[Editor's Note: Sandie Holguin, a very dear friend and occasional commenter at the EotAW, has kindly agreed to provide us with a history lesson about the Spanish Civil War. Sandie's book can be found here. (Apparently, her middle name is Eleanor. Who knew?) Thanks, Sandie, for doing this.]

On this day in 1936 (also on July 17, aka “yesterday,” if you want to get technical), a group of disgruntled army officers led by General Emilio Mola initiated a military rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected Popular Front government. The revolt began in Spanish Morocco a little earlier than planned, and soon thereafter, the Army of Africa and General Francisco Franco, who secretly had been whisked away from his exile in the Canary Islands, were supposed to use Morocco as a launching point from which to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and invade southern Spain. Meanwhile, other army officers revolted on the Peninsula the next day. Following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century Spanish generals, and, more recently, of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), these generals staged a pronunciamiento — or, as we say in English, a coup d’état — to restore order to a chaotic state. But things didn’t quite work out as planned. The Spanish navy remained loyal to the Republic, temporarily foiling the generals’ plans, and the insurgents met fierce resistance by workers’ militias in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. And thus, what was meant to be a simple military rebellion lasting a few days became the Spanish Civil War (cue portentous music).

Very few wars have inspired such international passions nor such polemical histories as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). To date, there are thousands of books on the subject, most of which try to figure out whom to blame for the Republican loss and the subsequent 36-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco.**

Those with a very general knowledge of the war tend to describe it as a prelude to World War II, emphasizing the international component of the war, and its grand ideological struggle between fascism and communism. Some may also know it for the great art it inspired, great posters, (This is one of my favorites — I cannot resist animated food), and the intellectuals and artists who participated in it, e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, George Orwell. But the war itself was caused by conditions endemic to Spain: uneven economic development; land hunger, especially in the south; extreme poverty; conservative landowners and industrialists; an overly powerful Catholic Church; a top-heavy military; a radicalized working class, including a very strong anarchist movement; a regional nationalist movement in Catalonia and the Basque Country, among other things. The various governments of the Second Republic were unable to solve any of these entrenched problems (although many people tried) and violence continued to spiral on the eve of the war.

As to the ideological struggles, communism and fascism were but two of many. In fact, as the conflict drew near, there were very few fascists or communists active in Spain. Those who supported the Nationalist side (the insurgents), included much of the military (who tended toward your basic conservative values); the Spanish fascists or Falange (FE de las JONS); the Carlists (a group revived from the nineteenth century who wanted to return Spain to pre-French revolutionary absolutism and theocratic values); Alfonsine monarchists, who wanted to restore the Alfonso XIII to the throne; the Catholic Church; large landowners, conservative peasants with small landholdings, and, industrialists, many of whom coalesced around the conservative Catholic party known as CEDA. As the war progressed, Franco wanted to impose unity on these disparate groups, and they eventually came under the mellifluous initials the FET y de las JONS. On the Republican side, there were middle-class Republicans, anarchists (CNT-FAI); socialists (PSOE); communists (PCE); Basque and Catalan nationalists; and in Catalonia, the non-Stalinist Marxists (POUM) and the communist controlled Catalan Socialist Party (PSUC). On this side, unity was much more difficult to achieve, especially since the communists and anarchists hated each other, and because the anarchists wanted to have a social revolution at the same time they were fighting the Nationalists, while everybody else on the Republican side wanted to win the war and save the revolution for later.

The war did become internationalized almost immediately, however, when the Germans and the Italians provided artillery and transport planes to Franco so that he could cross the Straits with his armies. Soon thereafter, the Germans and Italians provided more war materiel and troops to win the war. The Republicans hoped that France and Britain would intervene, but those hopes were soon dashed when those two nations decided to remain detached and opted for implementing a Non-Intervention Agreement, which was meant to prevent the selling of arms or the provision of troops to either side. The effect of the agreement, signed by some 27 nations (Including Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union), was to make the Nationalists much better armed than the Republicans. As a response to Italian and German intervention, the Soviet Union intervened on the side of the Republic in September (as did Mexico in a minor role), and with the Soviet Union came the International Brigades, over 59,000 volunteers from 53 countries around the world, ready to “fight fascism.”

The war went poorly for the Republicans, who had very few military victories and who faced internecine violence as well. The anarchists had begun a revolution in Catalonia Aragon and parts of Andalusia, which resulted in the collectivization of agriculture and industry. The socialists, communists, and Republicans kept trying to rein in the revolution, hoping that they could convince Britain and France to intervene on behalf of the “bourgeois Republic.” The tensions culminated in a civil war within a civil war (May 1937), resulting in the purging of the POUM and marginalization of the anarchists so well depicted by Orwell. Demoralized and hungry, the Republicans kept losing battles to the unified and better equipped Nationalists. The Republicans hoped to hold out until the now obviously-looming-in-the-distance WWII broke out, but they were finally defeated by the Nationalists on April 1, 1939, five months before the next outbreak of war.

I’ve left so much out, but I’ve gone on too long—kind of like Franco’s dictatorship.

* “It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials.” George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (San Diego, New York, and London: Harvest/HBJ, 1952), 47.

** The last exact count was 15,000 books and pamphlets in 1968 (Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 333. Since Franco’s death in 1975, another buttload of books have been published on the subject.