20.4: Fascism- The Spanish Civil War

Spain was the site of the first war launched by fascist forces. In the 1920s, most of the country was populated by poor rural farmers and laborers, and an alliance of the army, Catholic church, and old noble families still controlled the government in Madrid. The king, Alfonso XIII, held real power. In many ways, Spain was the last place in Europe that clung to the old order of the nineteenth century.

By the early 1920s, socialists and liberals were increasingly militant. Likewise, Catalan and Basque nationalists agitated for independence. From 1923 to 1930, general Primo de Rivera acted as a virtual dictator (with the support of the king) promoting the building of dams, roads, and sewers. He weakened political representation by making government ministers independent of the parliament (the Cortes), and lost support in the army by interfering in the promotion of officers.

In 1931, the king abdicated after an anti-monarchist majority took the Cortes. The result was a republic, whose parliament was dominated by liberals and moderate socialists. The parliament pushed through laws that formally separated church and state (for the first time in Spanish history) and redistributed land to the poor, seized from the enormous estates of the richest nobles. Meanwhile, Spanish communists sought a Russian-style communist revolution and, even further to the left, a substantial anarchist coalition aimed at the complete abolition of government. Thus, the left-center coalition was increasingly beleaguered, as the far left gravitated away, and the nobility and clergy joined with the army in an anti-parliamentarian right. Two years of anarchy resulted, from 1933 – 1935.

In 1935, as the forces of the right rallied around a general named Francisco Franco, the socialists, liberals, anarchists, and communists formed a Popular Front to fight it. More chaos ensued, with Franco’s forces growing in power and the Popular Front suffering from infighting (i.e. the anarchists, communists, liberals, and nationalist minorities did not work well together). Franco’s traditional conservative forces joined with Spanish fascists, the Falange, which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy openly supported. In 1936, Franco’s forces seized several key regions in Spain.

Figure 20.6.1: Francisco Franco

The Spanish Civil War was costly, approximately 600,000 people died, of which 200,000 were “loyalists” (the blanket term for the pro-republican forces) summarily executed after being captured by the “nationalists” under Franco. Meanwhile, the loyalists carried out atrocities of their own, specifically targeting members of the church. International Involvement included the arrival of 20,000 volunteers on the side of the loyalists, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States. Both the U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway and the English writer George Orwell fought in defense of the republic.

Officially, there was an international non-interventionist agreement among the governments of Europe and the US with regard to Spain, Germany, and Italy. However, this agreement was blatantly violated. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, used Spain as a training ground with real targets. The loyalists had no means to fight against planes, so they suffered consistent defeats and setbacks from the bombing raids. The Spanish Civil War allowed Italy and Germany to "try out" their new armies before committing to a larger war in Europe. (Italy also launched a brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1934.)

In early 1939, having cut off the pockets of loyalists from one another, the nationalists triumphed and were recognized as the legitimate government of Spain internationally. Despite their promises to the contrary, they immediately began carrying out reprisals against the now-defeated loyalists. Franco adopted the title of Caudillo, or leader, in the same manner as Mussolini and Hitler. Where Spain differed from the other fascist powers was that Franco was well aware of its relative weakness and deliberately avoided an expansionist foreign policy.

Franco’s regime, which united the old nobles, the army, and the Catholic church, controlled the country until his death in 1975. Just as Spain was one of the last countries still tied to the old political order of kings and nobles after World War I, it was among the last fascistic countries long after Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy had fallen.