The Spanish Republic and Civil War

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.

Mobilizing memories: The social conditions of the long-term impact of victimization

“…Victimization was commonly used during the civil war, in an attempt to wipe out potential enemies within the controlled territories. Following current research, more than 150,000 people died as a result of rearguard onesided violence, of which around 100,000 took place in the territory controlled by the military rebels (Casanova, 2010). Both sides resorted to violence against civilians, but the rebels did so with the explicit goal of dismantling the Republican regime and controlling the population.…”

War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration

“…Evans, 2006). The rise of the Franco regime in Spain, which included major fascist elements, has also been linked to the threat of socialism and political instability that characterized the brief experience of the Spanish Second Republic (see, for example, Jackson, 1965;Preston, 2007;Casanova, 2010;Domenech, 2013) A number of right-wing authoritarian military coups in Latin America, most notably Pinochet's overthrow of Salvatore Allende's government in 1971, presented themselves as bulwarks against socialism and communism (Valenzuela and Constable, 1991;Nef, 1983;Sigmund, 1977).…”

Revolution and the Whip of Reaction: Technicians of Power and the Dialectic of Radicalisation

“…In Spain, as Manuel Tuñón de Lara pointed out, the landed gentry, titled industrialists and financers had long been integrated with the aristocratic, priestly and bureaucratic strata, forming a Conservative 'power bloc'. 112 Gerald Brennan remarked that there "was a long tradition among the Spanish governing classes of how to break a revolution. Indeed such arts contained for them the whole of politics."…”