The Spanish Civil War

The Republic called itself the lawful government of Spain. The Popular Front had won the elections five months before the rising, and July was a coup against a ballot box.

The Republic held roughly two thirds of the population, the capital, the industrial belts of Catalonia and the Basque Country, and the gold reserve. It called this democracy against fascism, a year before the rest of the world used those words for a war of its own.

It argues it was not defeated so much as abandoned. The Non-Intervention Committee starved the one side that needed to buy weapons, and Munich in September nineteen thirty eight told the Republic that Britain and France would appease Hitler.

George Orwell fought for that Republic and then watched part of it turn on itself. He wrote down what that taught him.

This account does not begin with the coup. It begins with the chaos the coup claims to answer, strikes, land seizures, and church burnings through the first half of nineteen thirty six, and the killing of the monarchist leader Jose Calvo Sotelo by Assault Guards on July thirteenth.

The rising was a coalition of the right, the professional army, the fascist Falange founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the traditionalist Carlist requetes, monarchists, and Catholic conservatives. Franco welded them into one state party in April nineteen thirty seven and made himself Caudillo.

The regime called the war a Cruzada, a crusade to defend Christian civilization against an atheist and Bolshevik conspiracy, and the Spanish bishops endorsed the cause in writing the following year.

Victory bought stability, in this account. Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War, and aligned with the United States in nineteen fifty three in exchange for military bases.

To much of the watching world this looked like a foreign story about foreigners. The International Brigades held the Lincoln Battalion of about two thousand eight hundred Americans, of whom some seven hundred fifty died, the British Battalion, and the German Thaelmann and Italian Garibaldi units of exiles who could not fight in their own countries.

Above all of it sat the fiction of Non-Intervention. Twenty seven nations met in London while Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union armed their own clients and lied about it. Stalin extracted over five hundred tonnes of Spain's gold reserve to pay for the aid, and the NKVD came with the advisers.

Hermann Goering, testifying at Nuremberg after the next war was over, said plainly why Germany had come.

The Church remembers exact numbers. Thirteen bishops, four thousand one hundred seventy two priests and seminarians, two thousand three hundred sixty four monks and friars, and two hundred eighty three nuns, six thousand eight hundred thirty two clergy killed, most of them in the summer and autumn of nineteen thirty six.

To the Church this was the culmination of a Republic that had disestablished it in nineteen thirty one and secularized schools and marriage. Forty three Spanish bishops said in writing, in July nineteen thirty seven, that the rising was self defense.

But Catholic Spain was not one thing. The Basque Country was devout and Republican, and Franco's forces shot fourteen to sixteen Basque priests for it. The war set the rosary against the rosary.

Beneath the language of faith ran an older war over land. In Andalusia and Extremadura landless laborers had seized fields in nineteen thirty six, and the Nationalist reconquest of the countryside was as much a landlord's revenge as a religious crusade.

When Franco died in nineteen seventy five, Spain chose silence. The nineteen seventy seven Amnesty Law, approved by ninety three percent of the new parliament, closed the door on prosecutions in both directions, a pact of forgetting.

The silence broke from below. In two thousand a man named Emilio Silva dug his grandfather out of a roadside grave and started an exhumation movement. An estimated one hundred fourteen thousand people still lie in unmarked mass graves, a number the United Nations ranks second in the world only to Cambodia.

The historians went to war over it. Paul Preston documented around two hundred thousand executions behind the lines. Revisionists led by Pio Moa argued the Republic had started the war.

Paloma Aguilar named what the whole transition had rested on.