Este artículo se ocupa de uno de los aspectos ineludibles en un análisis político de los últimos meses de la Segunda República española: el papel de los militares. El objetivo fundamental es profundizar en una perspectiva de proximidad que enriquezca lo que ya sabemos sobre la preparación del golpe y sus protagonistas. La cuestión de los militares y el gobierno del Frente Popular se ha venido abordando desde el punto de vista de las tramas conspirativas, lo que podría definirse como una visión desde arriba del golpe. El artículo muestra, mediante un estudio de caso, la importancia de complementar esa visión con un enfoque desde abajo. Con ese objetivo, se han utilizado fuentes judiciales y locales que aportan una información muy significativa sobre el papel de algunos oficiales durante aquella primavera y el impacto de la violencia política y la quiebra de las jerarquías sociales tradicionales sobre la disciplina militar.
ResuMenEste artículo analiza el alcance y las características de la violencia anticlerical en los meses de febrero a junio de 1936. Se han rastreado diferentes fuentes primarias para realizar una estadística lo más precisa y completa posible de esa violencia. Primero, se analiza el contexto en el que ésta tuvo lugar. Segundo, se presentan los datos resultantes de la investigación cuantitativa y cualitativa de la violencia anticlerical. Y tercero, se plantea cuál fue la respuesta de las diversas autoridades ante ese fenómeno. El artículo prueba que los datos sobre violencia anticlerical que se han manejado hasta ahora eran fragmentarios y no contemplaban la magnitud ni el carácter general que llegó a alcanzar en los meses inmediatamente anteriores a la Guerra Civil. Además, demuestra que la reacción del gobierno fue, como poco, ambivalente, no correspondiéndose con las promesas de salvaguardar la legalidad que formuló en privado a la Nunciatura. En muchos casos la violencia anticlerical se produjo ante la pasividad de la policía y/o con la complicidad de las autoridades locales o algunos grupos afines a la coalición que sostenía parlamentariamente al gobierno central.
Political violence was a significant force in Europe between the two world wars, and the Spanish Second Republic (1931–6) was no exception to this general trend. The purpose of this article is to analyse its role in the campaign leading up to the February 1936 general election – the last to be held prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. Without doubt, this election constituted a crucial moment in Spain’s new experiment with democratic competition, and for this reason, the presence and characteristics of violence during the campaign are useful tools for analysing the process of democratic consolidation and its peculiar features. Until the present, historians have possessed a certain amount of information on electoral violence in the Spain of February 1936, but this has remained incomplete and is poorly documented. Therefore, this study presents the results of a more thoroughgoing and systematic analysis of the subject, based on a rigorous examination of the available primary sources. In addition, it also introduces a reflection on the comparative prior context of interwar European politics.
In a relatively recent book on interwar fascism, Michael Mann claimed that in Republican Spain, the main conservative political party, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederacio´n Espan˜ola de las Derechas Auto´nomas or CEDA) had been the 'main political destroyer of Spanish democracy'. Indeed, he went as far as to write that the CEDA's '''accidentalist'' trajectory' before July 1936 was 'far more damaging than the supposedly ''revolutionary'' trajectory of the anarcho-syndicalists or socialists'. 1 The reader will observe that the professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles described the 'revolutionary' trajectory of the Socialist Party as 'supposed', while the responsibility of the CEDA for the destruction of Republican democracy was presented as irrefutable.That Mann's study, an otherwise interesting and valuable examination of interwar fascism, puts forward such arguments is not infrequent. Although there are numerous comparative works on interwar European politics, few analyse Spanish politics between 1931 and 1936 recognizing its extreme complexity. To a great extent, this is due to the fact that many English-language studies on the Second Republic have not effectively assimilated the work of some very good Spanish historians after the death of Franco in November 1975. But it is also the case that Mann's arguments reflect a general narrative on the Spanish Civil War (and its origins) that has remained popular among foreign (and some Spanish) historians since the 1970s.
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