hilton — 27 October 2005
- 41NewsSpain torn on tribute to victims of FrancoGiles Tremlett — 1 December 2003
- 42NewsSpanish Civil War fighters look backNick Caistor — 28 February 2003
- 43Winnipeg
- 46JournalRethinking the Postwar Period in Spain: Violence and Irregular Civil War, 1939–52Jorge Marco — 2020
- 47The Evacuation of Spanish Children to the Soviet UnionDaniel Kowalsky — Columbia University Press
- 48History of the arrival of the Basque Children to England in 1937Basque Children of '37 Association
- 51Martín-Aceña, Martínez Ruiz, Pons (2012) p. 144–165Martín-Aceña, Martínez Ruiz, Pons — 2012
- 52BookEl desembarcament de Bayo a Mallorca: agost-setembre de 1936Josep Massot i Muntaner — Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat — 1987
- 53BookRacisme i supremacisme polítics a l'Espanya contemporàniaEduard Llaudó Avila — Parcir — 2021
- 54BookGuerra y vicisitudes de los españolesJulián Zugazagoitia — Tusquets Editores — 2001
- 57NewsMen of La Mancha22 June 2006
- 58JournalDefending the Republic: The García Atadell Brigade in Madrid, 1936Julius Ruiz — 2007
- 59NewsSpanish judge opens case into Franco's atrocities16 October 2008
- 60JournalDiscovery of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War using Ground Penetrating Radar and forensic archaeologyJosé-Paulino Fernández-Álvarez et al. — 2016
- 61Paul Preston lecture: The Crimes of FrancoPaul Preston — 19 January 2008
- 62BookSpanish Best: The Fine Shotguns of SpainTerry Wieland — Down East Enterprise — 2002
- 63BookPara ganar la guerra, para ganar la paz. Iglesia y Guerra Civil (1936–1939) (Estudios)Alfonso Alvarez Bolado — Univ Pontifica Comillas — 1996
- 64BookHistoria de la persecución religiosa de España 1936–1939Antonio Montero Moreno — Biblioteca de autores cristianos — 1998
- 65BookHistory of the ChurchHubert Jedin et al. — Continuum — 1981
- 661984: George Orwell's road to dystopia8 February 2013
- 67BookOrwell in SpainPenguin Books — 2001
- 74JournalThe Crescent and the Dagger: Representations of the Moorish Other during the Spanish Civil WarElisabeth Bolorinos Allard — 2016
- 75BookHitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939Robert H. Whealey — University Press of Kentucky — 1989
- 76BookBase Politics : Democratic Change and the U.S. Military OverseasAlexander Cooley — Cornell University Press — 2008