Civil war didn’t start until 1936, but for the preceding five years, since King Alfonso XIII was driven out in a fairly uneventful revolution, Spain had been feeling shaky. The new republican government, pledged to economic and social reform and determined to propel the country out of the eighteenth century and into the twentieth, moved against the Church (separating it from the State, which it had been pushing around at least since the Inquisition); broke up a few of the big landed estates, redistributing the acreage among the peasants; and gave a degree of local autonomy to the Catalans, in and around Barcelona, as well as to the Basques. Frankly, it was all a case of too-little-too-late, at least in the eyes of the extremists (anarchists and Communists, mostly). But it was more than enough to infuriate the priests and the landowners, not to mention the former royalists, who were upset anyway. In 1933, the government fell into the hands of the rightists, who themselves proved both ineffectual and inflammatory: A simple miners’ strike was put down with more than your average brutality, and the Catalans were sent to their rooms without supper.
Okay, now it’s 1936. New general elections. All the leftist types (republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-union members) join in a Popular Front against all the rightist types (monarchists, priests, landowners, army officers, and Fascists, known locally as Falangists). The leftists beat the rightists at the polls – but it’s very close. Even so, the leftists push ahead with their vision of the new Spain, figuring reconciliation was a luxury, or an impossibility, or that it damn well could wait – this part isn’t so clear.
Next thing you know, the military (never a factor to be discounted in Spain) has acted; revolts at Spanish army bases in Morocco, led by General Francisco Franco, result in what amounts to an invasion of Spain, with almost all of the soldiers siding with their officers – and the rightists. Thus the battle lines were drawn: the leftists, or Republicans, sometimes called the Loyalists, are concentrated in the south, which tends to be poor, in the industrial region around Barcelona, and in Madrid, the capital; the rightists, or Nationalists, sometimes called the Rebels (even though they’re the Establishment types), are strongest in the ancient – read strongly Catholic – heartland of Spain, plus Galicia, the northwest corner.
Even without the foreign intervention, which we’ll be getting to in a minute, it would have been an especially appalling civil war. Neither side behaved itself particularly well; the Republicans, at their worst, raped nuns, cut off the ears of priests, and fought savagely among themselves. The Nationalists came in the night and shot in the dark, with the result that whole villages weren’t around in the morning; their most famous victim was the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. In the end, some six hundred thousand Spaniards would die, with many more permanently crippled; still others were in exile, never to return.
But it was the Great Powers – Hitler and Mussolini on the side of the Nationalists, Stalin on the side of the Republicans – who, by taking a local amateur production and turning it into a dress rehearsal for bigger things, made sure the civil war turned into chapter-length world-history-book stuff. The Germans and Italians sent troops (the Italians over fifty thousand); the Soviets technicians and military advisors; both sides as much equipment – tanks, planes, guns – as they could pack up, with the emphasis on those items that still needed to be tested on the battlefield. The British and the French, again, hung back, though plenty of Brits, French, Americans, and others went to Spain as volunteers, usually on the Republican side.
A lot more happened in the course of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted until 1939, by which time the Nationalists, led by Franco, had crushed the Republicans. Guernica, in the Basque country, was bombed by the Nationalists, or at least by the Germans (Picasso got it down on canvas); General Mola tossed off his famous “fifth column” line (about how he had four columns of soldiers encircling Madrid, and a fifth column infiltrating and undermining it from within); and Ernest Hemingway completed his research for For Whom the Bell Tolls.
But what really mattered was what the war had crystallized: the splitting of the world into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps; the proof that Germany and Italy could work nicely together in a Rome-Berlin Axis; the general belief that not just war, but War, was inevitable. Also to be noted: the arrival on the world scene of Generalissimo Franco, a brilliant strategist and so-so politician, who, far from attempting to conduct Spain into the twentieth century, would, over the course of the next forty years, insulated her from the rest of the world and immunize her to the present.