Origins of the Spanish Civil War: Political Polarization and Conflict

[00:00:00]In July 1936, a secret cabal of Spanish  generals and politicians attempted to topple Spain’s government and install  a military junta. They did not succeed.

[00:00:13]But the bid for power plunged Spanish society  into all-out civil war. Vitriol, and violence, had already become commonplace in Spain, and now  the extremes of the political left and right were done completely with competing for votes. After the generals botched their coup, hundreds of thousands flocked to join the military  rebellion and were consolidated by Generalissimo Francisco Franco into the right-wing National  cause. Their Republican opponents - supporters of the left-wing government - were equally determined  to rally against enemies they despised… So, why?

[00:00:53]How did Spaniards, or at least a critical  mass of them, become so disillusioned with the good faith of their countrymen?  What began the Spanish Civil War?

[00:01:05]Well, Spain, by 1936, was a bit of a mess. Once, high on New World silver, it had been the most powerful country on the planet,  and the first to be called ‘the empire on which the sun never sets.’ But by the turn  of the 20th century, it had been reduced to a middling power - being relatively poor and  agricultural compared to its European peers.

[00:01:31]Unlike them, Spain had managed  to stay out of World War One, but most of the Spanish Empire had been lost in  the previous century, and an attempt to build a new one in North Africa led to humiliating defeat  in the 1920s. That upended Spanish politics and heralded the start of a seven-year-long military  dictatorship, which did conquer the Moroccan Rif.

[00:01:54]Headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera,  and backed by Spain’s King Alfonso XIII, the dictatorship ruled the country but it  was popular in few quarters, and came down amidst the Great Depression in 1930. His image  tied to it, Alfonso abdicated the next year, and the Second Spanish Republic began  with the nation in a fragile state.

[00:02:20]The republican constitution gave Spain the most  democratic regime it had ever had to that point: with provisions for freedom  of speech and association, and a universal right to vote (including,  for the first time in Spain, women’s suffrage). But it was far from perfect -  obviously - it devolved into civil war.

[00:02:42]The republican government was structured  similarly to neighbouring France.

[00:02:46]And also to Weimar Germany. In the pre-war republic, Spaniards went to the polls to elect el Cortes (a parliament)  with about four hundred seats. In place of a king, a president was head of state, and a cabinet led  by a prime minister ran government departments.

[00:03:05]It was not a particularly  stable system for a few reasons.

[00:03:09]Forget satisfying die-hard monarchists  or communist revolutionaries, the new republic was undermined  from the inside out when its own creators very quickly stopped getting along. In particular republicans from the moderate right felt betrayed when a constitutional  convention approved measures that attacked the Catholic Church, and gave the state broad  powers to seize and redistribute private property.

[00:03:36]There was never a solid democratic  majority to actually be elected; the country was splintered into too many camps, and it was much more complicated  than just a left v right split.

[00:03:47]The Spanish left included everyone from  middle-class liberals happy with the republic, to Marxists and anarchists out to topple  state and society - woe betide anyone who might get in their way. The left’s  most prominent figure was Manuel Azaña, a republican liberal-democrat who headed  several governments. Further left, the Spanish Socialists, the PSOE, closely  aligned with the powerful UGT trade union, were led by Francisco Largo Caballero and  Juan Negrín while the Communist Party, controlled from Moscow, managed to incense the  right but wasn’t materially influential until the Civil War started. Then there was the largest  union in Spain: the National Confederation of Labour (CNT). It professed anarchism and refused  to recognise the republic’s institutions at all.

[00:04:38]In that way (though for very different  reasons) they were similar to plenty on the right, but make no mistake it had  strong republican elements as well.

[00:04:47]Soon-to-be-president Niceto  Alcalá-Zamora, along with Azaña, was instrumental in toppling the king,  but as the civil war crept closer the republican right was challenged. First of  all, monarchism had not been killed off, though its supporters were split between the royal  family’s Alfonsine and Carlist branches. Then, spurred on by the anti-Catholicism written into  the constitution, the conservative catholic, and expressly anti-republican, CEDA grew  to be one of the most powerful parties in pre-war Spain. Led by José María Gil-Robles it  became the largest single faction on the right.

[00:05:28]The CEDA’s fairly authoritarian  Catholic Corporatist principles brought much consternation to republicans,  and it sent the far-left into hysterics.

[00:05:39]Likewise radical rhetoric by the PSOE and  radical action by their union allies only pushed conservatives towards their own extremes. All the while the army top brass, which had not opposed the creation of the republic but wasn’t  positively for it either, looked forlornly on.

[00:05:59]The republican left, republican right, and  socialist-republican coalition fell apart almost immediately at the end of 1931. For the next few  years, across the country workers would clash with capital, and labourers with landowners; secular  reformers confronted traditional Catholics and the Church, while regional minorities in Galicia,  the Basque Country, and Catalonia, railed against the central government - demanding self-rule  or outright independence. It wasn’t war yet, but the UGT and CNT regularly brought cities  and farms to a halt with devastating strikes.

[00:06:37]More worryingly, they built armed paramilitary  wings which, naturally, met rightist militias.

[00:06:43]Among those, was the fascistic Falange  Española - the Spanish Phalanx - organised by the firebrand  son of the late dictator.

[00:06:53]Both the monarchist right and  the revolutionary left would try and fail to overthrow the republic  before the 1936 nationalist plot.

[00:07:03]A year in, and Manuel Azaña was Prime Minister  at the head of a left-wing government.

[00:07:09]Unhappy about that, a band of army  officers tried to take Madrid, and one briefly did hold Seville.

[00:07:15]Backed, though, by neither the rest of  the army nor the civilian population, they were in custody, or off to  Portugal, within about a day.

[00:07:25]In 1933, President Alcalá-Zamora decided  that the government wasn’t functioning (which it wasn’t) and called  fresh parliamentary elections - making himself a pariah to  the left. The right won power, but the largest group of delegates were not  moderate republicans of the president’s breed.

[00:07:43]The CEDA had a plurality in  parliament, and its leader, Gil-Robles expected the post of Prime Minister.

[00:07:50]He was denied it on account of his party’s  indifference towards maintaining democracy.

[00:07:56]Nevertheless, his conservatives were too  popular to just ignore. Three members of the CEDA were made ministers a year later,  and the left called a general strike.

[00:08:07]In Asturias, that was developed  into an armed uprising, and a so-called ‘Proletarian revolution’  (supported by the Socialist Party, and UGT and CNT militias), was declared.

[00:08:19]The government, backed by the army this  time, put it down with extreme prejudice.

[00:08:26]The last pre-civil war election, held in  February 1936, returned a Cortes not too different in character from the one before it:  left-wing revolutionaries looked with disdain on their more moderate cousins, who squabbled with  the centre-right and Catholic conservatives, and monarchists. They themselves didn’t  get on, and all had to contend with José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange  movement hovering over their shoulder.

[00:08:55]The vote saw the left narrowly win back  power, having formed an electoral alliance: the Popular Front. It was led by Azaña’s moderates  but included the PSOE, as well as separatists and the Communist Party. At that point, General  Franco, as the professional head of the army, urged the outgoing government to use force  to prevent the leftists taking office.

[00:09:18]It didn’t, and a new Azaña ministry took steps  to demote and sideline officers, like Franco, whose loyalties were questionable.  It should be noted though that a significant chunk of commanders and more  among the rank-and-file were republicans, and their releasing of military stockpiles to  civilian militias in response to the Nationalist coup in July was one of the reasons that the  putschists could only split Spain, not seize it.

[00:09:47]The CEDA had again won the most seats of any  right-wing party, but when Gil-Robles began to call for a non-violent solution to Spain’s  woes, its members abandoned him in droves and the Falange exploded in size. The CEDA leader had  in fact already refused to seize power when he was briefly war minister in 1935; for that, he was  later decried as a traitor in Francoist Spain.

[00:10:15]In April, the Popular Front government moved to oust the president, which was  legal, if not necessarily clever.

[00:10:24]The removal of Alcalá-Zamora, a centrist, was probably the moment that the right  as a whole gave up on republicanism.

[00:10:32]Backed by large sections of the  police, most clergy, landowners from estate-holders to single-plot farmers  and plenty of the peasantry, the Falange, monarchist militias, and army commanders  started actively planning for a coup.

[00:10:48]The three main military conspirators who intended  to lead the revolt were: Emilio Mola who would soon command Nationalist forces in mainland  Spain, José Sanjurjo who had been exiled in Portugal since the failed 1932 uprising, and  to a lesser extent Francisco Franco, who had been fired as chief-of-staff and effectively  exiled with a posting on the Canary Islands.

[00:11:14]What they needed was a spark, and they got one  when Spain’s foremost monarchist politician, José Calvo Sotelo, was murdered by a police officer  with ties to the Socialist Party on July 13th.

[00:11:28]That was almost certainly not part of a  plan; Socialist leadership didn’t order it, and now-president Azaña was personally  disgusted by the killing. But that wasn’t the point. By the conspirators,  the government could now be painted as incredibly inept at best, in addition  to being a puppet for godless Marxists.

[00:11:48]They could be the forces of order who  would save Spain from a red terror.

[00:11:53]For the soon-to-be Republican fighters, the Nationalists were in fact a force for  backwardness and merciless repression, and they were ready to be the freedom fighters  who would save Spain from slavery and subjugation.

[00:12:07]They would both get a scarred nation,  but Spain survived its civil war.

[00:12:12]Not every country is so lucky. See, for example, the contentious coming-together of Yugoslavia  in the video to the left and find out how its eventual doom was foreshadowed  at the very beginning. As always, if you enjoyed this one it should be right up your  alley, and thanks for watching Look Back History.