Causes of the Spanish Civil War

In the 60's, the anachronistic Spain represented by Franco's dictatorship was entering its
final stage of decomposition. Underneath the surface, a new society was forming, ready to burst
out peacefully 10 years later, in a process known as the "Reforma". One of the factors that
accelerated this modernization process was tourism. Mr Alcántara, a typical Spanish patriarch
from one of Spain's best loved TV shows, is deeply shocked when, in Benidorm, he discovers
English women sunbathing topless. His daughter, upon travelling to Londen, suffers a veritable
culture shock. This discovery of new ways of thinking and living were what allowed the
Spanish to reintegrate themselves in modern Europe. Ironically, official tourism campaigns
expressed the same point from the opposite perspective : "Spain is different", was the slogan
used to sell this new tourism destination to Europeans in search of cheap sun and exoticism.
Was Spain different? The Eternal Spain of imperial grandeur and rags, of hidalgos and
pícaros, has had a hold on the European imagination since the Romantics reinvented the myth.
Religious fanaticism, the Conquistadores in search of Gold and Glory, Don Quijote and a country
tilting at windmills for five centuries, a country of passion and madness, bullfights and autos-da-
fé, the country of the High Inquisition and of Don Juan, of the Americas and the
circumnavigation of the world, the country of the Black Legend and of the famous Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War. The epitome of such conflicts, that mobilized European and world
public opinion for three years, and has provoked rivers of ink, even more than World War II, and
torrents of passion. For many, it was archetypically Spanish, the bloody conclusion to a five-
century long tragedy. For others, it was a prologue to the titanic conflict that would engulf Europe
immediately after. Some have called it a "world war by proxy"[1]. For a generation of young
Americans and Europeans, it represented the ideological conflict of their time, seen in stark
black-and-white ethical terms that would later be blurred by too much blood and splintered by too
many loyalties in the world conflict.
Was the Spanish Civil War a part of a global process, as many of its participants seemed to
think at the time? To the hundreds of volunteers who marched to fight fascism in the ranks of the
International Brigades, the Spanish cause had universal relevance. For Hitler and Mussolini, who
rapidly mobilized their armed forces to support the military coup, risking war with Britain and
France, the conflict had more than local significance. But to many observers, both the timing and
the devastation of the Spanish Civil War, its complexities and its difficult-to-understand
ferocities, are better explained in the peculiarities of Spanish history and society, and the clear
differences it had given rise to in relation to the rest of Western Europe.

At the end of the 19th century, Spain was divides in three ruling classes: the rich landowners,
the monarchy and the Church. The power of these three pillars of Spanish society had never been
checked by the revolutions which tore other countries apart: the monarchy's absolutism had never
been limited by a Spanish Cromwell; Church's influence was never curbed by blood-thirsty Jacobins.
And the landowner's property was never taken by Russian communists. Spain had also remained
neutral during World War I, which acted as a releaser of violence, and played a big part in
Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. The Army was very traditional and inefficient, not having been
modernised (nor traumatized) by the modern warfare of World War I. Maintaining these institutions
was the responsibility of the workers and the peasants, whose living conditions were so bad that they
led to the saying "half of Spain works but does not eat, while the
other half eats but does not work"
The Church's influence is Spanish culture is enormous, even today. During the Reconquista, it
had acted as the cement that held the Spanish together and rallied other countries to their cause.
During the Middle Ages, the High Inquisition acted as a police not only for the Spanish, but also for
people of other religions. The Spanish Conquistadores claimed the Americas in the name of God. It
dictated the economic policy of the 16th and 17th century, with its views on usury hampering
development. It ousted the Jews and the Arabs from Spain. A Concordat signed in
1851 made it the religion of the state: the population was expected to, through its taxes, pay for
the priests's salaries. Education was in the hands of the Church. Traditionally, the right sides
with the Church, while the left is more secular. Thus, the anarchists and the communists saw the
Church as their natural enemy : "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions"[2]. Thus, the oppressive Church in which so
many inequalities existed, in the contrast between rich bishops and illiterate country priests, was
seen as the perpetuation of an antiquated and unjust political system
The Spanish monarchs and their people, much like absolute monarchs such as Louis the
XVI, were "foreigners to each other in their own country"[3]. They were unable to understand that
what the subjects really wanted was freedom, the kind that was found just across the Pyrenees.
They wanted the ideas of the Enlightenment to break Spain out of its political hibernation. The
bourgeois made several attempts to limit the king's power, the first being the 1812 Constitution,
which Ferdinand VII grudgingly accepted in 1814 long enough to assert his power and then
promptly revoked. At his death, the throne was disputed by his daughter Isabelle and his brother
Carlos. His supporters were the Basque Carlists, ultra-conservative and highly religious, who
would play a big part in the Spanish Civil War. Isabelle won the battle, but she would not savour
her triumph long. It was during her reign that generals acquired the unfortunate taste of
overturning the government, which they still retained in 1983, when the Congress members were
held hostage by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero. After she was ousted in 1868, another
attempt at fairness was made. The I Republic lasted eleven months. It ended with a military coup,
and the restoration of the Bourbons.
The third ruling class was the landed oligarchy. In 1903, agriculture represented a third of
the economy. Andalucía and Extremadura were extremely backwards, and agriculture was very
primitive. Land was mostly divided in latifundios, large estates in the hands of a single person or
family. These latifundios employed landless braceros, mostly illiterate, and working at very low
wages. They had no state security. Since certain areas of Spain were very poor, it was very also
very easy to replace them, which gave their landlords a huge leverage. After the "economic
miracle"[4] of World War I faded, the peasants started clamouring for more rights. Those which
Marx held so much contempt for swelled the ranks of the anarchist unions, especially in
Andalucía. They hinted through their slogans to a social revolution similar to the Russian, which
naturally scared their landlords. The need for an agrarian reform was recognized, but "few
governments remained in place long enough to implement them"[5]. The issue would not be
seriously tackled until the II Republic, and even then, it would be done inefficiently.
When one is confronted with the utter lack of realism and common sense displayed by
the ruling classes, their inability to learn from the failures of some and the successes of others,
and their contempt for their own compatriots, one can better understand the resentment that it
created. However, one has a harder time adjusting to the fact that the monarchy was restored in
Spain no less than three times, especially given the shamelessness they still display today in the
handling of public funds.
 The Republic formed in 1931 had to deal with all these issues, as well as massive debt and
the collapse of the peseta. The king had fled, but he still had plenty of support, especially in the
countryside. The Concordat with the Church was revoked in the polemical Article 44 of the
Constitution, which also banned them from involvement in school, and revoked the Jesuit order.
After the Sanjurjo attempted coup of 1932 , a great amount of land was removed from the
aristocracy. The army was somewhat reformed, but without much success. Basically, it had to
"carry out a process of social and political reform which had taken anything up to a century
elsewhere"[6]. Such a herculean task could hardly have been achieved with cooperating parties,
but when dealing with opposition such as the anarchists, who refused to endorse the Republic
and had such a strong hold on the workers (CNT reached nearly a million members between
1931 and 1936), it was practically impossible.
The tragedy of the Second Republic is that democracy took so long to arrive in Spain that,
by the time it got there, resentment was so huge that it was considered too bourgeois by some, and
too radical by other. Parties such as the FAI or the PCE , by their very nature as well as by
declarations, were openly revolutionary. One of the most important figures of the PSOE, Largo
Caballero, made sweeping statements such as "I want a Republic without class war, but for that
one class must disappear". The centre right CEDA leader, Gil Robles, declared that "Democracy
is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either
parliament submits or we will eliminate it". Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher, states that "The
only thing that can save the Republic is thinking big, shaking off the petty and projecting towards
the future". He overlooked one important fact: the majority of the political parties did not desire
to save the Republic.

The Republic's first order of business was the much needed agrarian reform. It limited the
hours a peasant could work, and forbid landlords from expelling their tenants, among other
things. The government led by Alcalá Zamora also created a Comisión Técnica Agraria to draft a
law. However, its budget of 50 million pesetas was nowhere near big enough for the job. The
revocation of the Concordat in the Article 44 of the Constitution led to severe reactions: the
anarchists burnt churches,while the Catholics protested furiously, all the while instructuind their
priests to sell Church property and take the money out of Spain. The Constitution also removed
the Church from education and dissolved the Jesuits. Catholics were instructed to be anti-
Republican. Some people, notably Pío Moa, argued that the removal of the Church from
education was a disaster because it closed some of the only competent universities in Spain, such
as "the most similar there was in Spain to a University of Economical Sciences"[7]. The half-
hearted reform of the army was resented by generals, as well as providing "disgruntled officers
with the time and opportunity to plot against the Republic"[8]
One of these generals, General Sanjurjo, head of the Civil Guard, which had a "notorious
reputation for its deadly acts of repression"[9], was growing increasingly frustrated with a
Republic he had at first supported. After a strike gone wrong had created a spiral of violence, he
plotted a coup with other generals, of which the government was very much aware. The coup
failed. The general attempted to flee to Portugal, but was arrested alongside Primo de Rivera,
founder of Falange Española, and others. The government, in a "sweeping and illegal measure
which hardened their hostility"[10], decreed the removal of land from the grandees of Spain, on
the basis that some of them had participated in the coup. Such measures did much to discredit
the legality of the Republic.
In 1934, the elections were won by Gil Robles's centre-right party CEDA. Its first measures
were halting land reform, denying labourers the same protection as industrial workers, as well as
cancelling the confiscation of land. The left's reaction was immediate. The UGT called a strike,
and when that did not produce any results, the PSOE organized a rebellion, which only took hold
in Oviedo. Without support from the rest of Spain, the rebels were doomed. By 11 of October the
city was practically overrun by General López Ochoa's deadly Moorish troops. The
revolutionaries surrendered on the condition that these troops would not enter the city, but no
heed was paid to them. The brutal repression that ensued, with "looting, rape, and the execution
of prisoners on the spot"[11] made the left, if possible, even more set on their revolutionary
course. It also entailed the unfortunate side effect of even more power being granted to the Civil
Guard and the army, making it harder for Madrid to control them.
Both these risings, especially the second, were a shock to Spain. For the right, it meant that
the left was a danger to traditional ways of life. For the left, it merely illustrated the bourgeois
nature of the government, and that it was high time for a revolution. They paid no heed to
warnings that "Spain in 1936 was not Russia in 1917 and that the Spanish Army was no about
to mutiny like the Tsarist forces, exhausted by a long and terrible war"[12].
For the February 1936 election, both the right and the left took advantage of the electoral
law, which favoured coalitions, by forming each their own bloc. During the election period, both
sides behaved abominably, giving up all pretence of law. Largo Caballero declared that "If the
right wins the election, we will have to go straight to open civil war". This did not help calm
down the right. Their coalition, an alliance between the CEDA, monarchists and Carlists -mostly
anti-Republic, handed out leaflets declaring that a victory for the left meant "an arming of the
mob, the burning of banks and private houses, the division of property and land, looting and the
sharing of women". Naturally, the Church endorsed this alliance. When the left won, they
proceeded to give amnesty to all those who had participated in the October rising, which greatly
angered the right, as the same had not been done for those participating in the Sanjurjo rising.
According to the socialist Vidarte, the radical left only accepted to enter the coalition to
"bring Azaña to a crisis to, legally, succeed him as members of the Popular Front"[13]. This
seems logical, if one considers that, as soon as they were elected, the PSOE returned to its
previous antics of strikes and demonstrations. This appeared to be a good plan, apart from one
gross miscalculation: the right beat them to a takeover. The state of public unrest was so extreme,
that Indalecio Prieto, a leading figure of the PSOE, took a stand against his own party "Enough!
Enough! [...] What a country cannot endure is a constant bloodbath of public disorder without
revolutionary finality, the attrition of its public influence and economic vitality, maintaining
unrest, anxiety, restlessness". On the 16th of June, Gil-Robles declared in the Cortes that, since
the elections, "170 churches had been burned, 269 murders had been committed, and 1287 people
injured".
In this hostile environment, there was a conspiracy brewing. On the 25th of May, 1936,
General Mola, sent his "Instrucción Reservada Nr 1", which gave instructions for the military
coup he, along with General Sanjurjo, General Franco, General Queipo de Liano and many
others, had been planning for some time. He called for the Armed Forces and all people against
the Republic (Carlists, Falangists etc.) to help install through "extremely violent" action a
"military dictatorship with the task of immediately restoring public order"[14]. The leaders of the
Republic knew of this conspiracy, yet did noting to halt it. Prieto urged Casares, the leader of the
government, but he refused, believing that he "had the plot under control and could crush it at the
most convenient moment"[15].
However, what dealt the mortal blow to the Republic was the murder of Calvo Sotelo, a
prominent monarchist and right-wing leader. Some say that the socialists were retaliating for
the murder of a Republican officer by Falange gunmen. Others, notably Pío Moa, an ultra-
conservative Spanish historian who has repeatedly refused to condemn the Franco regime, argue
that it was a plot by socialists to provoke the military coup that everybody was talking about.
According to him, "no matter how stupid the executioners were, they could not ignore that such
an attack would entail a civil war"[16]. This crime had exposed the breakdown in law and order
of the republic, as well as further hardening public opinion towards the left. It "destroyed even the
last hope of preventing [the war], and gave its beginning a special aura of tragedy"[17]. On the
17th of July. the Army of Africa rebelled against its commanders. The coup had begun.

The causes of the Spanish Civil War also also share many similarities with the causes of
World War II. The radical parties were becoming increasingly violent, with streetfights between
communists and Nazi storm troopers in Germany, between Socialist youth and extreme-right
parties in France. Rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Italy, Germany, Greece, Poland
and Austria made for a very tense political situation in the 30's, further aggravated by Germany
breaking every single term of Versailles, as well as the League of Nations' powerlessness and
the isolation and appeasement policies pursued by the USA and Great Britain, respectively. Just
like Azaña's government was powerless to halt the spiral of violence and terrorism in Spain, the
democratic governments were unable to calm down these two factions. And just as Casares did
not recognize the danger of an army coup, Great Britain did not comprehend, or refused to, the
danger that Hitler posed. Their policy of appeasement further encouraged a man who desired
conflict, not peace. And, unfortunately for the II Republic, he decided to start with Spain,
arming Franco, perpetuating a bloody war which would traumatize the population, and
implementing a dictatorship which would last well into the 70's.

We can thus see in the Spanish Civil War a more simplistic version of what was happening
in Europe, without the complications of Versailles, the Iron Pact between Hitler and Stalin, the
exhaustion caused by the Great War. As George Orwell put it : "the rights and wrongs had seemed
so beautifully simple.''[18] Yet another victory for Hitler would leave the Europeans who had
rushed to defend their ideals in the International Brigades with a bitter taste in their mouths, and
the horrors of the war would prove cathartic[19] for the supporters of appeasement. It would
leave the defenders of democracy with a grim determination to defeat the Fascist threat forever.
This realisation came unfortunately too late for Spain, a country in which freedom was the
collateral damage of the intricate political game.

Bibliography
1. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
2. Karl Marx, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844
3. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
4. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
5. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
6. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
7. Pío Moa, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 2003
8. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
9. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
10. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
11. Anthony Beevor, The Battle For Spain, 2006
 12. Julián Beistero
13. Pío Moa, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 2003
14. General Mola , Instrucción Reservada del General Mola. N°. 1, 1936
15. Pío Moa, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 2003
16. Pío Moa, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 2003
17. Pío Moa, Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, 2003
18. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938
19. R. Levin defines catharsis as "any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal
and restoration "

Terminology

CNT: Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the anarchist union.

UGT: Unión General de Trabajadores, the communist union.
CEDA: Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, the Spanish catholic
conservative group
FAI: Federación Anárquica Ibérica, the anarchist party
PCE: Partido Comunista Español, the communist party
PSOE: Partido Socialista Obrero Español, a strong socialist party
Comintern: Communist International, a group of communists aiding parties to implement
the social revolution in their countries
NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitpartei, the nationalistic and fascist German party