Kinlore
17 July 1936 – 1 April 1939

The Spanish Civil War

A military coup against the Republic splits Spain in two; after nearly three years of war and terror behind both lines, Franco's Nationalists win.

  • The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston, HarperPerennial (2006)
  • The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)
  • The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)

Well established wartraumaconflict

Part of the story of Spain and Catalonia.

On 17–18 July 1936 army officers rose against the Republic. The coup succeeded in about half the country, including Galicia, Old Castile, Navarre, Seville and Spanish Morocco, but failed in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and the industrial north, where workers’ militias and loyal police beat it back. A coup became a war. Germany and Italy quickly flew General Franco’s Army of Africa across the Strait and went on to send aircraft, tanks and tens of thousands of troops; Britain and France promoted “non-intervention”; the Soviet Union armed the Republic, and some 35,000 foreign volunteers fought in the International Brigades.

  • The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston, HarperPerennial (2006)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)
  • The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)

Terror behind the lines

In the first months both zones saw mass killings. In Republican territory, where the coup unleashed revolution, militias and gangs killed perhaps 50,000 people, including some 6,800 priests, monks and nuns, and burned churches across the country. In Nationalist territory killing was a deliberate policy of “cleansing” directed by the military: Paul Preston estimates about 150,000 people were executed or murdered by the rebels and the Franco regime, including some 20,000 after the war ended. The poet Federico García Lorca was one of them. Historians continue to debate exact figures, which are hard to establish.

  • The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
  • The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)

The war

Madrid held out against a direct assault in November 1936 (“¡No pasarán!”) and remained Republican until the end. On 26 April 1937 German and Italian planes destroyed the Basque town of Guernica, the attack Picasso turned into the century’s most famous anti-war painting; the death toll is still disputed. The Republic was weakened by its own divisions, including fighting between communists and anarchists in Barcelona in May 1937. Franco’s forces took the Basque north in 1937, split Republican territory by reaching the Mediterranean in April 1938, and won the long, bloody Battle of the Ebro that autumn.

  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)
  • The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston, HarperPerennial (2006)

Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939. Roughly 450,000 people, soldiers and civilians, fled over the Pyrenees into France in the winter exodus Spaniards call la Retirada, many into makeshift camps on French beaches. Madrid surrendered at the end of March, and on 1 April 1939 Franco declared the war over.

  • The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston, HarperPerennial (2006)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)

Counting the cost

Estimates of all deaths from the war and its repression commonly run to around half a million, including combat, killings behind the lines, and hunger and disease. Hundreds of thousands went into exile, many permanently; Mexico alone took in some 20,000 Republican refugees. More than 100,000 victims of the war and dictatorship are believed to lie in unmarked mass graves, which volunteer groups and, since 2022, the state have been working to exhume.

  • The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
  • Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática — Jefatura del Estado, Boletín Oficial del Estado (2022)
  • Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past — Giles Tremlett, Faber & Faber (2006)

For decades after 1939 the regime commemorated only its own dead. The poet Antonio Machado, who died in exile days after crossing into France, had already written of the “two Spains”, one of which would freeze the heart of every Spaniard born. For many families that line still describes the war.

  • Campos de Castilla (Proverbios y cantares, LIII) — Antonio Machado, Renacimiento (1912)
  • Spanish Identity in the Age of Nations — José Álvarez Junco, Manchester University Press (2011)

How it's seen
Republican and left memory

A fascist-backed coup against an elected government, followed by a war of extermination against workers, teachers, regional nationalists and anyone suspected of the left. The Republic's defenders fought for democracy, alone while the democracies looked away.

  • The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
  • The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston, HarperPerennial (2006)

Nationalist and conservative memory

A "Crusade" to save Spain and the Church from revolution and chaos after the Republic had lost control; the thousands of priests, nuns and right-wingers murdered in the Republican zone are proof of what Spain was saved from.

  • The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)

Most historians

Both sides committed mass killings behind the lines, but the Nationalist repression was larger, more systematic and continued for years after victory. The war was rooted in Spanish conflicts over land, religion, class and the regions, internationalised by Germany, Italy and the USSR.

  • The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
  • The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)
  • The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 — Antony Beevor, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2006)

Why it matters today

Spain

The war is the wound under Spanish politics. Tens of thousands of its dead still lie in unmarked graves, families argue over grandparents who fought on opposite sides, and debates about exhumations, monuments and the Valley of Cuelgamuros can still turn a dinner party cold.

Catalonia

Catalonia was the Republic's industrial heart and, from late 1937, the seat of its government. Barcelona was bombed from the air, its fall in January 1939 sent hundreds of thousands into exile across the Pyrenees, and the victors set out to erase Catalan self-government and public use of the language.