Beginning of the Spanish Civil War
On 17 July 1936 colonial troops rose against the republican government in Madrid. The Spanish Civil War had started.
Spain lost the last of its empire in the Americas in 1898 and was left deeply divided. Democrats hoped for reform; authoritarians called for an ‘iron surgeon’ to treat the nation’s ills.
In 1917 a general strike was brutally suppressed by the army. Politics were volatile: prime minister Eduardo Dato was assassinated in 1921; he had five successors in two years. In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera overthrew the last of them. ‘My Mussolini’, the king, Alfonso XIII, called him.
The 1929 financial crisis lost Primo de Rivera the army’s support. An upswell of Republican sentiment made elections inevitable. Monarchists held the rural districts but lost the cities. The king abdicated in 1931: ‘I am determined to have nothing to do with … a fratricidal civil war’, he said.
Within weeks Cardinal Segura, archbishop of Toledo, denounced the new Republican regime: ‘We shall have no right to lament when bitter reality shows us that we had victory in our hands, yet knew not how to fight like intrepid warriors.’
New elections in 1933 gave power to the right-wing CEDA party, led by José María Gil-Robles. ‘We must reconquer Spain’, he stated: ‘What does it matter if we have to shed blood.’ General Francisco Franco, a veteran of colonial warfare in Morocco, did just that when faced by striking miners in Asturias the following year. He ordered bombing raids and artillery fire; more than 1,000 died. ‘This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilisation’, he said.
Further elections brought the Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties, to power early in 1936. But the left was divided. Socialist leader Largo Caballero predicted the government’s imminent collapse, heralding ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat [and] the repression … of the capitalist and bourgeois classes’.
The army was ready. On 17 July 1936 three garrisons in Morocco rose up. The next day it was Andalusia’s turn. Working-class organisations demanded arms to resist the coup. The administration refused. ‘The government is master of the situation’, prime minister Santiago Casares y Quiroga told a friend: ‘It will all be over soon.’
