Modern historiography of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) consistently asserts that General Francisco Franco overthrew a “legitimate, democratically elected government.” Despite its appearance of democratic republicanism, no election was free from Leftist political violence, and the parliamentary system was openly flouted as early as 1934 under President Alcala-Zamora. The passage of the government from the moderate CEDA-Radical Republican coalition to the Popular Front government in 1936 was the ultimate collapse of democracy, given the widespread political violence, voter manipulation, and post-facto electoral interference by both President Alcala-Zamora and the interim Prime Minister Azaña.
Whether the government was legitimate is a different question from whether it was democratic. Certainly, the Nationalists considered their government after the Civil War to be legitimate, though it was clearly undemocratic. There were a series of arguments made to deny legitimacy to the Popular Front government and to support the Nationalist revolution: the initial speech made by Franco to the soldiers as Las Palmas, followed shortly after by a series of letters from Spanish bishops, and finally, the Bellón Commission established by the Nationalists in 19391 to articulate a defense of the rebellion. Whether these arguments were valid in an objective sense is beside the point: they resonated with a substantial portion of the Spanish people and with international observers.
Revolutionary Birth of the Republic
The history of the modern Spanish state begins with the Napoleonic Wars: in 1808, Napoleon occupied Spain and replaced the traditional monarchy under Ferdinand VII with a constitutional monarchy under his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in an insurgency that ousted the French and reestablished Spanish sovereignty, but now as a constitutional monarchy under the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz with Ferdinand VII as the legitimate, but no longer absolute, king of Spain. Ferdinand returned to power in 1814 and almost immediately repealed the Constitution, reestablishing the ancien régime and absolute monarchy. This decision led, perhaps inevitably, to the era of pronunciamientos (bloodless military coups d’etat), revolutions, and counter-revolutions. One author counts 43 pronunciamientos between the years of 1820 and 1923; Payne chooses instead to separate it into four eras:
the 1820-1823 pronunciamento under Ferdinand VII by Rafael del Riego that reestablished the 1812 Constitution
the 1836-1843 pronunciamiento under Baldomero Espartero during the First Carlist War2 that demanded liberal reforms from the Queen Regent, Maria Cristina de Borbón
the 1854-1856 pronunciamiento under Leopoldo O’Donnell as Prime Minister under Isabella II that advocated anti-clericalism and laissez-faire policies
the 1868-1874 pronunciamiento under Francisco Serrano and Juan Prim that expelled Isabella II, briefly installed Amadeus of Savoy as a constitutional monarch, and ended as the First Spanish Republic that immediately faced opposition from Carlists, the socialist First International, Navarre and Catalan unrest, and the Catholic Church
The era of pronunciamientos ended in 1874 with the restoration of a constitutional monarchy under Alfonso XII that enshrined Catholicism as the state religion and established a bicameral Cortes with an upper Senate split between appointments, peerage, and elective positions, and a fully elected lower Congress of Deputies. Because the purpose of the restoration monarchy was political stability, however, it was unable to coopt the growing radical movements of Carlism, Republicanism, Socialism, and Anarchism into the state structure as Bismarck’s State Socialism had in Germany. This weakness led to the return of praetorianism with the pronunciamiento of Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923 in response to inflation, unemployment, labor strikes, and the initial disaster of the Rif War.
Primo de Rivera’s military directorate was initially successful in capturing the economic revival happening across Europe, expanding industrialization and electrification, and winning the Rif War, but gained enemies on the Left by violently repressing the anarchist labor union, the CNT, and eschewing agrarian reform to shore up elite support. The economic decline that would become the Great Depression proved to be his downfall, and he was forced to step down in 1930. As the interim government under General Berenguer attempted to plot a course to normalcy, opposition to the monarchy grew into a Republican military revolt in December 1930 resulting in the deaths of two members of the Civil Guard and a general before being suppressed. Berenguer stepped down in February 1931, replaced by Admiral Juan Aznar, and municipal elections were held in April.
Early results showed a victory in the provincial capitals for the Republican-Socialist coalition, and it declared a mandate to establish a new Republican government, even though a majority of municipal council seats still remained outside of this coalition. Unable to trust the military to resist this revolution, Alfonso XII and nearly all Monarchist politicians went into exile. Franco, who later sat on a military tribunal judging the December military revolt, cautiously supported democratic reform, but had grave misgivings about the future Spanish Republic:
The well-reasoned evolution of ideas and of peoples, bringing democracy under law, constitutes the true progress of the Fatherland, while any extremist, violent revolution will drag it into the worst kind of tyranny.
Stanley Payne, Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, pp. 95
The Commission Report describes the outcomes of this event in the following quote:
Men thus possessed by Power and converted to governors, not by popular vote, but by their own free will, proceed and act not as those who exercise power, regulated and legitimately received, but as those who conquered it by the force of a revolution with and unlimited character.
Out of the Leftist Coalition, only the Radical Republican Party genuinely stood for free, liberal elections and moderate reforms. The Left Republicans wanted to permanently exclude Catholics and conservatives from politics, with Miguel Azaña declaring that “Spain [was] no longer Catholic”; sweeping labor and agrarian reforms were put into place; Catalonia was given self-government; female suffrage and divorce were legalized. In May, more than one hundred churches were burned, and the CNT led a series of violent strikes and riots that culminated in the killing of four Civil Guards on December 31, 1931, beaten to death.
October Revolution of 1934
The right wing was so dysfunctional that despite the turmoil of the Liberal Biennium, it took until 1933 for a conservative party to emerge, the Catholic Confederation of Autonomous Rightists (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, CEDA). Despite violence that left at least twenty-eight people dead, and attempts by the Left Republicans and Socialists to have the results nullified, CEDA formed a winning coalition with the Radicals in the general elections. The CEDA had consented to the formation of a government under the leader of the Radical Party despite being numerically larger and being excluded from the cabinet; unlike the CNT which had already led three revolutionary insurrections, and the Socialist Party that was radicalizing, the CEDA was strictly reformist. By 1934, however, the leader of the CEDA, Gil Robles, demanded representation in the government for continued support in the Cortes. When three CEDA ministers were allowed into the government on October 1, 1934, the Socialist and Left Republican Parties launched their long-planned revolutionary insurrection alongside a Catalan rebellion.
In Oviedo alone, the revolutionaries had killed 50-100 civilians, including teenage seminarians, and destroyed buildings; nearly 15 million pesetas were stolen from provincial banks. The government was forced to rely on military intervention to suppress the revolt, as it had for previous attempts, but the 15,000 arrested revolutionaries represented a political problem: the Left viewed the October Revolution as a stand against fascism, and demanded amnesty; the Right viewed it as the return of the Russian revolution and the emergence of Bolshevism, and demanded severe punishment.
The Commission Report describes the conclusion as follows:
Through the hardships, the immense damages, the loss of lives, and the ordeal of ruin brought about by the gigantic upheaval of 1934, Spain reaped a double lesson: that it was saved by the sacrifice and defense of its Army; and the total incapacity of the highest powers of the existing political regime to solidify its recovery from the evil it suffered with effective punishment.
This trend of conciliation towards the Left under Alcala-Zamora’s administration would continue on to the 1936 prelude to the Nationalist Uprising.
Violence and Fraud in the February 1936 Elections
The Republican newspaper El Sol describes the atmosphere before the 1936 general elections in the following quote:
Since the advent of the Republic, we have been oscillating dangerously between two extremes, particularly in the countryside. During the first biennium [1931-1933] agriculture was burdened with a ridiculous working day, and the wave of idleness and indiscipline through which it passed ended by ruining it… During the second biennium [1933-1935] we fell into the other extreme… Property took revenge on labor, and did not realize that it was piling up fuel for the social bonfire of the near future.
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, pp. 35—36.
Even on the Right, there was recognition of the need for social change. Gil Robles wanted to build a social justice platform to co-opt revolutionary elements; Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, described life in the countryside as “absolutely intolerable”
Against this backdrop, new elections were held in February 1936, marked by Leftist violence and voter intimidation. As rioting intensified through the night, the entire cabinet resigned, and the president appointed a new government under Azaña, the leader of the new Leftist coalition, the Popular Front, to oversee the confirmation of the elections. The Commission Report details numerous ways that the elections were thus rendered illegitimate:
Early victories in several capital cities on the evening of February 16 excited revolutionary leaders to seize public buildings and stuff ballots, particularly in the cities of Cáceres and La Coruña, eventually giving the Popular Front an extra 12 seats.
Political violence in the city of Málaga forced countless polling stations to close and intimidated right-wing candidates into withdrawing.
The election commission annulled the elections in the provinces of Granada and Cuenca, which initially announced ten out of thirteen right-wing deputies and six out of six right-wing deputies, respectively, forcing the elections to be reheld under the “auspices of violence”.
In Burgos and Salamanca, four right-wing deputies were declared legally incapable according to the “second section of Article 7 of the Electoral Law”3. According to the Commission Report, not only was this declaration dubious, but the electoral commission also awarded their seats to non-rightist candidates in violation of the Congressional Rules which stipulated that the elections should be reheld.
In Valencia, gunmen roamed the streets, intimidating and assaulting voters, expelling poll observers from their stations, and destroying ballot boxes in safely right-wing districts.
Despite the rampant abuses of the electoral process, the Popular Front government was confirmed with a two-thirds majority, allowing it to unilaterally amend the Constitution. This was a necessary power, because the Popular Front platform demanded a return to the Leftist biennium, with nationalization, land redistribution, labor arbitration and work conditions, and secular education.
Illegitimacy in the Exercise of Power
Almost immediately, the new regime moved to solidify its power, enrich its friends, and suppress its enemies. An amnesty was passed on February 21, 1936 which released participants in the October Revolutions, including Lluís Companys Jover who declared the brief independence of the Catalan Republic during the tumult; Enrique Pérez Farrás, the head of the Catalan Police Squad who supported Companys Jover; Ramón González Peña, the leader of the miners’ revolt in Asturias; and Juan García Oliver, the Catalan anarchist arrested for his role in the CNT-led revolts in January 1933. The latter three are referred to in the Commission Report’s treatment of the amnesty as follows:
This is because under its protection, and because it was carried out in the midst of a socio-political subversion, criminals were released who, for the majority of Spaniards, were guilty of common crimes or high treason. Among these cases, recall: Pérez Farrás, a traitor to Spain and the true murderer of a military chief who was fulfilling his duty; González Peña, the leader of the Asturian revolution and looter of the Bank of Spain; García Oliver, a common criminal and notable former convict, later ironically appointed Minister of Justice in the Government of the 'Popular Front,' and many others who are omitted here to avoid making the reference too provocative.
The pendulum of labor laws swung back, giving “the workers license to impose their will with impunity.”4 Employers were forced to rehire workers, with backpay, who had been dismissed for involvement in political strikes as far back as January 1934, even if they had been jailed for said involvement. In rural places, farm managers were subjected to forced hiring—alojamientos—even as the thousands of migratory day laborers stole animals, crops, and lumber. Strikes for higher wages and shorter working hours crippled cities and devastated rural production—the cost of labor would have made harvesting crops uneconomical, so landowners simply let it rot in the field. Land redistribution and expropriation, already underway through peasant-led seizures, were legitimized post facto by the Institute of Agrarian Reform.
Arson, Looting, and Murder between February 19 and July 13, 1936
Factionalism within the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) was already threatening the stability of the Popular Front government. Francisco Largo Caballero, the former President of the PSOE who resigned in December 1935 but retained leadership of the General Workers’ Union (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT) and the Madrid branch, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña (ASM), was philo-communist revolutionary, promoting the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of the Spanish state. Indalecio Prieto, also on the PSOE Executive Committee and who assumed de facto leadership of the national organization, was more moderate, favoring a cohesive Republic and moderation. The youth wing of the PSOE, the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas (FJS), followed Caballero in trending philo-communist and militant. While the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, PCE) supported the Popular Front coalition as an analogy to the French Front populaire which had recently established a government under Leon Blum in May 1936, the extreme left wing of the party wanted an “energetic and thorough purge of the state apparatus” of all “reactionary, fascist, and monarchist elements”.5
The left wing was not unique in radicalizing, as the now underground fascist movement, the Falange, swelled with new recruits as members abandoned Gil Robles’ CEDA which strictly advocated non-violence. The CEDA youth wing, the Juventudes de Acción Popular (JAP), always had a fascist tendency, but the monarchist newspaper ABC also came to agree with the Falange that it was “shameful to narcotize the people with the lure of peaceful solutions.”6
In the few months the Popular Front governed, political violence was rampant, yet the government response focused on suppressing Rightists while granting immunity to Leftists. Theft of farmland and Church property was widespread, strikes crippled productivity, and hundreds were killed.7 Even in exile on the Canary Islands, Franco received so many death threats from leftists that he was obliged to keep a 24-hour personal guard.
In the 47 days between February 16 and April 2, 1936, the Commission listed 178 cases of vandalism against political centers, public and private establishments, private residences, and churches; 199 arsons; 11 general strikes; 169 riots; 39 shootings; 85 assaults; 24 robberies. In total, there were 345 injured and 74 killed in the political violence during the initial elections and the inter-governmental period before the “confirmation” of the Popular Front government.
Numerous commentators noted that the Spanish Republic was nearing its final days. The monarchist parliamentarian Jose Calvo Sotelo compared the Popular Front government to the short-lived Russian and Hungarian democracies ousted by communist revolution. Gil Robles lambasted the apathy of the government in stopping the political violence and evaporating public belief in legality and democracy. Agustí Calvet Pascual, the Republican editor-in-chief of La Vanguardia, blamed the rise of fascism on the constant strikes, crime, and violence occurring across the country. Miguel Maura Gamazo, a Conservative Republican politician, argued in an article for the El Sol that all Republican parties, from Prieto to Gil Robles, needed to establish a national dictatorship to prevent the looming threat of civil war and dictatorship, fascist or communist. Even foreign commentators foresaw the end of the Spanish Republic:
Among the various examples of the foreign press condemning the Spanish anarchy that could be cited, an article published in the French newspaper L’Ere Nouvelle8 […] deserves special mention.
The article read as follows: “Since the first day of March, disorder reigns throughout the country [referring to Spain]. And what disorder! In almost all major centers, elements of the extreme left have launched a campaign of violence that every democracy must condemn. It is particularly paradoxical to reproach dictatorial regimes for the use of force and to proceed exactly like them when the occasion arises. No one is unaware that attacks have been occurring in certain cities for a month now. And despite the censorship from Madrid, the odious acts committed against many representative societies of doctrines opposed to those of the new regime are well known in detail. These same excesses prove that the Government of Madrid is being overwhelmed by its extreme left allies. And all democrats among us who applauded the birth of the Spanish Republic and its small efforts are now worried to see it sliding down such a dangerous slope. The danger for a democracy does not only come from reactionary parties; that posed by revolutionary parties is no less serious. Having checked one, Spain seems incapable of reacting against the other.”
The historian Stanley Payne described the period as having “conditions so oppressive that they would already have provoked rebellion in other countries,” yet no such relief was forthcoming until the assassination of Calvo Sotelo in the dark, skulking hours of July 13. The Falange had assassinated an officer of the Assault Guard, and immediate approval was granted by the Ministry of the Interior to arrest a long list of Rightist leaders, of whom Calvo Sotelo was just one. Calvo Sotelo was arrested, shot in the back of the head, and unceremoniously dumped at the entrance of the city morgue.
Antonio Ramos Oliveira, who had been arrested in the October 1934 rebellion but later became disillusioned with socialism, writes:
The ultimate barrier of disorder had been passed. Nothing more was required, after this incident, for the government and the reactionaries to lose, the former, what shreds of authority remained to it, the latter, what judgment they still possessed.
Antonio Ramos Oliveira, Politics, Economics, and Men of Modern Spain, 1808-1946, pp. 547
On July 15, the Count of Vallellanos, speaking for the Monarchists, went before the Cortes and repudiated the government for its impotence.
This crime, without precedent in our political history, has been committed by the government’s own agents. […] We cannot coexist with the protectors and moral accomplices of this deed a moment longer. We do not want to deceive the country and international opinion by accepting a role in a farce that pretends that a civilized and normal state exists, whereas, in reality, we have lived in complete anarchy since 16 February.
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, pp. 92
The Commission Report, similarly, found the Popular Front government jointly liable for the rise of political violence and the death of Calvo Sotelo.
Firstly, in the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, as in subsequent ones, the former carried out by agents of the government mixed with extremists, and the latter by political groups to whom command, jurisdiction, and effective power were handed over with arms, sometimes mixed with genuine agents of the government, those who encouraged and assented to them bear an initial responsibility for direct inducement, and another, no less clear, for the total absence of preventive action and repression. Secondly, the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, the determining motive for the National Uprising, represented the already undeniable proof that, indeed, since February 16, 1936, despite the feigned appearance of a civilized and normal State, there existed merely authorities and justice in the service of violence and crime. Therefore, it cannot be denied that there exists common responsibility between the men representing that State and the material executors of the acts, indistinguishable from codefendant liability.
To the Right, there was no longer a Spanish state, only a regime of traitors and lickspittles that at best merely stood by as civil war churned in the city streets. Franco, exiled off the coast of Morocco, and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, in an Valencian prison cell, finally committed themselves to shrug off the pretenders. Forty-four of the fifty-one army garrisons faced rebellion, fulminating from a hardened core of hardly a thousand junior officers who aroused their reluctant peers with, as Payne puts it, “sheer bravado, courage, and personal example.”9
Conclusion
The Commission Report concludes its analysis by emphatically supporting the legitimacy of the Nationalist revolt.
The Glorious National Uprising cannot be characterized, under any circumstances, as a rebellion in the legal sense of the word; on the contrary, it represents a supreme appeal to the legitimate means of force that encapsulated the sole method of restoring morality and justice, which were previously unrecognized and repeatedly violated.
In the absence of justice and the possibility of restitution, there existed for the Right only the final defense which remains in the natural law and can never be relinquished: the supreme appeal to Heaven.
This concludes the first in a two-part series on the contemporary arguments for the illegitimacy of the Second Spanish Republic, and, ipso facto, the legitimacy of the Nationalist revolt. The second part will focus on the argument offered by the Spanish bishops, particularly Enrique Pla y Deniel’s 1936 pastoral letter Los Dos Ciudades (“The Two Cities”) and the 1939 follow-up El triunfo de la Ciudad de Dios y la Resurrección de España (“The Triumph of the City of God and the Resurrection of Spain”).
In the meanwhile, two articles I have written for the Dissident Review have been made freely available online.
Justice and Force in the Frontier: The Johnson County War
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Published in February 15, 1939 as the Dictamen de la Comisión sobre ilegitimidad de poderes actuantes el 18 de julio de 1936 (Ruling of the Commission on the Illegitimacy of the Acting Powers on July 18, 1936). Unlabeled quotes are translated from this document. Wikisource
The Carlists supported the claim of Ferdinand’s brother, Infante Carlos, against his neice, Isabella II.
I understand this to refer to Article 7 Section 2 of the 1907 Electoral Law: “The contractors of public works or services that are financed with State, provincial, or municipal funds, who as a result have pending claims of self-interest against the Administration, and the guarantors and partners of said contractors [are ineligible for public office]. This inability will be understood only in relation to the district in which the work or public service is carried out.”
Edward E. Malefakis. 1970. Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Civil War. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 39.
Burnett Bolloten. 2015. The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. 77-78.
Ibid., 55.
Specific numbers vary only slightly by source. Payne (Franco: A Personal and Political Biography) gives “more than three hundred deaths”; Jose Peirats (La CNT en la revolución española) gives 269 deaths; Clinton D. Young (History in Dispute: The Spanish Civil War) gives “close to 300 political murders”.
L’Ère Nouvelle ("The New Era") was a French newspaper founded by two Radical-Socialists, Yvon Delbos and Gaston Vidal, which ran from 1919 to 1940. Its subtitle, "The Organ of Left-Wing Entente", suggests its close alignment with parliamentary politics, especially with the French Radical-Socialist Party, which like its Spanish counterpart, and despite its anti-clericalism and socialist leanings, was strictly parliamentarian and incrementalist.
Stanley G. Payne. 1988. The Franco Regime, 1936—1975. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. 100.