Second Spanish Republic

The Second Spanish Republic was the democratic regime that existed in Spain between April 14, 1931, the date of its proclamation, replacing the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, and April 1, 1939, date of the end of the Civil War, which gave way to the Franco dictatorship.

After the period of the Provisional Government (April-December 1931), during which the Constitution of 1931 was approved and the first reforms began, the history of the Second Spanish Republic "at peace" (1931-1936) tends to be divided into three stages. A first biennium (1931-1933) during which the Republican-Socialist coalition chaired by Manuel Azaña carried out various reforms that sought to modernize the country. A second biennium (1933-1935), called the radical-CEDA biennium, during which the right governed, with the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux, supported from parliament by the Catholic right of the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), which sought to "rectify" the leftist reforms of the first biennium. During this biennium the most serious event of the period took place: the anarchist and socialist insurrection known as the Revolution of 1934, which in Asturias became a true social revolution and which was finally put down by the Government with the intervention of the army. The third stage is marked by the triumph of the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front in the general elections of 1936, and which was only able to govern in peace for five months due to the coup d'état on July 17 and 18 promoted by by a part of the Army that led to the Spanish Civil War.

During the Second Spanish Republic at war (1936-1939) there were three governments: the first (July to September 1936) was led by the left-wing Republican José Giral, although real power was in the hands of the hundreds of committees that had been formed after the outbreak of the Spanish social revolution of 1936; the next government was assumed by the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero, the leader of one of the two unions that had led the revolution —the General Union of Workers (UGT) and the National Confederation of Labor (CNT)—; and the third, by the also socialist Juan Negrín, as a consequence of the fall of Largo Caballero after the May Days. Negrín governed until the beginning of March 1939, when Colonel Casado's coup d'etat took place, putting an end to the Republican resistance and giving way to the victory of the rebel faction headed by General Franco. From then on, the republic ceased to exist in Spanish territory; however, its institutions remained in exile, as most of its members had fled the country.

Proclamation

After the resignation of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in January 1930, Alfonso XIII tried to return the weakened monarchical regime to the constitutional and parliamentary path, despite the weakness of the dynastic parties. To do this, he appointed General Dámaso Berenguer as Prime Minister, but he failed in his attempt to return to "constitutional normality." In February 1931, King Alfonso XIII put an end to the "soft dictation" of General Berenguer and offered the government to Alba (leader of the Liberal Party), but he refused, so he then handed it over to Sánchez Guerra, who was to the Modelo prison, where the participants in the Jaca uprising were imprisoned, and offered them ministerial portfolios. Finally, the king appointed Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar as the new president, in whose government of "monarchic concentration" old leaders of the liberal and conservative dynastic parties entered, such as the Count of Romanones, Manuel García Prieto, Gabriel Maura Gamazo (son of Antonio Maura) and Gabino Bugallal. The Government proposed a new electoral calendar: municipal elections would be held first on April 12, and then elections to Cortes that would have the character of Constituent Assembly, so they could proceed to review of the powers of the State Powers and the precise delimitation of the area of each one (that is, reduce the prerogatives of the Crown) and an adequate solution to the problem of Catalonia.

Postal Franchise of the Constituent Courts, 1931.

The municipal elections of Sunday, April 12, 1931, yielded, at the time of the proclamation of the new regime, partial results of 22,150 monarchist councilors —from the traditional parties— and barely 5,875 councilors for the different republican initiatives, leaving 52,000 positions still to be determined. Despite the greater number of monarchist councillors, the elections meant a wide defeat for the Crown in the urban centers: the Republican current had triumphed in 41 provincial capitals. In Madrid, the republican councilors tripled the monarchists and, in Barcelona, they quadrupled them. If the elections had been called as a test to weigh support for the monarchy and the possibilities of modifying the electoral law before the call for general elections, the supporters of the republic considered such results as a plebiscite in favor of its immediate establishment. The Marquis de Hoyos would go so far as to say that "the news from important towns was, like that from the provincial capitals, disastrous". Depending on the authors, there are different interpretations of the results. The reason why the results of the main urban centers represented the defeat of the monarchy can be found in that, in those nuclei, the vote was less adulterated, since the presence of caciques, supporters in their vast majority of the monarchy, was minor. This gave evidence that the crown was completely discredited, since it had become too close to the dictatorial regime of Primo de Rivera.

At half past ten in the morning on Monday, April 13, the President of the Council of Ministers, Juan Bautista Aznar-Cabañas, entered the Palacio de Oriente in Madrid to celebrate the Council of Ministers. Asked by the journalists if there would be a government crisis, Aznar-Cabañas replied:

What if there's a crisis? What more crisis do you want than that of a country that lies monarchy and wakes up Republican?

Republican flag on the 77th anniversary of the proclamation of the republic in Éibar.

At the government meeting, the Minister of Public Works, Juan de la Cierva y Peñafiel, defended the resistance: "We must set up a strong government, implement censorship and resist." He is supported by two other ministers: Gabino Bugallal, Count of Bugallal, and Manuel García Prieto, Marquis of Al Hocemas. The rest of the ministers, headed by the Count of Romanones, think that all is lost, especially when they are receiving the hesitant responses of the general captains to the telegram that the Minister of War, General Dámaso Berenguer, sent them hours before., and in which he has advised them to follow "the course imposed by the supreme national will".

In the early hours of the morning of Tuesday, April 14, General Sanjurjo, director of the Civil Guard, went to the house of Miguel Maura, where the members of the revolutionary committee were meeting. who were not in exile in France, nor were they in hiding: Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, Francisco Largo Caballero, Fernando de los Ríos, Santiago Casares Quiroga and Álvaro de Albornoz. As soon as he entered the house, General Sanjurjo squared off before Maura and said: "At your command, Mr. Minister." For his part, King Alfonso XIII asked the Count of Romanones, an old acquaintance of Niceto Alcalá -Zamora, that he contact him so that, as president of the revolutionary committee, he guarantees his and his family's peaceful departure from Spain. At half past one in the afternoon, the interview takes place at the home of Dr. Gregorio Marañón, who had been the king's physician and who now supported the republican cause. The Count of Romanones proposed to Alcalá-Zamora to create a kind of transitional government or even the abdication of the king in favor of the Prince of Asturias. But Alcalá-Zamora demands that the king leave the country "before the sun sets." And he warns him: "If the republic has not been proclaimed before nightfall, the violence of the people can cause a catastrophe."

The monarch went into exile on the night of April 14, 1931; A few hours before his departure, a conspiratorial meeting of right-wing personalities was held at the home of the Count of Guadalhorce with the purpose of laying the foundations of a monarchical-style political party and, at the same time, trying to define a counterrevolutionary strategy that could overthrow the nascent democratic regime. On April 16, the following manifesto was made public, drawn up on behalf of the king by the Duke of Maura, brother of the political leader Miguel Maura, and that on the 17th was only published by the ABC newspaper, on the front page, accompanied by a "Note from the Provisional Government":

The elections held on Sunday clearly reveal to me that I do not have the love of my people today. My conscience tells me that this deviation will not be definitive, because I always sought to serve Spain, put the only concern in the public interest to the most critical circumstances. A King may be mistaken, and I will certainly be there once; but I know well that our homeland was always generous in the face of guilt without malice.

I am the king of all Spaniards, and also a Spaniard. I'd find plenty of means to maintain my prerogative regimens, in effective struggle with those who fight them. But, resolutely, I want to step away from what it is to throw a compatriot against another in fratricidal civil war. I don't give up any of my rights, because more than mine are deposit accumulated by History, whose custody is to ask for a rigorous day.
I hope to know the true and proper expression of collective consciousness, and as the nation speaks I deliberately suspend the exercise of the Royal Power and depart from Spain, recognizing it as the only lady of its destiny.

I also now believe that I am doing my duty to the homeland. I ask God that as deep as I feel it and the other Spaniards do it.

Celebrations of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in Barcelona, 1931, extracted from the federal archives of Germany.

Alfonso XIII left the country without formally abdicating and moved to Paris, later establishing his residence in Rome. In January 1941 he abdicated in favor of his third son, Juan de Borbón. He passed away on February 28 of the same year.

The cities of Sahagún (León), Éibar (Guipúzcoa) and Jaca (Huesca) were the only three cities that proclaimed the republic one day before the official date, April 13, 1931. The Government of the Second Republic Spanish would later grant them the title of Most Illustrious Cities. The first city in which the tricolor flag was hoisted was Éibar, at half past six in the morning of April 14, and in the afternoon of that same day the main Spanish capitals followed, including Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid, in which the Republican candidacies obtained very comfortable majorities.

The writer from Eibar Toribio Echeverría recalls, in his book Journey through the country of memories, the proclamation of the Second Republic in Eibar in this way:

...and before six o'clock in the morning the people had gathered in the square that was to be called from the Republic, and the elected councillors of Sunday, on their part, having presented themselves in the Consistorial House with the intention of asserting their investiture from that moment, were constituted in solemn session, agreeing unanimously to proclaim the Republic. The three-coloured flag was then placed on the central balcony of the city council, and Juan de los Toyos told the assembled people from it, that from that hour the Spaniards were living in Republic. (Toribio Echeverría, Travel through the country of memories)

1931 Constitution

Cover of a copy of the Constitution of the Second Republic.

After the proclamation of the republic, a provisional government chaired by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora took power from April 14 to October 14, 1931, the date on which he resigned due to his opposition to the way in which picked up the secularism of the State in article 26 of the new Constitution, being replaced by Manuel Azaña. On December 10, 1931, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora was elected President of the Republic, by 362 votes out of the 410 deputies present (the Chamber was made up of 446 deputies). He remained in this position until April 7, 1936, when the new majority of the Popular Front Cortes dismissed him for having called general elections twice in the same term, which could be considered an excess of his prerogatives, and he was replaced by Manuel Azana.

The Parliament resulting from the constituent elections of June 28, 1931 had the mission of preparing and approving a constitution on December 9 of the same year.

The Republican Constitution marked a notable advance in the recognition and defense of human rights by the Spanish legal system and in the democratic organization of the State: it dedicated almost a third of its articles to collect and protect individual and social rights and freedoms, extended the right of active and passive suffrage to citizens —of both sexes from 1933— over 23 years of age and the legislative power resided in the town, which was exercised through a unicameral body that received the name of Cortes or Congress of Deputies. In addition, it established that the head of state would henceforth be elected by a college made up of deputies and delegates, who in turn were appointed in general elections.

Symbols of the new State

Allegory of the Spanish Republic by Teodoro Andreu (1931)

The history of the tricolor flag responds to an essentially popular sentiment. Purple had been used by the liberal movements and, later, progressive or exalted since the times of the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823) influenced by the myth of the purple banner of Castilla, which defended that the community members of the xvi rose with such a banner against Carlos I for his policy of giving Flemish men the most important posts in the Castilian administration. Be that as it may, in 1931 the purple or violet color had a kind of popular tradition, which led to its definitive inclusion in the new national flag, in an improvised outburst of differentiating the new regime that began after the April 12 vote in your most needed symbols.

The union of red, yellow and purple in three stripes of equal size becomes official in the decree of April 27, 1931:

Article 2: The flags and banners... shall be formed by three horizontal bands of equal width, being red the superior, yellow the central and dark abode the lower. In the center of the yellow band will be the shield of Spain, adopting as such the one that appears on the back of the five pesetas coins coined by the interim government in 1869 and 1870.

It was endorsed in the first article of the Constitution of 1931. In said decree, the inclusion of the Castilian color to the traditional Aragonese colors was clarified: «Today the flag adopted as national in the middle of the century xix. The two colors of it are preserved and a third is added, which tradition admits as the insignia of an illustrious region, the nerve of nationality, with which the emblem of the Second Spanish Republic, thus formed, more accurately summarizes the harmony of a great Spain”. The same decree explained the new meaning of the tricolor flag: «The Republic covers everyone. Also the flag, which means peace, collaboration between citizens under the rule of just laws. It means even more: the fact, new in the history of Spain, that the action of the State has no other motive than the interest of the country, nor any other rule than respect for conscience, freedom and work.

25 cents of peseta, 1934

The origins of this new banner date back to 1820. In that year, General Riego, after "reproclaiming" the Constitution of Cádiz in Las Cabezas de San Juan, provoked for a brief period of time —barely three years— the opening liberal of the Fernando VII regime. During this period the National Militia was founded, which was assigned purple flags with the coat of arms of Castilla y León. This currency did not last long, since that same year it was replaced by another rojigualda with the motto "Constitución" in its central stripe.

In 1823 the return of Ferdinand VII to absolutism also ended the National Militia itself. In 1843, under the reign of Isabel II, the unification of the national flag was decreed for the first time on October 13. In said regulatory decree, regiments that previously had purple flags were allowed to use three ties —the cords that hang from the upper ends of the flags— with the colors red, yellow and purple. This is the main antecedent of the tricolor.

After the banishment of Elizabeth II, the Provisional Government of 1868-1871 changed the royal coat of arms, replacing the royal crown with the mural one and eliminating the Bourbon-Anjou coat of arms. The republican shield will follow the model of that period. The brief reign of Amadeo I ended with the proclamation of the First Republic. The flag projected during this regime emulated the revolutionary colors of France: red, white and blue, a modification that was not carried out due to its short duration ^{[citation needed]} and, with the Restoration, the flag recovered its elements of 1843.

Republican currency of a peseta coined in 1934.

During the Restoration, the Federal Party adopted the colors of the National Militia of 1820 as a symbol of the anti-dynastic faction and rejection of the established system. The tricolor flag began to be seen in casinos, newspapers and centers of Republican affiliation. Such was the strong link of these colors with the idea of republicanism, change and progress, during the reign of Alfonso XII, the regency of María Cristina, the reign of Alfonso XIII and the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Berenguer, that, In a burst of spontaneity, once the first results of the voting on April 12, 1931 were known, especially in Madrid, the people took to the streets carrying badges, cockades and flags with the three colors.

The coat of arms chosen in 1868 by the Provisional Government of 1868-1871 was adapted for her: quartered for Castilla, León, Aragón and Navarra, with Granada pointed, stamped by a mural crown and between the two columns of Hercules. As a novelty, its smaller size stands out, the same measurement for the three stripes and the golden fringes on the contour of those belonging to the army. Coins with the new shield were also minted.

	Hymn of Irrigation Rural singing proposed in 1931
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Similarly, an attempt was made to choose as the national anthem the one popularly known for much of the xix century as Himno de Riego i>, substituting the official until then, the Royal March. However, despite popular belief, it was never officially the anthem of the Republic; In 1931, shortly after its proclamation, a great controversy was organized about its validity as a national anthem in which numerous politicians, intellectuals and musicians intervened: among others, an article by Pío Baroja against it was famous, since he considered it too streetwise. and inappropriate to the ideals of the new regime. Perhaps in response to these complaints, the famous composer Óscar Esplá, together with the Andalusian poet Manuel Machado, proposed a completely new hymn, the Rural Song to the Spanish Republic, which was ultimately rejected. ^{[citation required]}

Social and economic context

The Republic's intentions were met with the stark reality of a world economy mired in the Great Depression, from which the world did not recover until after World War II. In terms of social forces, the Second Republic arose because the Army officers did not support the king, with whom they were upset for having accepted the resignation of Primo de Rivera, and a climate of growing demand for freedoms, rights for workers and rising unemployment rates, resulting in some cases in street clashes, anarchist riots, assassinations by extremist groups of one side or another, military coups and revolutionary strikes.

Distribution of the Spanish population in 1930.

In Spain, political agitation also took a particular turn, with the Church being a frequent target of the revolutionary left, which saw in the privileges they enjoyed one more cause of the social unrest that was being experienced, which often resulted in the burning and destruction of churches. The conservative right, also deeply rooted in the country, felt deeply offended by these acts and saw the good position it enjoyed increasingly endangered by the growing influence of the groups of the revolutionary left. From the point of view of international relations, the Second Republic suffered severe isolation, as foreign investment groups pressured the governments of their home countries not to support the new regime, fearful that the socialist tendencies that were gaining prominence within it, they will end up imposing a nationalization policy on their businesses in Spain. To understand this, it is clarifying to know that the Telephone Company was a monopoly owned by the North American International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), that the railways and their operators were fundamentally in the hands of French capital, while the electric companies and trams in the cities belonged to different companies (mostly British and Belgian). As a consequence, there was not a single nationalization during the republican period, but, nevertheless, the support of the fascist powers encouraged many conservative generals to plan military insurrections and coups. His intentions would materialize first in the "La Sanjurjada" of 1932 and in the failed coup of 1936, whose uncertain outcome led to the Spanish civil war. For their part, the Western democracies did not support the republican regime for fear of an armed confrontation, except in very specific circumstances, which ultimately did not serve to avoid the Second World War.

Copper coin of 50 cents of 1937

Spanish society in the 1930s was fundamentally rural: 45.5% of the active population worked in agriculture, while the rest was divided equally between industry and the service sector. These figures describe a society that had not yet experienced the Industrial Revolution. As for unions and political parties, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), whose list was the most voted for the constituent elections of 1931, had 23,000 members; its sister organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) union already had 200,000 members in 1922; the anarchist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) had some 800,000 members in September 1931. Other organizations, such as the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) had a nominal presence and did not gain strength until the start of the Civil War. As for nationalisms, the Regionalist League of Catalonia, led by Francesc Cambó had openly supported the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and for this reason it remained on the margins of politics during the Republic, while other Catalan political parties, more leaning towards the the left or the independence movement, were the ones that had the greatest prominence; In the case of the Basque Country and Navarra, it is worth mentioning that the break between the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and the Traditionalist Communion (CT), the latter made up of the Carlists, had not yet been consummated.

Regarding the socioeconomic change initiatives of the republican governments, it is worth noting the increases in the wages of farm workers carried out during the social-azana biennium, later reversed during the radical-cedista biennium, aimed at improving the living conditions in rural areas. Other initiatives were land occupations and illegal expropriations in the initial moments of the Civil War as a way of obtaining income and popular support from the peasantry.

The Republican Finance Ministers, without ideological distinctions, considered the budget deficit as one of the most urgent problems to solve, together with the depreciation of the peseta, to face Spain's economic problems. Participating, like their contemporaries, in the principles of classical orthodoxy in public finance, they tried to achieve budgetary balance, considering that the financial activity of the public sector should not harm private consumption and investment.

At the educational level, there was an important boost in public education, unprecedented in Spanish history. The Second Republic projected a qualitative and quantitative improvement in the education system: the most conservative calculations estimate an increase from 37,500 to 50,500 teachers in four years (from April 1931 to April 1935), the creation of 91 new secondary schools (those already existing were doubled) as well as an increase in the number of students from 76,074 in the 1930-31 academic year to 145,007 in the 1934-35 academic year. On September 16, 1932, a loan of 400 million pesetas was approved by law, plus another 200 million contributed by the Town Halls for school construction, which allowed a notable increase in the creation of schools. The remuneration of teachers and their training were substantially improved, as well as their presence in rural areas, for which reason it has been said that "during the period of the Republic, the teacher became the social and political reference of the people". Likewise, emphasis was placed on promoting pedagogical innovations and on extending training and culture throughout the territory through the Pedagogical Missions.

Stages of the Republic

Provisional Government or constituent period (April-December 1931)

Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, first president of the Second Spanish Republic.

The Provisional Government of the Second Spanish Republic held political power in Spain from the fall of the monarchy of Alfonso XIII and the proclamation of the republic on April 14, 1931 until the approval of the Constitution of 1931 on December 9 and the formation of the first ordinary government on December 15. Until October 15, 1931, the provisional government was chaired by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, and after his resignation due to the wording that had been given to article 26 of the Constitution that dealt with the religious question, Manuel Azaña succeeded him. government front.

But the Republican-Socialist coalition came to power not at the best of times. The economic depression that was plaguing Europe and the United States, although it was less profound in Spain, did affect construction and small complementary industries. Consequently, unemployment in the cities grew, and indirectly underemployment in the countryside increased, since day laborers could no longer emigrate to the cities where work was once again scarce. The feeling of insecurity of workers who had jobs also grew. And furthermore, the economic crisis coincided with the enormous expectations of a better life that the change of political regime had given rise to among the popular sectors, among workers and peasants, before the republic had time to establish and extend a democratic political culture. It was in these circumstances of economic crisis and growing popular expectations, when the republican-socialist coalition began to govern.

Public order policy

On April 15, the Gaceta de Madrid publishes a decree establishing the legal Statute of the Provisional Government, which was the superior legal norm by which the Provisional Government was governed until the approval of the new Constitution and in which it proclaims itself as "Full Power Government". The most controversial aspect of the "Legal Statute" is the contradiction that is observed in the issue of civil liberties and rights, since its recognition is accompanied by the possibility of its suspension by the Government, without judicial intervention, "if the health of the Republic, in the opinion of the Government, claims it". of an instrument of exception outside the courts of justice to act against those who committed "acts of aggression against the Republic", becoming, even after the approval of the 1931 Constitution, "the fundamental norm in the configuration of the regime law of public liberties for almost two years of the republican regime" in which it was in force (until August 1933). Spending on Citizen Security (Polic ía and Guardia Civil) experienced very significant growth during the Governments of the Second Republic, with an average annual increase of 14%. Edward Malefakis, referring to the "enormous increase in police forces that occurred during the first year of the Republic", details that the Civil Guard, which had some 26,500 members during the decade before the regime change, increased its troops to 27,817.. To which was added the new body of Assault Guards that in 1932 came to have 11,698 policemen.

The “regional question”

The most immediate problem that the Provisional Government had to face was the proclamation of the Catalan Republic made by Francesc Macià in Barcelona on the same day, April 14. Three days later, three ministers of the Provisional Government met in Barcelona with Francesc Macià, reaching an agreement whereby the Republican Left of Catalonia renounced the Catalan Republic in exchange for the Provisional Government's commitment that it would present the statute of autonomy decided by Catalonia, previously "approved by the Assembly of Catalan Town Halls", and the recognition of the Catalan Government that would cease to be called the Governing Council of the Catalan Republic, to take the name Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia, thus recovering "the name of glorious tradition" of the centennial institution of the principality that was abolished by Felipe V in the Nueva Planta decrees of 1714. The draft statute for Catalonia, called the Nuria Statute was endorsed on August 3 by the people of Catalonia by an overwhelming majority, but it responded to a federal State model and exceeded in terms of denomination and in terms of powers to what had been approved in the Constitution of 1931 (since the "integral State" responded to a unitary conception, not a federal one), although it conditioned the parliamentary debates of the "integral State", which was finally approved.

In the case of the Basque Country, the process to obtain an autonomy statute began almost at the same time as that of Catalonia. An assembly of the Basque-Navarrese town councils meeting in Estella on June 14 approved a statute that was based on the reestablishment of the Basque privileges abolished by the Law of 1839, together with the Navarra Agreement Law of 1841. The Estella Statute was presented on September 22, 1931 to the Constituent Cortes, but it was not taken into consideration because the project was clearly outside the Constitution that was being approved, among other things, due to its federalist conception and the confessional declaration of the "Basque State"..

The “religious question”

The first decisions of the Provisional Government on the secularization of the state were very moderate. In article 3 of the legal Statute of the Provisional Government, freedom of worship was proclaimed and in the following three weeks the Government approved some secularizing measures, such as the decree of May 6 declaring religious education voluntary. On April 24, Nuncio Federico Tedeschini sent a telegram to all the bishops in which he conveyed the "wish of the Holy See" that they "recommend[ed] to the priests, religious and faithful of their [s]dioceses that they respect[a] constituted powers and obey[ed] them for the maintenance of order and for the common good". Along with the nuncio, the other member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy who embodied this conciliatory attitude towards the republic was the cardinal archbishop of Tarragona Francisco Vidal and Barraquer. However, a large sector of the episcopate was made up of fundamentalist bishops who were not willing to compromise with the republic, which they considered a disgrace, and whose visible and It was the Cardinal Primate and Archbishop of Toledo, Pedro Segura. This, on May 1, published a pastoral in which, after addressing the Spanish situation in a catastrophic tone, he gratefully praised the monarchy and the dethroned monarch Alfonso XIII, "who, throughout his reign, knew preserve the ancient tradition of faith and piety of their elders". The press and the republican parties interpreted the pastoral as a kind of declaration of war against the Republic, and the Provisional Government presented a note of "calm and energetic" protest to the Nuncio and asked that he be removed from office.

Cardinal Pedro Segura

Ten days later, the events known as the burning of convents took place, triggered by the incidents that occurred on Sunday, May 10, on the occasion of the inauguration in Madrid of the Círculo Mónárquico Independiente, during which rumors spread throughout the city that a republican taxi driver had been assassinated by some royalists. A crowd then gathered in front of the headquarters of the monarchist newspaper ABC, where the Civil Guard had to intervene, firing at those who were trying to assault and burn the building, causing several injuries and two deaths, one of them a child. In the early hours of the following day, Monday, May 11, when the provisional government was meeting, the news reached him that the Jesuit House of Profess was burning. The Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, tried to get the Civil Guard out on the streets to restore order, but he was met with opposition from the rest of the cabinet and especially from Manuel Azaña, who, according to Maura, went so far as to state that "all the convents of Madrid are not worth the life of a Republican" and threatened to resign "if there is a single wounded in Madrid for that stupidity". The inaction of the government allowed the insurgents to burn more than a dozen religious buildings. In the afternoon, finally, the Government declared a state of war in Madrid and as the troops occupied the capital, the fires stopped. The next day, Tuesday May 12, while Madrid calmed down, the burning of convents and other religious buildings spread to other towns in the east and south of the peninsula (the most serious events occurred in Malaga). About a hundred Religious buildings burned in whole or in part throughout Spain, and several people died and others were injured during the incidents.

The response of the Provisional Government to the burning of convents was to suspend the publication of the Catholic newspaper El Debate and the monarchist ABC, and also agreed to the expulsion from Spain on May 17 of the fundamentalist bishop of Vitoria Mateo Múgica, for refusing to suspend the pastoral trip he had planned to make to Bilbao, where the Government feared that due to his visit there would be incidents between the Carlists and the clerical Basque nationalists, and the Republicans and the anticlerical socialists. It also approved some measures aimed at ensuring the separation of Church and State without waiting for the meeting of the Constituent Cortes, such as the one that ordered the removal of crucifixes from classrooms where there were students who did not receive education religious.

The Catholic Church criticized all these secularist measures, but once again the most radical reaction came from Cardinal Segura who on June 3 in Rome, where he had been since May 12, published a pastoral letter in which he stated " the very painful impression that certain governmental provisions had produced on them". When Cardinal Segura returned unexpectedly to Spain on June 11, he was arrested by order of the government and on the 15th he was expelled from the country.

Two months later, a new incident occurred that further clouded relations between the Republic and the Catholic Church and in which Cardinal Segura was once again the protagonist. On August 17, among the documentation seized from the vicar of Vitoria, Justo Echeguren, who had been arrested three days earlier at the Spanish-French border by the police, were found instructions from Cardinal Segura to all the dioceses in which the bishops to sell ecclesiastical property in case of need and in which the transfer by the Church of its immovable property to seculars and the placement of movable property in foreign debt titles were advised, all to avoid a possible expropriation by of the State. The immediate response of the Provisional Government was the publication on August 20 of a decree in which the powers of sale and alienation of assets and rights of all kinds of the Catholic Church and religious orders were suspended.

The “military question”

The two main objectives of Manuel Azaña's military reform were to try to achieve a more modern and efficient army, and to subordinate "military power" to civilian power. One of its first decrees, dated April 22, forced the commanders and officers to pledge allegiance to the Republic. To try to solve one of the problems that the Spanish army had, which was the excessive number of officers, commanders, and generals, The Provisional Government, at the proposal of Azaña, approved on April 25, 1931, a decree of extraordinary retirements in which the Army officers who so requested were offered the possibility of voluntarily leaving active service with their full salary. Almost 9,000 commanders (among them 84 generals) took advantage of the measure, approximately 40% of the officers, and thanks to this Azaña was able to subsequently undertake the reorganization of the Army. Another of the issues that Azaña addressed was the controversial issue of the promotions, promulgating some decrees in May and June by which a large part of those produced during the Dictatorship were annulled for "war merits", which meant that some 300 soldiers lost one or two degrees, and that others suffered a strong setback in the ranks, as in the case of General Francisco Franco. Azaña's military reform was strongly opposed by a sector of the officers, by the conservative political circles and by the military media outlets La Correspondencia Militar and Ejército y Armada. Manuel Azaña was accused of wanting to "crush" the Army.

Regarding the second objective of Manuel Azaña's military reform, to "civilize" political life by putting an end to military interventionism by returning the military to the barracks, the most important measure was to repeal the Law of Jurisdictions of 1906 (which during the monarchy had placed civilians accused of crimes against the country or the Army under military jurisdiction). However, the repeal of the Jurisdictions Law did not mean that the Republic would stop using military jurisdiction for the maintenance of the public order without the need to resort to the suspension of constitutional guarantees or declare a state of emergency. Military power continued to occupy a good part of the State administration bodies related to public order, from police headquarters, the Civil Guard (whose character as a militarized body was maintained) and the Assault Guard (the new public order force created by the Republic), until the General Directorate of Security.

The “land question”

Francisco Largo Caballero

One of the most urgent problems that the Provisional Government had to solve in the spring of 1931 was the serious situation that the day laborers were suffering, especially in Andalusia and Extremadura, where the previous winter there had been more than 100,000 unemployed and the abuses in hiring and low wages kept them in misery. Thus, to alleviate the situation of day laborers in the southern half of Spain, the Provisional Government approved, at the proposal of the Minister of Labor, Francisco Largo Caballero, seven agrarian decrees of the Provisional Government that had an enormous impact, especially the Decree of Municipal Terms, of April 20, 1931, which provided unions with greater control of the labor market, by preventing the hiring of day laborers from outside the municipality until they had no work those of the town, and the decree of Mixed Juries, of May 7, by which these organizations were created, made up of 6 employers, 6 workers s and 1 secretary appointed by the Ministry of Labor to regulate working conditions in the field. Thanks to these decrees, the wages of the agricultural campaign experienced substantial increases (from 3.5 pesetas they went on to exceed 5 pesetas a day).

The application of the agrarian decrees of the Provisional Government proposed by the socialist minister Largo Caballero found strong opposition from the owners who relied on the mostly monarchic town halls and the recourse to the Civil Guard to confront the representatives of the National Federation of Land Workers (FNTT) of the UGT and the socialist Casas del Pueblo, which functioned as headquarters for the unionized workers of the different localities. Thus "in the towns and villages, inevitably, the first weeks of the Republic provoked a certain atmosphere of class warfare". peasants, but also that their budgetary management of what they received was remarkably inefficient. Malefakis is surprised that, having received state subsidies of 158 million pesetas from the IRA, at the end of 1935 it had 96 million pending use (60%), especially when most of the land obtained had not had to be expropriated, for belonging to Greatness. In the opinion of Malefakis, in the Spanish republican left, with an urban base and a European vocation, its anti-clerical, anti-militarist and anti-monarchic orientation historically prevailed and it did not become deeply involved in agrarian reform. They were aware of the revolutionary implications of the Agrarian Reform Law and feared that an excessively rapid application of it would produce massive resistance from landowners or chaotic assaults on large estates.

The “social question”

Largo Caballero also undertook a reform of labor relations that consisted of creating a legal framework that would regulate them, consolidating the power of the unions, especially the UGT (a socialist union of which Largo Caballero was one of its leaders), in the Negotiating employment contracts and monitoring compliance.

The two basic pieces of the project were the Labor Contracts Law and the Mixed Jury Law, laws approved under the presidency of Manuel Azaña. The Labor Contracts Law, of November 21, 1931, regulated collective agreements (negotiated by the representatives of employers' associations and unions for minimum periods of two years and which were binding on both parties) and dictated the conditions of suspension and termination of contracts. In addition, it established for the first time the right to paid vacations (seven days a year) and protected the right to strike which, under certain conditions, could not be cause for dismissal. November 1931, extended the mixed jury system (approved in May for the agricultural sector) to industry and services. Its composition was the same and its mission was the same: to mediate in labor conflicts, establishing a conciliatory opinion in each case.

The Provisional Government hoped that these measures would reduce the number of strikes, but social peace did not occur due to the incidence of the economic recession, and above all due to the refusal of the CNT to use the official conciliation mechanisms, which it identified with the corporatism of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The CNT radically opposed the employment contract law and mixed juries and launched direct action to achieve the monopoly of labor negotiations by other means. The employers also opposed it because they were not willing to accept the decisions of the Mixed Juries when they benefited the workers.

Timeline

• April 14: After the municipal elections the Second Republic is proclaimed in Spain and the Revolutionary Committee that emerged from the San Sebastian Pact becomes the Provisional Government. Several dozen members of the Socialist Youths are deployed at the Palace of the East to ensure the security of the royal family, even within it. Upon learning the results, Francesc Macià proclaims the Catalan state and invites the other regions to organize a federal state, although soon afterwards it will collaborate with Madrid prioritizing the stability of the new regime. The financial world misled regime change. A private Dutch loan of sixty million dollars granted to the last government of the monarchy was canceled, a capital flight was recorded and the contribution of the peseta was depreciated by 20% during the first month of the Republic. Indalecio Prieto, Minister of Finance, threatened with fines and confiscations of those involved in the capital flight, negotiated the purchase of foreign currency and closed a gas purchase agreement with the Soviet Union at a price ostensibly cheaper than those offered by British and American companies.
• 28 April: the Interim Government issued its first decree of importance to combat agricultural unemployment. The reforms, promoted by Francisco Largo Caballero, would continue in the following months with the opposition of the majority of mayors and landowners, affections to the monarchy.
• 1 May: the clergy is divided into the observance of the republican regime among those who recommend obedience to the authorities (but without recognizing the republic as a legitimate government) and the openly hostile, such as Cardinal Segura, Cardinal Primate of Toledo, who launches an anti-laicist diatribe in his pastoral of May 1, 1931.
• 6 May: Religious teaching in public school is no longer compulsory, it becomes voluntary.
• May 10: causing great controversy, the Circle Monarchical is inaugurated in Madrid. In the face of rumors that an exalted monarchist had murdered a taxi driver who refused to shout « Long live the King», a group of people provoked an altercation at the doors of that institution.
• May 11: Twenty-four convents, schools and Catholic centers at the national level are burned.
• May 12: the events of the previous day bring to the pass the efforts of Prieto to reactivate the Dutch loan. As a result, deposits are made at the Bank of France.
• May 13: The government declares person non grata Cardinal Pedro Segura, for the provocative and for his criticism of the system addressed to the faithful.
• May 22: The government proclaims religious freedom. In addition, it is decreed that the Ministry of Public Instruction is free to remove the works of art that were kept by religious buildings if they were deemed to be in danger of being damaged.
• May 26: Azaña begins the reform of the Army. The number of divisions is reduced from sixteen to eight; compulsory military service is limited to one year. In addition, the rank of captain-general was eliminated; the captains were an institution with the ability to deal with the Government in situations of tension. The functions of the generals of division would be reduced to the strictly military and efforts would be made to reduce the number of officers from 26,000 to 8300. In order to do so, those officers who voluntarily resign would be offered the withdrawal with the full pay, something that was seen by the senior commanders as a bribe despite the understanding of the necessary reform. However, thousands of officers took action.
• May 29: By decree of the Minister of Public Instruction, Marcelino Domingo, the Patronate of the Pedagogical Missions is created, in order to "disseminate the general culture, modern teaching orientation and citizen education in villages, villas and places, with special attention to the spiritual interests of the population". A Central Commission in Madrid, in collaboration with the University of Madrid and other commissions created for this purpose in provinces, will organize, among many other activities, film sessions, theater and the circulation of mobile libraries by the most distant villages of the Spanish geography.
• June 3: the Spanish bishops protest against the president of the government for his claim to separate Church and State.
• Elections to Constituent Courts of 28 June 1931. Most left-wing parties in Parliament.

• 4 July: the strike of Telefónica and the general strike called by the anarchist union National Confederation of Labour (CNT) take place.
• 14 July: the Military General Academy of Zaragoza is closed, unleashing the anger of the most anti-republican officers.
• 3 August: the draft Statute of Catalonia is approved in referendum with 75% participation and the practice of all votes in favor.
• 22 September: the draft Basque Statute, supported by Basque Carlists and Nationalists, is rejected in the Constituent Courts for overcoming constitutional limits.

The 1931 Constituent Courts (scaths per game).

• 14 October: Niceto Alcalá-Zamora resigns as president of the Government for his disagreement with the approval of article 26 of the Constitution, which prohibits the exercise of teaching to the Catholic Church. He replaces Manuel Azaña, who will form the Second Provisional Government of the Second Spanish Republic.
• 29 October: the Defence of the Republic Act is enacted.
• October: Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and Onésimo Redondo founded the JONS, a fascist organisation. Although politically it is a marginal group, it receives occasional donations from Juan March, Antonio Goicoechea and some Basque bankers.
• 9 December: Approval by the Courts of the Constitution of the Spanish Republic of 1931.

First biennium or Social-Azañista Biennium (1931-1933)

The first biennium of the Second Spanish Republic or social-azañista biennium, also known as reformist biennium or transformative biennium, constitutes the stage of the Second Republic in which the coalition government of left-wing republicans and socialists chaired by Manuel Azaña, formed on December 15, 1931 after approving the Constitution of 1931 and after rejecting the Radical Republican Party its participation in it for disagreeing with the continuity in the Socialist government, deepens the reforms initiated by the Provisional Government whose purpose is to modernize the Spanish economic, social, political and cultural reality. The new government was formed after the election of Niceto Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, who confirmed Manuel Azaña as President of the Government.

But the whole range of reforms met with great resistance from the social and corporate groups that the reforms were trying to “dismount” from their acquired positions: landowners, big businessmen, financiers and employers, the Catholic Church, religious orders, Catholic opinion, monarchical opinion, "Africanist" militarism. And there was also resistance to republican reformism of the opposite sign: that of extreme revolutionism, headed by anarchist organizations (the CNT and the FAI) and a sector of socialism, the one linked to the UGT union. For them the republic represented the "bourgeois order" (without too many differences with previous political regimes, dictatorship and monarchy) that had to be destroyed to achieve "libertarian communism", according to the former, or "socialism", according to the latter.

The "religious question" and educational policy

From the approval of the Constitution of 1931, the republican-socialist government promulgated a series of decrees and presented some laws for approval by the Cortes that made the state non-denominational effective and that allowed it to assume those administrative and that the Catholic Church had performed up to then. The first measure it took was the Decree of January 23, 1932, which complied with the provisions of Article 26 of the Constitution: the dissolution of the Jesuit order and the nationalization of most of its assets (schools and residences, especially), which came to be managed by a Board of Trustees.

Fulfilling another constitutional mandate, seven days later, the decree of January 30, 1932 secularized the cemeteries, which became the property of the municipalities. A few days later, on February 2, 1932, the Cortes approved the law of divorce.

The moment of greatest confrontation between the Azaña government and the Catholic Church was over the Law on Confessions and Religious Congregations, whose debate in the Cortes took place in the first months of 1933. The Spanish cardinals and bishops, led by the new cardinal primate Isidro Gomá y Tomás, published an episcopal letter that considered the law "a harsh insult to the divine rights of the Church" and in which they called for the mobilization of Catholics. On June 3, the day after the promulgation of the law, an encyclical of Pope Pius XI (Dilectissima Nobis) was made public, in which he condemned the "anti-Christian spirit" of the Spanish regime, affirming that the Law of Congregations "can never be invoked against the imprescriptible rights of the Church."

What the Law of Congregations did was develop articles 26 and 27 of the Constitution: it regulated Catholic public worship; it abolished the endowment of «cult and clergy» of the State; it nationalized part of the ecclesiastical patrimony (temples, monasteries, seminaries, etc.) although they remained at the disposal of the Church; and finally, it established the closure of Catholic secondary schools for October 1 and primary schools for December 31, 1933.

Education policy

One of the priorities of the Provisional Government had already been the construction of public primary schools, to put an end to one of the scourges of Spanish society, the still high illiteracy (in 1931 estimates ranged between 30 and 50% of the total population). It was estimated that to serve the more than 1.5 million children who were out of school, the state would need to build some 27,000 new schools, at a rate of 5,000 each year. At the end of 1932, the Minister of Public Instruction, the socialist Fernando de los Ríos, informed the Cortes that almost 10,000 schools had been built or enabled, but the planned plan could not be fulfilled due to lack of resources due to the drop in income. of the Public Treasury due to the economic depression and the balanced budget policy decided by the government.

The needs of state primary schools increased even more when the law of Congregations was approved, which had established the closure of religious primary schools for December 31, 1933, and the calculation that the ministry had made was that to serve to the 350,000 children in those schools, it would be necessary to hastily build some 7,000 more schools.

In the summer of 1933, the Azaña government launched «the most notable of its educational experiments»: the pedagogical missions. It was an initiative of the art critic Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, linked to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, who wanted to bring “the breath of progress” to the most isolated and backward towns in Spain. Thus teachers and students, most of them from the University of Madrid, went to the villages with reproductions of famous paintings and with records and films, and on improvised stages they performed plays by Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. They also brought books and medicines and helped build schools. The theater group La Barraca, created by Federico García Lorca, also participated in this project.

A sample of the determined determination of the government in educational policy was the increase in the budgets of the Ministry of Instruction, although on many occasions they were found to be insufficient. The promotion of coeducation, in addition to the fact that religion ceased to be a compulsory subject, sharpened the confrontation with the Church. There were also interesting projects in the educational field, based on the work of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the Board of Expansion of Studies (modernization of the University, expansion of centers and high school students) and important achievements in the field. cultural (mobile libraries, educational missions). It was, therefore, the most determined action in the history of the country up to then to improve Spanish education. And this was not only in investments, but also trying to introduce pedagogical improvements and giving way to new currents in this matter.

Hospitals, home of the soldier, were priorities for the politics of Popular Culture after the outbreak of the war, without neglecting trade unions and anti-fascist political organizations

The library policy coordinated by Teresa Andrés Zamora brought public reading and Popular Culture libraries to the organizations of the popular front and, with the outbreak of the war, took them to the trenches and hospitals, as well as to the schools and municipalities. It remained active until the last moment when all the staff were dismissed and the libraries were confiscated. Shortly before, the Central Reference and Reading Library was inaugurated, which was installed in the Student Residence.

The Franco dictatorship destroyed the republican library action, but it flourished in Latin America, where the exiled library staff was able to shape "a second cultural renaissance in exile"

The “social question”

The first reforms in this field were agreed by the Provisional Government at the proposal of the Minister of Labor, the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the UGT, who continued with the same position in the Azaña government. The two basic pieces of his project for the regulation of labor relations, the Labor Contracts Law and the Mixed Juries Law, were highly contested by both the CNT and the employers.

The number of strikes and violent incidents as a result of them (which created serious public order problems) increased throughout the first two years of the Republic, mainly due to the refusal of the CNT to use the mechanisms conciliation officers. What was at stake were two union models, socialist and anarcho-syndicalist, almost opposed, which also continued to have a different presence in the various regions, because if the socialists were preponderant in Madrid, Asturias and the Basque Country, the anarchists were in Andalusia, Valencia and Catalonia.

The employers also mobilized against Largo Caballero's social and labor reform. Thus, at the end of January 1933, in the midst of a political crisis due to the events in Casas Viejas, the Spanish Employers' Confederation addressed an open letter to Azaña in which it pointed out the "vertiginous speed" with which the new social legislation was being approved and complained of the mixed juries that practically always agreed with the workers, thanks to the vote of the representative of the Ministry of Labor that broke the ties. The Economic Union, which brought together businessmen and economists, expressed itself in similar terms and complained about the "socialist" tendencies of the Government. These mobilizations came together in an economic-social assembly held in Madrid in July 1933, in which the Socialists were asked to leave the government, whom they held responsible for the "ruin of the economy" due to the increase in costs (because of wage increases) and worker intervention (the "cold socialization" they called it) and because of its ineffectiveness in stopping and reducing the number of strikes and guaranteeing social peace.

The “military question”

When Azaña's second government was formed in December 1931, the military reform was already underway. It had been the work of Azaña himself, who in the Provisional Government held the Ministry of War, a position that since October 1931 had been combined with that of president of the government. The decrees on promotions were confirmed by the Cortes by a Recruitment law and Official Promotions of September 12, 1932, which also established a scale for promotions in which seniority and professional training prevailed. Likewise, this law unified career officers and those from the troops on a single scale.

Officers who had generally opposed Manuel Azaña's military reform also protested when a September 1932 law forced candidates to enter officer academies to serve in the army for six months and follow a certain number of courses. courses at a university. "In their view, the college education requirement was an attempt to dilute the military spirit of a new generation of officers... In reality the government was seeking to break down the old barriers of caste and mutual ignorance by putting future officers in contact, during a part of their education, with the future members of the liberal professionals".

In March 1932, the Cortes approved a law that authorized the Minister of War, that is, Manuel Azaña, to transfer to the reserve those generals who had not received any assignment for six months. It was a covert way to get rid of those generals whose fidelity to the Republic was doubted by the government. The same law provided that officers who had accepted the retirement established in the decree of May 1931 would lose their pensions if they were found guilty. of defamation according to the Defense of the Republic Law. This last measure raised a lively debate in the Cortes, since both Miguel Maura and Ángel Ossorio and Gallardo denounced the injustice of which the around 5,000 recently retired officers who at any given moment criticized the Government could be victims. Azaña responded that it would be intolerable for the republic to have to pay its "enemies".

Likewise, in December 1931, the non-commissioned officer corps was created, with the possibility of joining the officer corps in the Complementary Scale and also 60% of the places in the military academies were reserved for them. In this way, it was intended to democratize the social and ideological base of the Army commanders. And it was also intended to narrow the professional vacuum that existed between officers and non-commissioned officers.

Regarding compulsory military service, this was reduced to twelve months (four weeks for high school and university students), but it maintained the cash redemption of military service, although it could only be applied after six months of remaining in the ranks.

Finally, the application of military jurisdiction to civilian individuals for reasons of public order was maintained, since the 1931 Constitution maintained within its jurisdiction "military crimes" and "arms services and the discipline of all the armed institutes", the latter concept that included not only the Armed Forces "that defended the national territory", but also the forces in charge "only of maintaining Public Order" (Civil Guard, Carabineros and any other possible new militarized body). In other words, the councils of war were, for example, competent to prosecute civilians who had expressed criticism of the Armed Forces or the Civil Guard. And they were also competent to try those who had threatened public order, as happened in the anarchist insurrections in Alto Llobregat in January 1932 and in all of Spain in January 1933. As the socialist Juan Simeón Vidarte pointed out:

Although that seemed odd, the Code of Military Justice and all the clashes between the people and the Guardia Civil had not been amended, the Councils of War continued to intervene.

The attempted coup led by General Sanjurjo, in August 1932, was an example of the malaise of a part of the Army for reasons that were not strictly political. "The very strong campaign unleashed by the conservative media against the reform, personalized in the figure of Azaña, also contributed to turning the prime minister into the true black beast of many soldiers."

The “regional question”

Regions entitled to appoint a member in the Constitutional Guarantees Tribunal

The Statute of Catalonia

Between January and April 1932, a commission of the Cortes adapted the draft Statute of Catalonia (the so-called Nuria Statute) to the 1931 Constitution and even so found enormous opposition in the chamber for its approval, especially among the agrarian minority and the deputies of the Traditionalist Communion who had already separated from the PNV deputies in the Basque-Navarre minority, and which included a broad “anti-separatist” street mobilization. "Manuel Azaña risked the life of his government and his personal prestige in approving the Statute". which was finally approved on September 9 by 314 votes in favor (all the parties that supported the government, plus the majority of the representatives of the Radical Republican Party) and 24 against. The Statute was less than what the Catalan nationalists had expected (the final version eliminated all the phrases that implied sovereignty for Catalonia; the federal formula was rejected; the Castilian and Catalan languages were declared equally official, etc.), "but when the president of the Council of Ministers went to Barcelona for the presentation ceremony, they received him with a tremendous ovation". The first elections to the Parlament took place two months later (in November 1932) and were won by Esquerra Republican of Catalonia, followed at a great distance by the Regionalist League. Francesc Macià was thus confirmed as President of the Generalitat.

Through the Statute, Catalonia became an autonomous region, which would be governed by its own government, the Generalitat of Catalonia, made up of a president, a parliament and an executive council. The Generalitat would have legislative and executive powers in finance, economy, education and culture, transport and communications; the Government of the republic would deal with foreign relations and the army.

The Statute of the Basque Country

Autonomic referendum on 5 November 1933 in Éibar for the approval of a new Statute

After the rejection of the Estella Statute due to its clear incompatibility with the 1931 Constitution, in December 1931 the Cortes commissioned the provisional Management Commissions of the Provincial Councils, dominated by the Republicans and the Socialists, to prepare a new project of Statute, which in the end was agreed with the PNV. An Assembly of Town Halls held in Pamplona in June 1932 approved the project, but the Carlists rejected it, so, having the majority in Navarra, they left this territory outside the scope of the future "autonomous region". This forced a new wording of the project that excluded Navarra and a new delay. A new obstacle arose when the mandatory referendum on the "Managers Statute" was held on November 5, 1933, in the midst of the campaign for the elections to Cortes, the favorable votes in Álava did not reach the majority of the census, again by the opposition of the Carlists (Álava was a province that, like Navarra, had a lesser Basque nationalist identity due to the strong implantation of Carlism).

The Statute of Galicia.

As for Galicia, the first initiative, in charge of the Santiago de Compostela city council, was taken later, in April 1932. But only nine months later, in December, the first phase of the established process had already been completed by the Constitution of 1931, having approved the majority of the Galician town councils a draft statute, which was largely inspired by the Catalan Statute that had just been approved by the Cortes. However, as in the Basque case, the victory of the center-right in the November 1933 elections paralyzed the process.

The “agrarian question”: the Agrarian Reform Law

During the first biennium, the agrarian decrees of the Provisional Government approved at the proposal of the Minister of Labor, the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero, continued to be applied, and the opposition of the owners who relied on the mostly monarchic town halls and on the resource to the Civil Guard to confront the representatives of the National Federation of Land Workers (FNTT) of UGT. The latter grew a lot during this time, going from about 100,000 members in 1931 to about 450,000 in the summer of the following year (to almost half of the members of the entire UGT), the majority of the new members being landless peasants who were grateful to the socialists for giving them their first opportunity to make their voices heard when negotiating with landowners. -Agrarian, joined in 1931 the Association of Rural Property Owners, and in March 1933, the Spanish Confederation of Agricultural Employers (in whose founding manifesto it was said: «socialism is the enemy; he and his allies; he and his collaborators »). Many of the leaders of the future CEDA will emerge from these organizations.

The Law on Agrarian Reform

After the rejection of two draft bills for agrarian reform, in March 1932 a third drafted by the team of the Ministry of Agriculture of the radical-socialist Marcelino Domingo was taken as the basis of the debate in the Cortes. But the discussion of the The bill was lengthening and would have lasted even longer had the attempted coup headed by General Sanjurjo on August 10, 1932 not taken place, which, when defeated, gave the government the definitive impetus for the approval of the Law (The failure of Sanjurjo's coup d'état also unblocked the debate on the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia).

The agrarian reform, finally approved, consisted of the expropriation (with compensation, except for the lands of the nobility that were "grandes de España" for their alleged involvement in the "Sanjurjada") of the lands of latifundista Spain (Andalusia, Extremadura, the south of La Mancha and the province of Salamanca) included in the sections indicated in Base 5 of the Law, which contemplated four types of expropriable land: jurisdictional manors, poorly cultivated land, systematically rented and those that were in irrigated areas and had not been converted to irrigation.

Thus, the Agrarian Reform Law established the expropriation with compensation of large farms that were not cultivated directly by their owners, as well as uncultivated and irrigated farms that were not irrigated, to be distributed among peasant families or among communities of farmers. To carry out the redistribution of land, the Agrarian Reform Institute (IRA) was created, on which the provincial boards and peasant communities depended. The Institute was granted an annual credit of 50 million pesetas and it was projected to settle 60 to 75 thousand peasants annually. The mechanism of action was as follows: the expropriated or confiscated lands became the property of the Institute, which transferred them to the provincial boards, which in turn handed them over to the peasant communities, for their collective or individual exploitation, as they had decided. before the peasants. The problems that arose to carry out this work were numerous and serious, without counting on the opposition of the expropriated or confiscated landowners, the excessively bureaucratic nature of the Institute, the lack of data to know the lands belonging to the same owner, the lack of previous studies on the quality and yields of the land, the exclusion of pasture land, which marginalized livestock. Despite everything, it was the first effort to distribute land among the peasants.

However, and despite the great expectations it had raised, the effects of the Agrarian Reform Law were very limited: at the end of 1933 only 24,203 ha had been occupied, distributed among 4,339 peasants, to which we would have to add others three or four thousand on the lands previously expropriated from Greatness. The main reason for this failure in the application was that the Agrarian Reform Institute (IRA), which was the body in charge of applying the law, was endowed with insufficient human and economic resources, due to the lack of money from the public Treasury. and the boycott carried out by private banks (family and economically linked to the landowners) of the National Agricultural Credit Bank, created by the Law to finance the reform.

The slowness in the application of the law was alleviated with a complementary measure, which was the Crop Intensification Decree of October 22, 1932, which allowed the temporary occupation of farmland that had ceased to be leased to growers and would have been dedicated only to livestock in the southern half of Spain (mainly Extremadura). The measure affected 1,500 farms in 9 provinces (some 125,000 hectares) and gave work to 40,108 families, mainly from Extremadura, whose members were unemployed.

The failure of the agrarian reform was one of the main causes of the acute social unrest of the period 1933-34, because the announcement of the reform made many day laborers believe in a rapid delivery of land, which finally did not take place due to which they were soon disappointed. This led to the radicalization of the National Federation of Land Workers (FNTT) of the UGT, thus coinciding with the CNT, which from the beginning had fought an agrarian reform that, according to it, consolidated the capitalist model in rural areas and made it impossible for a "real" revolution to take place.

At the other side of the political spectrum, the agrarian reform united the traditional dominant social sectors in agriculture and contributed, to a similar or even greater degree than the "religious question", to consolidate them as a bloc in opposition to the republican regime. Already in August 1931 they created the National Association of Owners of Rustic Estates, in defense of the "legitimate property right", and making use of the old cacique networks and the continuous appeal to the intervention of the Civil Guard, they boycotted the application of the "decrees agrarian». Likewise, in the Cortes the agrarian minority carried out a spectacular obstruction of the debates of the law that contributed notably to the delay in its approval.

Opposition to the reforms

The monarchical right

Flag of the Carlist Requeté

The Alfonsino monarchists, unlike the Carlists whose Traditionalist Communion continued to grow and organize their militias of requetés, did not set out to form a mass movement but acted on three fronts: the cultural one, updating the traditionalist and conservative discourse, through through a group of intellectuals grouped around the magazine Acción Española; the politician, founding his own party, called Renovación Española, which will try to form an anti-republican front with the nascent Spanish fascism, the Carlists and the less "accidental" sector of the CEDA; and above all the insurrectionary, seeking the collaboration of the sectors of the Spanish Army that remained faithful to the monarchy (despite having sworn allegiance to the Republic) and those others discontent with Azaña's military reform.

The attempted coup by General Sanjurjo in August 1932

Although General Sanjurjo at first did not show much interest in leading a military pronouncement that would overthrow the Azaña government, his opinion changed when he was dismissed in January 1932 from his position as director of the Civil Guard, as a result of the events de Arnedo, and appointed general director of Carabineros, a position of lesser importance.

The attempted coup d'état took place on August 10, 1932. In Madrid, a group of armed soldiers and civilians under the command of generals Barrera and Cavalcanti tried to take over the Ministry of War, where Azaña was located, but several Civil Guard and Assault units put down the rebellion, in which nine rebels died and several were wounded. In Seville, on the other hand, where General Sanjurjo had located his headquarters, he did manage to get the garrison to support the coup and the state of war was declared, although Sanjurjo kept the troops quartered. He published a manifesto in which he announced that he was not revolting against the republic as such (which disappointed part of the monarchists who had supported him), but against the current "illegitimate" Cortes, summoned by a "terror regime", and that had brought Spain to the brink of "ruin, iniquity, and dismemberment." The unions immediately called a general strike in the city and due to the lack of support from other garrisons, General Sanjurjo fled in the direction of Portugal, but was arrested in Huelva near the border.

Sanjurjo was sentenced to death by court martial, although the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by decree of the President of the Republic. The military and royalist civilians who had participated in or supported the coup fell almost all the repressive measures provided for by the Law for the Defense of the Republic: 145 chiefs and officers were arrested and deported to Villa Cisneros in the Spanish colony of Western Sahara, as had been done with 104 anarchists a few months earlier on the occasion of the anarchist insurrection of Alt Llobregat; its most prominent media outlets, the ABC newspaper and the Acción Española magazine, were suspended; many political and cultural venues were closed; the properties of the "grande de España" nobility (accused of financing the coup) were expropriated without compensation for their lands by a law passed by Parliament, etc.

The Fascists

After the failure of the Sanjurjo coup, the monarchists began to financially support the small fascist groups that had emerged in the previous two years, pressing them to unify into a single organization. In 1931, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and Onésimo Redondo had merged their respective groups to form the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS), organized into "squads" on the model of the "squadra d'azzione" of Italian fascism. Another fascist group was led by the lawyer José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, who had founded together with the journalist and writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas and the aviator Julio Ruiz de Alda the Spanish Syndicalist Movement (MES), which the "jonsistas" considered little "revolutionary". The MES was joined by the pro-fascist Spanish Front, headed by Alfonso García Valdecasas, a former follower of José Ortega y Gasset and integrated with him in the Agrupación al Servicio de la República. The definitive impulse of the MES group was thanks to the signing in August 1933 of the so-called "Pact of El Escorial" by which the Alfonsino monarchists of the Spanish Renovation promised to finance the movement in exchange for it adopting a large part of its postulates. On October 29, 1933, the MES held a rally at the Teatro de la Comedia theater in Madrid, a kind of refounding of the movement that came to be called the Spanish Falange. JONS, which until the spring of 1936 remained a minuscule organization.

The Catholic right «accident» of the CEDA

CEDA Logo

The hostility of the Catholic Church and the sectors that supported it to the declaration of the non-denominational nature of the State and to the radical secularizing policy undertaken by the republican-socialist government presided over by Azaña, gave birth to political Catholicism, which managed to build from Acción Nacional (since March 1932 called Acción Popular) a great mass party that was the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), although this would not have happened without the leadership, ideological discourse and organizational resources of the Church catholic. This confederation of parties brought together not only the oligarchies of the old regime but thousands of poor and middle-class farmers politically led by members of the urban middle classes, who in turn felt harmed by the reformist policies of the left-wing coalition, such as certain professional and civil servant sectors, both civil and military, or intellectual circles linked to the conservative tradition. And all of them viewed the secularism of the State with horror and the rise of the working class with fear. «The new Catholic party began its activity seeking a direct confrontation with the government on the two points that could serve to attract greater affiliation: the Republicans were described as cold persecutors of the Church, and, consequently, enemies of the Fatherland, and the Socialists were presented as enemies of property, family and order. This is how Acción Popular, and from its founding congress in February and March 1933, the CEDA, achieved a mass audience linking the defense of the Catholic religion to the fight for property as the foundation of the social order. "The CEDA was led by the young lawyer José María Gil-Robles, professor at the Law School of the University of Salamanca, and at the time of its foundation it claimed to have 600,000 members, which made it the largest party of the Second Republic.

The CNT

Flag of the CNT-FAI.

The CNT opposed the Provisional Government, first, and the Social-Azañista government, later, as it saw how the government's repressive measures attacked it (as in the days of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship) and as that the new and lengthy labor legislation of Largo Caballero was being promulgated, which tried to impose the "corporate" union model of the UGT by decree, and which the CNT considered as an attempt to reduce its influence over the working class and as a "betrayal » to the true «social revolution».

The policy of confrontation with the republic also had internal repercussions in the CNT because it reinforced the anarchist tendency (identified with the Iberian Anarchist Federation, FAI) against the syndicalist tendency, led by Juan Peiró and Ángel Pestaña, who will arrive to spread his theses against insurrectionism in a manifesto called "of the Thirty" in August 1931. Many of these "treintistas" were expelled from the CNT throughout 1932.

The first important example of the confrontational policy of the CNT was the call in July 1931 for a strike by the employees of the National Telephone Company of Spain, which gave rise to bloody incidents in Seville, with the result of 30 dead and about 200 wounded. "The anarchists discovered that a Republic could treat them with the same severity as a monarchical government". Libertarian" and the Republican flags were replaced by the red and black flags of the CNT. The Army had to intervene to put an end to the insurrection. There were many detainees and some two hundred CNT leaders were subjected to the Law for the Defense of the Republic, for which they were deported without a judicial order to the African colonies. With this fact of the deportees, the confrontation between the CNT and the republican-socialist government became even more radical.

Photograph taken shortly after the events of Old House (January 1933). The bodies of the peasants can still be seen without burying.

Just one year later, a new insurrectionary movement took place in January 1933, this time general, which caused serious incidents in Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and Andalusia, expeditiously repressed by government forces, which caused numerous deaths. The most serious events took place in the village of Casas Viejas (Cádiz) where the intervention of public order forces caused a massacre. The events were used by the opposition to attack the government (the false news spread that Azaña himself had given the order to shoot the guards), and although he was able to overcome the crisis, in the medium term "Casas Viejas" would be enormously harmful.

In the Cadiz town of Casas Viejas, the guards under the command of Captain Manuel Rojas entered the town with shots, burning down the house where some peasants had taken refuge, among them Francisco Cruz Gutiérrez, known as "Seisdedos", who was burned to death together with other residents when their hut was set on fire by the Assault Guard, and then they proceeded to a series of arrests: shooting participants, suspects, neighbors and their relatives at random, a total of fourteen residents were executed.

The crisis of the republican-socialist coalition: the end of the Azaña government

Against all odds, 1933 turned out to be a very difficult year for the Azaña government. It began with the anarchist insurrection of January 1933, which led to the Casas Viejas massacre and undermined Republican credibility; The criticisms of the opposition were exemplified in the famous expression of the radical deputy Martínez Barrio "blood, mud and tears" to refer to the government, which was used from then on as a slogan by the detractors of the Republic (even during the Franco regime). The bad news about the economy and the strike converged with the offensive of the employers' organizations against the mixed jury system, the irruption of Catholicism as a mass political movement with the founding of the CEDA and the harassment of the Radical Republican Party.

The opposition of the Radical Republican Party to the continuity in the government of the socialists, once the Constitution of 1931 was approved, was fundamentally based on the fact that an important part of its social base was made up of the urban and rural middle classes, merchants, shopkeepers and small businessmen who rejected the socio-labour reforms approved by the socialist Francisco Largo Caballero. The leader of the radicals Alejandro Lerroux thus became the spokesman for all those who hated the socialists and pressured Niceto Alcalá Zamora to withdraw his support for the Azaña government. «Let the socialists leave became the unanimous cry of businessmen and employers in the spring and summer of 1933, when the economic crisis and unemployment reached their highest point and the CNT focused its strikes and mobilizations against mixed juries».

The key point in the rupture of the coalition of the left republicans and the socialists, however, was not the "external" pressures or the loss of support, but rather the intense internal debate that Spanish socialism experienced over the convenience of staying in government. The discontent of the socialist bases in the countryside was growing, disillusioned by the scope and pace of the agrarian reform, and there had already been bloody confrontations such as the events in Castilblanco (Badajoz) or the events in Arnedo (Logroño) between day laborers from the FNTT-UGT and the Civil Guard, which was under the orders of a government where there were three socialist ministers. In the cities the economic crisis worsened, unemployment increased and the employers radicalized their opposition to the socio-labour regulations. All this accentuated the gap between the socialist bases and "their" government. On the other hand, the UGT leaders observed the faster growth of their CNT rivals and attributed it to the fact that they had not committed themselves to collaborating with a "Bourgeois" government. The events in Casas Viejas are what ended up making the idea that the time had come to abandon the alliance with the republican bourgeoisie prevail among the socialists.

Finally, it was the pressure of the Catholics mobilized by the recently created CEDA on the presidency of the republic on the occasion of the debate on the Law of Congregations that caused the first crisis of the Azaña government. Alcalá Zamora and his conscientious scruples as a Catholic induced him to delay until the last day the working period to sanction the Law of Congregations, approved by the Cortes on May 17 but not promulgated until June 2. The following day, Alcalá Zamora withdrew his confidence in the government and the government had to resign.The president of the republic was convinced that public opinion was leaning to the right.

However, Alcalá Zamora had no choice but to reappoint Azaña because he could not find any other candidate who could obtain the support of the majority of the deputies. Thus, on June 13, Azaña's third government was formed, with a composition very similar to the second (the Socialists kept their three ministers) although they expanded their parliamentary support to include a minister from the Federal Democratic Republican Party, José Franchy Roca, new Minister of Industry and Commerce, and Lluís Companys, from the Republican Left of Catalonia, as Minister of the Navy.

The new opportunity to remove Azaña was presented to Alcalá-Zamora at the beginning of September 1933. On the 3rd, the elections of the fifteen members of the Court of Constitutional Guarantees that corresponded to elect the city councils had been held, and During these elections, the opposition parties, CEDA and the Radical Republican Party, mobilized and the CEDA won six positions and the Radical Republican Party four, while the Republican-Socialists only obtained five. Azaña sought the vote of confidence from the Cortes and obtained it, but the next day, September 7, the president withdrew his vote for the second time and Azaña had to resign.

Alcalá Zamora entrusted the formation of a new government to Alejandro Lerroux, but his government of "republican concentration" (with the socialists outside the Executive who declared that "all the commitments made between the republicans and the socialists had been broken") It only lasted three weeks, because Marcelino Domingo's left-wing republicans, socialists and "independent" radical-socialists did not trust him. Consequently, the president of the republic appointed Diego Martínez Barrio, also a radical, as the new president, whose sole mission would be to organize new elections for the first round on November 19 (and the second round on December 3). It would be the first time in the history of Spain, and one of the first in Europe, that women would vote (six million were on the census).

Timeline

1931

• December 16: republican-socialist coalition government, headed by Azaña.
• 20 December: the Federation of Earth Workers convenes a peaceful demonstration to ask for work. In the small village of Extremadura of Castilblanco, the Guardia Civil prevents the demonstration without firing at the crowd as usual. The Federation, in response, calls for a two-day general strike. More demonstrations are called, and the mayor sends a group of civilian guards to the village house to negotiate. A group of women start to unbelief, so one of the guards shoots a deterrent shot. Then, a group of people swoop over them and lynch them. Public opinion and political class are shaken and lynching heads are sentenced to life imprisonment.
• Other projects initiated first by the Minister of Public Instruction Marcelino Domingo and his successor Fernando de los Ríos include the investment of 400 million pesetas of the time for the mass construction of primary schools (with the hands of the director of Primary Education Rodolfo Llopis erected 7000 in the first ten months of the new government, of a total of 27 000 foreseen by the Ministry as necessary for all the children of Spain to have access to primary school The most conservative councils do not believe in the initiative from the beginning and, since the end of 1932, the monarchical and Catholic deputies openly torpedo it until it is lost at the bottom of the discussion the religious question.

1932

• January 5: As in the end of December, the peasants and the Guardia Civil face in Arnedo, La Rioja. The guards, unlike in Castilblanco, open indiscriminate fire on a group of peasants who came to a negotiation with the bosses, killing four women and one child and wounding sixteen people. Public opinion becomes scandalized and the event will provoke the dismissal after a month of the Director General of the Guardia Civil, José Sanjurjo, and its replacement by Miguel Cabanellas.
• 10 January: a carlist rally takes place. At the exit of the same, some affiliates were faced with young socialists who had come to do a countermanifestation and opened fire, killing three people and wounding an undetermined number, in addition to a civilian guard. The investigation found that some shots had come from the convent of the Mothers Reparators, so it proceeded to its closure. In addition, the College of the Sacred Heart was fined when in a register an arms cache was found inside.
• January 24: The government, applying Article 26 of the Constitution, orders to dissolve the Company of Jesus and confiscate all its goods in Spain including its investments in Telefónica and in the electricity and transport companies, but it is difficult to follow its network of screen companies. The decree implies the exclusion of Jesuits who ran educational institutions, which entails different consequences for the centers: some like the University of Comillas managed to maintain their activity, but others had to cease. Among those affected were centers of higher studies such as the Pontifical University Comillas, the Chemical Institute and the Biological Laboratory of Sarriá, the Catholic Institute of Arts and Industry of Madrid, the School and Commercial Centre of Valencia, the observatories of Roquetas and Granada, the Faculty of Letters and the Commercial University of Deusto, then the only Faculty of Economic Sciences of Spain, which would not reopen their classrooms. In some cases these centers became the property of the State, so their titles finally received the official recognition they had not had during the monarchy. In other cases the Jesuits continued to direct them as if it were any private company, and the property of some residences was discovered that it had been years since the inhabitants themselves even though the Company was the holder.
• January 30: To replace the urban police bodies the Assault Guard is created. In successive months he will be provided with personnel and means to deal with sporadic strikes and clashes between street gangs.
• February 24: The Divorce Act is passed. Although the measure did not involve a flood of divorces, they did run ink rivers with the divorces of some prominent people, such as Constance de la Mora Maura, granddaughter of the conservative Antonio Maura. The influential Catholic Church considered the measures taken by the Government of Azaña as illegal and offensive acts.
• March: it is decided to pass to the reservation to all those generals who do not receive an appointment within six months. This measure is intended, on the one hand, to lose the body of officers, and on the other to force the withdrawal of generals who may pose a risk to the democratic system. Among those affected are Emilio Mola and Millán Astray.
• April: a clash between socialists and carlists in Pamplona is waged with two dead and eight wounded by fire. Sporadic political violence and strikes or strikes, however, did not jeopardize the stability of the government.
• May 13: the CASE is created (Army Sub-altern Assistant Corps) with the intention of regularizing the situation of the civilian employees of the Army such as concierges, typists, mechanics or delineants.
• June 27: Carabanchel incident. Generals Villegas, Caballero and Goded mobilized to Carabanchel three infantry regiments of the Madrid garrison in the framework of military practices with cadets. After a series of critical speeches with government policy and appealing to the traditional interventionist vision of the Army in civil life, Goded ends his speech with a Live Spain... and nothing else.omitting on purpose Long live the Republic! which by law is bound to pronounce. Then, Lieutenant Colonel Julio Mangada, of known liberal ideas, shaves his attitude, to what Goded responds by sending him to arrest. It is publicly known that some generals and high ranks of the army such as Villegas and Goded are monarchists and are believed to be involved in anti-republican conspiracies, so Azaña takes advantage of the incident to relieve the principals involved from their positions.
• August 10: Failed coup d ' état of General Sanjurjothe Sanjurjada). Sanjurjo is arrested in Huelva, when he tried to flee to Portugal. Judged and sentenced to death, the President of the Republic sentenced him to life imprisonment. Among the detainees as organizers of the Golpe are other high-ranking leaders such as Goded, Cavalcanti and Barrera, up to a total of 145 collaborators.
• 9 September: rapid approval of the Catalan Statute in Parliament. After the failed coup d ' état of the previous month, the majority of the intervening parties agree that intrinsically fighting for minor issues endangers the stability of the Republic. Since the adoption of the Statute in referendum, the parties had long polluted Catalan questiontheir role within the State and the territorial organization of the nascent Republic, and the discussions were dead after more than a year of meetings, full and media noise. However, the Sanjurjo State coup made the political class aware that there were a number of well-located people determined to end the system and to establish a dictatorship or restore the monarchy.
• 9 September: for the same reasons, the Law on the Bases for Agrarian Reform, the most ambitious project of the Second Republic for its economic and social decalation, which, however, will not yield the desired results. It will be replaced by the Agrarian Counter-Reformation Act in the following biennium.
• September: Over the month, the Agrarian Reform Institute (IRA) is created for inventory and expropriation. Azaña continues to carry out reforms in the Army: a Train Corps is created and the aviation budget is increased. The academies of specialists from five to two are reduced and it is necessary that all the candidates for the official should study a certain number of hours of liberal arts at the university level. Furthermore, the military courts cease to have their own jurisdiction and are subordinate to the civil courts. The first two measures are applauded by the military, but the other measures, decreed with the motivation of bringing the army closer to civil society and ending its sense of independence and superiority over successive governments, are generally received with friarity.

1933

• January 8: Anarchist uprising at the national level (the so-called Revolution of January 1933). Anarchists of all the Spanish geography rebel with the aim of establishing libertarian communism. Several provincial councils are set on fire and in Barcelona the workers and the police face, leaving a balance of 37 dead and 300 wounded in three days. In some places like Valencia or Seville the state of war is declared and the workers' unions are closed down.
• January 11th: the events of Casas Viejas take the covers of the newspapers. The Assault Guard faces the peasants in Casas Viejas, Cadiz, and aims to surrender to the leader of the rebellion in the village, which is locked in his house. Faced with the refusal, the agents open fire killing all the inhabitants of the house and then set fire to the place. At the same time, a platoon of the Assault Guard irregularly shoots fourteen prisoners, and at the time his commanding officer, Captain Rojas, claims to receive direct orders from Manuel Azaña, and attributes to him the phrase "The Shots, the Beard". However, Azaña denied having given that kind of order and after the investigation it could never be demonstrated its involvement in the facts. Alejandro Lerroux presents a motion of censorship, but withdraws it in the light of the conclusions. Several deputies from different parties contact Azaña to propose a Dictatorship as a means of ending social instability.
• January: the monarchists founded Spanish Renewal under José Calvo Sotelo.

• 4 March: a group of moderate Catholics founded the CEDA using Popular Action as a core, although since its birth the new party also brings together the Carlists and Alphons. They are more supporters of a traditional monarchy than of an Italian style.
• April 23: municipal elections of April 1933, for the first time in Spain's history, women can vote in elections. Its mass incorporation into electoral life has the expected results, as it was also the first occasion for Republican candidates in hundreds of rural municipalities. Rural society, much more conservative than urban society, makes the number of monarchical or far-right councillors surpass the 4000 barrier at the national level, compared with the slightly more than 7500 that are declared republicans.
• May 18: The Law of Congregations converts into public property all the goods of the Church, not only the temples, but also the movable goods (including the ornaments of priests, images and objects of common use).^{[chuckles]required]}
• July: Pastor of Pope Pius XI, who advises Spanish Catholics to abide by civil powers, without renouncing their children to schools of Catholic tradition.
• 4 August: The Defence of the Republic Act of 1931 is repealed. Shortly afterwards, the Government of Azaña would fall and Alcalá-Zamora would be in charge of forming a government to Alejandro Lerroux.
• September: elections for the Constitutional Court of Guarantees. The Tribunal, voted mainly by the councillors elected in the April municipalities, is co-opted by the conservatives, who conquer 70% of the posts. Some of the elected members are Juan March, then in jail for smuggling and José Calvo Sotelo, monarchist, former minister of Primo de Rivera and in exile at the time of his election.
• 9 October: In the face of the impossibility of Lerroux to achieve a majority that guarantees governability, the Courts are dissolved and new elections are called.
• October 29: Founding of Spanish Falange by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Despite the sympathies that his founder raises among university students for his youth, Falange refuses to stand for the general election. José Antonio rejects any idea that has to do with sitting in a Parliament expeditiously.
• November 19: General elections in which the conservative CEDA, led by José María Gil-Robles, becomes the first majority. In second position there are the radicals of Alejandro Lerroux, the main beneficiaries of the rupture of the Republican-Socialist conjunction. It was the first elections in the history of Spain in which women could vote. As in the first legislature, the winning parties are overrepresented in Parliament due to electoral norms. The results of the rest of the matches hardly vary from those of two years before.

Second biennium or radical-CEDista biennium (1934-1936)

The second biennium of the Second Spanish Republic, also called black biennium, or rectifying biennium, or conservative biennium, constitutes the period between the general elections of November 1933 and those of February 1936 during which the parties of Republican center-right led by the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux, allied with the Catholic right of the CEDA and the Agrarian Party, first from parliament and later participating in the government. It was precisely the entry of the CEDA into the government in October 1934 that triggered the most important event of the period: the 1934 Revolution, a failed socialist insurrection that was only consolidated in Asturias for a couple of weeks (the only place where the CNT also participated).) although it was finally put down by the intervention of the army (Revolución de Asturias). Unlike the relative political stability of the first biennium (with the two governments led by Manuel Azaña), the second was a period in which the governments led by the Radical Republican Party lasted an average of three months (eight governments were formed in two years) and three different presidents took turns (Alejandro Lerroux, Ricardo Samper and Joaquín Chapaprieta), and the last two governments of the biennium lasted even less, those presided over by the "centrist" Portela Valladares.

The radical governments of Alejandro Lerroux and Ricardo Samper (December 1933-October 1934)

The result of the November 1933 elections, in which women voted for the first time (6,800,000 registered), was the defeat of the Republicans on the left and the Socialists and the triumph of the Right and the Center Right, mainly due to the fact that the parties of that tendency presented themselves united, forming coalitions, while the Left presented itself divided. The coalition of the non-republican right obtained around 200 deputies (of which 115 were from the CEDA), while the center-right and the center obtained around 170 deputies (102 from the Radical Republican Party), and the left saw reduced its representation to barely a hundred parliamentarians (59 the PSOE). There had been a spectacular reversal with respect to the Constituent Cortes. The distribution of votes was as follows: of the 8,535,200 votes cast, 3,365,700 were for right-wing parties, 2,051,500 for center parties, and 3 118 000 for left-wing parties.

The leader of the Radical Party Alejandro Lerroux was commissioned by the president of the republic Alcalá-Zamora to form a "purely republican" government, but to gain the confidence of the Cortes he needed the parliamentary support of the CEDA, which was left out of the cabinet (he continued without making a public declaration of adherence to the Republic), and of other center-right parties (the agrarians and the liberal-democrats who entered the Government with one minister each). José María Gil Robles set out to put into practice the tactic [of three phases] enunciated two years earlier: lend his support to a government headed by Lerroux and then take a step forward demanding entry into the government to later receive the commission to preside over it".

The support of the CEDA to the government of Lerroux was considered by the Alfonsino monarchists of Renovación Española and by the Carlists as a "betrayal" for which they began contacts with Mussolini's fascist Italy to provide them with money, weapons and logistical support to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy. For their part, the left-wing republicans and socialists considered the radical-CEDA pact a "betrayal of the Republic" and tried to get the president of the republic to call new elections before that the newly elected Cortes were to be constituted. The PSOE and UGT socialists went even further, agreeing that they would unleash a revolution if the CEDA entered the government.

The aim of the Lerroux government was to "rectify" the reforms of the first biennium, not annul them, with the aim of incorporating the "accidentalist" right into the republic (which did not openly proclaim itself monarchical, although its sympathies were with the monarchy, nor republican) represented by the CEDA and the Agrarian Party.

On April 20, 1934, the Cortes approved the Amnesty Law (one of the three points of the CEDA's «minimum program», and which also appeared in the electoral program of the Radical Republican Party) which meant the release of all those involved in the coup d'état of 1932 (the Sanjurjada). The problem that arose was the opposition of the president of the republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora to the law and Lerroux, noting that he had lost the president's confidence, resigned. The solution to the crisis was to find a new radical leader to head the government. It was the Valencian Ricardo Samper.

The first problem that the radical governments had to face was the anarchist insurrection of December 1933, which, like the two previous ones of the first biennium, was also a complete failure. The balance of the seven days of the insurrection was 75 dead and 101 wounded, among the insurgents, and 11 civil guards and 3 assault guards dead and 45 and 18 wounded, respectively, among the public order forces.

Regarding the reforms of the first biennium, Azaña's military reform was maintained even though the radical governments gave his administration an orientation markedly contrary to the Azaña period, trying to attract the dissatisfied military.

Regarding the "religious question", the Lerroux government approved a bill whereby clergymen who worked in parishes with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and who were over 40 in 1931 would receive two-thirds of their salary of 1931. But when the Government took him to Parliament in January 1934 the left accused him of pursuing an "anti-republican" policy. The second measure taken by the Lerroux government was to extend the period for the closure of religious schools, which in primary education was scheduled for December 1933, until enough public schools had been built to accommodate all the students of the schools. of the Catholic Church. However, the radical governments failed in their attempt to reach an agreement with the Holy See, because the latter demanded a revision of the 1931 Constitution.

Regarding the "social question", Largo Caballero's socio-labour reforms were partially "rectified" under pressure from the employers' organizations, however the "labour counter-reform" demanded by the businessmen was not carried out because the unions still retained a great capacity for mobilization, which resulted in a growing wave of strikes throughout 1934, which for the first time since the proclamation of the republic were called by joint committees of the UGT and CNT.

Regarding the «agrarian question», Minister Cirilo del Río Rodríguez respected the planned rate of application of the Agrarian Reform Law, which is why in 1934 more peasants settled than during the entire previous two-year period, expropriating four times as many properties, although the Amnesty Law approved in April 1934 returned to the "great Spanish" nobility a part of the lands that the Azaña government had confiscated for the involvement of some of its members in the Sanjurjada. The main objective of his policy was to dismantle the "socialist power" in the countryside, for which he annulled or substantially modified the agrarian decrees of the Provisional Government. In addition, in February 1934 the Crop Intensification Decree was not extended, for which reason some 28,000 families were evicted from the plots they cultivated on farms that maintained uncultivated land. The de facto repeal of the Municipal Terms decree and the reform of the Mixed Agrarian Juries (whose government-appointed presidents increasingly leaned in favor of the employers) allowed owners to once again enjoy almost complete freedom to hire the day laborers they needed and to retaliate against their organizations. As a consequence of all this, agricultural wages, which had increased during the first two years, fell again. This policy of "disposal of socialist power" in the countryside was due to the offensive of rural owners who had interpreted the victory of the right and center right in the November elections as a victory over the day laborers and tenant farmers. Some of them used the expression "eat Republic!" when the day laborers asked them for work or when they evicted the tenants.

The union response was the call by the FNTT for a general strike of farm laborers for the beginning of June, even without the approval of the UGT national executive (which was preparing a national revolutionary general strike). The government ended up supporting the hard line of the Minister of the Interior Salazar Alonso who considered the strike a "revolutionary movement" and declared the harvesting of the harvest to be of "national interest", giving instructions to prevent the actions of the peasant organizations. Thus "the greatest agrarian strike in history" gave rise to an unprecedented repression in the Republic. There were more than 10,000 arrests and some 200 left-wing councils were ousted and replaced by government-appointed right-wing managers. Clashes between strikers and law enforcement (and scabs) left thirteen dead and several dozen injured. As a consequence of the excessive actions of Salazar Alonso, agrarian unionism was practically dismantled.

Regarding the «regional question», the governments of the Radical Republican Party neutralized the statutory impulse of the integral State defined in the 1931 Constitution (which according to the CEDA posed a danger of «disintegration of the homeland»), which which caused serious tensions where the autonomy processes were already underway, such as in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The processing of the Basque Country's Statute of Autonomy was paralyzed and on June 12 the deputies of the PNV withdrew from the Cortes as a sign of protest. In the summer of 1934 another conflict arose around the Basque Economic Agreement, which caused an institutional rebellion of the town councils that called elections (without the approval of the Cortes) in order to appoint a Commission to negotiate the defense of the Economic Agreement and that the government tried to prevent by all means (it arrested and prosecuted more than a thousand mayors and councilors and replaced numerous city councils with commissions government managers). On September 2, the Basque parliamentarians held an assembly in Zumárraga in solidarity with the municipalities.

The conflict with the Generalitat of Catalonia arose from the promulgation on April 14, 1934 of the Cultivation Contract Law approved by the Catalan Parliament, which made it possible for vineyard tenants (rabassaires) to purchase plots after cultivating them for fifteen years. The owners protested and managed, with the support of the Regionalist League, for the Government to take the law before the Court of Constitutional Guarantees, which declared it unconstitutional. Republican Left of Catalonia, accompanied by the 12 of the PNV, and to propose to the Parliament of Catalonia an identical law that was approved on June 12, which constituted a serious challenge to the government and the Court of Constitutional Guarantees. From that moment on, the Samper government tried to negotiate with the Generalitat throughout the summer to try to reach an agreement, but the CEDA accused it of lacking energy in the "rabassaire question" and ended up withdrawing its support, which would open the crisis of October 1934.

The October Revolution of 1934

After the CEDA's announcement that it was withdrawing parliamentary support for Ricardo Samper's government and demanding entry into it, the government resigned and the president of the republic Niceto Alcalá Zamora proposed Alejandro Lerroux again as president of a government that would include three CEDA ministers. As soon as the composition of the new government was made public, the Socialists carried out their threat that they would unleash the "social revolution" if the CEDA acceded to the government and called the "revolutionary general strike" that would begin at midnight on October 5.. "Nothing would be the same after October 1934."

The radicalization of the socialists was due to the fact that since their "expulsion" from the government in September 1933 and especially after the defeat in the November 1933 elections, they abandoned the "parliamentary path" to achieve socialism and opted for the insurrectionary path for the seizure of power. "That decision was reinforced by the activism of the socialist youth and by the events of February 1934 in Austria, when the Social Christian chancellor [the equivalent of the Spanish CEDA] Dollfuss crushed a socialist rebellion bombing the working-class neighborhoods of Vienna, events interpreted by the Spanish socialists as a warning of what could await them in the event that the CEDA came to government." The socialist sector that decided on the change in strategy was led by Francisco Largo Caballero, who since January 1934 had accumulated the positions of president of the PSOE with that of general secretary of the UGT, in addition to being the most acclaimed leader by the Socialist Youth.

The announced «revolutionary general strike» began on October 5 and was followed in almost all the cities (not so in the countryside, which had just come out of its own strike), but the armed insurrection was reduced, except in Asturias, to some shootings and no important population remained in the hands of the revolutionaries. In the Basque Country, where the nationalists did not support the uprising, the strike continued in some points until October 12 and the toughest armed confrontations occurred in the Vizcaya mining area. At least 40 people died, most of them strikers killed by the guards. In Éibar and Mondragón the violent actions of the insurgents caused several victims, including a prominent traditionalist leader and deputy Marcelino Oreja.

Lluís Companys, Civil Governor of Barcelonain the article How the Republic was proclaimed in Barcelona (Figure, number 1017, page 4, 29 April 1931).

Without any connection to the insurrectionary socialist strike, the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia Lluís Companys proclaimed «the Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic» around 8 pm on Saturday, October 6, as a measure against « the monarchist and fascist forces... that had seized power". Companys then called for the formation of a "Provisional Government of the Republic" that would have its headquarters in Barcelona. But the Catalan rebellion, lacking all planning and The support of the main labor force of Catalonia, the CNT, was quickly dominated on October 7 by the intervention of the Army headed by General Domingo Batet, whose moderate action prevented many more victims (eight soldiers died and thirty-eight The President and the Consejeros of the Generalitat were imprisoned and the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 1932 was suspended (although the monarchist right demanded their final repeal).

In Asturias, unlike the rest of Spain, there was a real attempt at a social revolution: the «Red October». The reasons for the "Asturian difference" must be found in the fact that there the CNT did join the Alianza Obrera proposed by the socialist workers' organization (PSOE-UGT), hegemonic in Asturias (the Spanish Communist Party joined very late after having fought the Alliance for months), and in which the insurrection was meticulously prepared, with previous calls for general strikes, and the supply of arms and dynamite obtained through petty robberies in factories and mines, in addition to the training of groups of militias. For about two weeks the workers' militias made up of some 20,000 workers, mostly miners, took control of the Nalón and Caudal basins and then seized Gijón and Avilés and entered the capital Oviedo, although they could not occupy it completely (in the center of the city there were violent combats between the forces of order and the revolutionaries). A "rev committee olucionario”, led by the socialist deputy Ramón González Peña, coordinated the local committees that sprang up in all the towns and tried to maintain the “revolutionary order”, although he was unable to prevent the wave of violence that broke out against property owners, right-wing people and religious. Of the latter, 34 were assassinated (something that had not happened in Spain since 1834-1835), in addition to burning 58 churches and convents, the episcopal palace, the Seminary and the Holy Chamber of Oviedo Cathedral, which was dynamited. To dominate the "Comuna Asturiana" the government had to resort to colonial troops (legionnaires and regulars from Africa, commanded by Colonel Yagüe), while a column led by General Eduardo López Ochoa reached Oviedo from Galicia. The entire operation was being directed from Madrid by General Franco, at the express request of the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo. On October 18, the insurgents surrendered. The casualty balance was about 1,100 dead and 2,000 wounded among the insurgents, and about 300 dead among the security forces and the army.

The Spanish right (both the monarchist of Renovación Española, and the «accidentalist» of the CEDA) interpreted the October Revolution as a work of the «Anti-Spain», of the «anti-patria», in a vision "mythical-symbolic" in which the Good was identified with the Homeland, Spain, which was defined according to the values and ideas of the right. This idea of Spain was specified in the relationship with the Army, as expressed by the leader of Spanish Renovation José Calvo Sotelo in a famous speech in which he said that the army was the "backbone of the homeland". On the other hand, the repressive action of the troops that put down the uprising was hardly mentioned by the right-wing parties or by their press, such as ABC or El Debate. In addition, the anti-republican right took advantage of the insurrection of the left to incite an "authentic and saving revolution for Spain". Thus, "October reaffirmed on the right, and especially in the monarchists, the conviction that if the E The state had reacted this time in time, it had not been due to the effectiveness of the [democratic republican] political institutions, but rather due to the determination of the Armed Forces to act quickly and forcefully. The Army —"the backbone of the homeland, as José Calvo Sotelo called it at the time— thus constituted the last guarantee, the reserve of the traditional forces against revolutionary change, which the parliamentary regime seemed incapable of averting."

The government repression of the October Revolution was very harsh. Some thirty thousand prisoners were taken throughout the country and, especially, the Asturian mining areas were subjected to harsh military repression, first (there were summary executions of suspected insurgents), and then by the Civil Guard, headed by the latter by Commander Lisardo Doval, who would be transferred by order of the government. The detainees were tortured as a result of which several of them died. Numerous left-wing leaders were also detained, including the Socialist Revolutionary Committee headed by Francisco Largo Caballero, and the military courts handed down twenty death sentences although only two were executed., thanks to the fact that the President of the Republic Niceto Alcalá Zamora commuted them to life imprisonment, resisting the pressure of the CEDA and Renovación Española who demanded a much harsher repression.

Former government president Manuel Azaña was also arrested in Barcelona, where he had gone to attend the funeral of a friend, unfairly accused of having participated in the Catalan insurrection. Initially he was interned on the ship "Ciudad de Cádiz", anchored in the port of Barcelona and requisitioned by the government as a prison, and later he was held on two ships of the Republican Navy, where he received hundreds of letters and telegrams of solidarity and support every day. A group of intellectuals even signed an open letter to the Government denouncing the "persecution" to which Azaña was being subjected. Finally, on December 24, the Supreme Court dismissed the accusation against Azaña for lack of evidence and ordered his immediate release. Azañá's dubious legal detention had lasted ninety days.

The radical-CED governments (October 1934-December 1935)

Despite the fact that for the left the failure of the October Revolution, from which both socialists and anarchists emerged split and greatly weakened, meant abandoning the "insurrectional path", "October" increased their fear on the right that in a next attempt the "Bolshevik revolution" (as they called it) would end up triumphing. This increased their pressure on their government partner, the Radical Party, to pursue a more decidedly "anti-reformist" ("counterrevolutionary" as they called it) policy, which did not fail to produce growing tensions between the Republican center-right and the Catholic right. "accidentalist" of the CEDA and the Agrarian Party (cheered on from outside by the monarchical right and by the fascists). And ultimately "October" convinced the CEDA that it was necessary to reach the presidency of the government in order to give the "authoritarian turn" the regime needed. The defeat of the October Revolution had shown the way: it was enough to provoke continuous government crises to advance positions.

The most serious crisis that the CEDA provoked occurred at the beginning of April 1935, when the three ministers of his party refused to approve the commutation of the death sentence of two of the socialist leaders of the «Revolución de Asturias» » (Deputies Ramón González Peña and Teodomiro Menéndez). Lerroux sought a way out by forming a government that would leave the CEDA out, but the government he formed did not get the necessary parliamentary support to govern, which finally forced him to accept the demands of the right: the CEDA would go from three to five ministers, one of they were the leader of the CEDA himself, José María Gil Robles, who demanded for himself the Ministry of War. Thus, in the new Lerroux government formed on May 6, 1935, the majority was no longer held by the center-right Republicans, but by the non-republican right (CEDA and the Agrarian Party). "Then the" rectification really began "of the Republic, with the radicals, who had broken all possible bridges with the left-wing republicans and socialists, subjected to the will of the CEDA and to the revengeful demands of the employers and landowners".

Regarding the «agrarian question», the reformist policy implemented from October 1934 to April 1935 by the liberal CEDista Manuel Giménez Fernández (whose most ambitious project had been the Yunteros Law that extended the occupation of land by peasants from Extremadura, for which he was labeled a "white Bolshevik" by the landowners' organizations and by his own party comrades), and the new Minister of Agriculture Nicasio Velayos Velayos, a member of the Agrarian Party and a great landowner, he immediately began a clearly "counter-reformist" policy. The first thing he did when he took office was not to renew the Yunteros Law, for which thousands of families found themselves immediately expelled from the land they cultivated, and then on July 3 he presented the Law for the Agrarian Reform Reform, which was approved on August 1, 1935, and which meant the definitive freezing of the reform begun in the first biennium. Likewise, the socialist organizations of day laborers were completely dismantled, mixed juries in the countryside ceased to function and more than 2,000 socialist town halls and left-wing Republicans were replaced by government-appointed management commissions. All this translated into a notable deterioration in the living conditions of day laborers, who had to accept lower wages if they wanted to have a job.

Niceto Alcalá Zamora, President of the Republic

Regarding the “social question”, a “socio-labour counter-reform” was launched. The Mixed Juries were suspended and a decree was approved that declared "abusive strikes" illegal (those that were not strictly labor strikes or did not have government authorization). Thousands of workers were fired on the pretext of having participated in the strikes of the October Revolution or simply for belonging to a union. The consequences of the "socio-labor counter-reform" were the freezing of wages, and even their decrease in certain sectors, and the increase in the working day in others. If we add to this the increase in unemployment as a consequence of the economic depression, we will understand the difficult situation that the working classes experienced in those years.

Regarding the "military question," Gil Robles emphasized the policy initiated by Minister Diego Hidalgo to reinforce the role of the military of dubious loyalty to the Republic. Thus, the most significant occupied the key positions in the military leadership: General Fanjul, held the Undersecretary of the Ministry; General Franco was the head of the Central General Staff; General Emilio Mola was the head of the Moroccan Army; General Goded, the General Directorate of Aeronautics. All these generals will be the ones who will lead the uprising of July 1936 that started the Spanish civil war. On the other hand, the military most loyal to the republic were dismissed from their posts and the officers considered "leftists" suffered professional reprisals.

One of the agreements reached between the four parties that formed the new government of Lerroux (CEDA, Agrarian Party, Liberal Democratic Republican Party and Radical Republican Party) formed in May 1935 was to present a project for a "revision" of the Constitution (which was the most important point of the "minimum program" of the CEDA with which it was presented to the elections). At the beginning of July 1935 they reached an agreement in principle and Lerroux presented a draft bill in Parliament that proposed the change or suppression of 41 articles, but the debates dragged on because the bill did not fully satisfy any party.

These disagreements over the scope of the reform of the Constitution and the question of the return to the Generalitat of Catalonia of some of the powers that had been suspended due to the October Revolution led to a crisis in the government. Lerroux He was replaced in the presidency of the executive by a man of confidence of the President of the Republic Alcalá Zamora, the liberal financier Joaquín Chapaprieta, who maintained the radical-CEDA alliance with Lerroux and Gil Robles in the government, and included a minister from the Regionalist League, to broaden its parliamentary base. But this government, formed on September 25, was affected by the outbreak of the black market scandal, which led to the departure of Lerroux from the cabinet on October 29 and the rest of the radical ministers, and later by the Nombela affair that constituted the final blow to the Radical Republican Party, from which it would not recover.

The collapse of the radicals convinced Gil Robles that the time had come to implement the third phase of his strategist to achieve power and he withdrew support from the Chapaprieta government, on the pretext of his disagreement with the project of tax reform. On December 9, 1935, the day on which the Constitution of 1931 was four years old (so from that moment on, a majority of 2/3 of the deputies was not necessary to modify the Constitution, but it was enough to the absolute majority), demanded for himself the presidency of the Government. But the president of the republic Alcalá Zamora refused to give power to an "accidentalist" force that had not proclaimed its fidelity to the republic and ordered the formation of a government to an independent you trust. Manuel Portela Valladares on December 15 formed a center-right Republican cabinet excluding the CEDA, but it was soon found that this option did not have sufficient support in the Cortes and in the end Alcalá Zamora dissolved Parliament on January 7 and convened elections for February 16, 1936, the first round, and March 1, the second.

Popular Front (1936-1939)

The formation of the coalition of the republican and socialist left headed by Manuel Azaña

The proposal to return to the republican-socialist alliance of the first two years arose at the initiative of the leader of the left-wing republicans Manuel Azaña, who had become a "political martyr" and a "political martyr" after his arrest during the October Revolution. a symbol for the left. Azaña toured the country giving three massive rallies: the one in the Mestalla field (Valencia), on May 26; that of Baracaldo (Vizcaya), on July 14, and that of Comillas (Madrid), on October 20, in order to achieve a "republican intelligence" that would restore the regime's democratic values.

In April 1935, Azaña had reached a "Republican Conjunction" pact between his own party (Izquierda Republicana), Diego Martínez Barrio's Republican Union, which had split in 1934 from Lerroux's Radical Republican Party, and the National Republican Party of Felipe Sánchez Román. In mid-November 1935, Azaña offered the PSOE the formation of an electoral coalition based on the joint agreement of the forces of the Republican left.

While the socialist sector headed by Indalecio Prieto defended the agreement, the sector headed by Francisco Largo Caballero was reluctant to agree to it and to reinforce the "worker" part of the coalition imposed the inclusion of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in the same, which motivated the departure of the "Republican Conjunction" from the party of Sánchez Román. The PCE, for its part, had changed its position with respect to the socialists (who until then it had considered as "enemies" of the revolution) after the VII Congress of the III International held in Moscow in the summer of 1935, where Stalin he had launched the new slogan of forming "anti-fascist fronts." The signing of the pact of the electoral coalition between the left-wing republicans and the socialists took place on January 15, 1936. When the PSOE signed its signature, it also did so on behalf of the PCE and other workers' organizations (the Partido Sindicalista of Ángel Pestaña and the POUM).

The coalition program, which began to be called the "Popular Front", despite the fact that this term did not appear in the document signed on January 15 and that it was a name that Azaña never accepted, was that of the left republicans (and only mentioned the aspirations of the "labour" forces with which the left republicans disagreed). The program included, first of all, amnesty for "political and social" crimes (the release of all those detained by the October Revolution), the continuity of the reformist legislation of the first two years and the resumption of the autonomy processes of the regions". The government would be formed exclusively by left-wing republicans and the socialists would give their support from parliament to comply with the agreed program. Thus, the 1936 alliance was circumstantial, limited to elections and, therefore, very different from that of 1931.

The elections of February 1936

Portada del diario The Voice on Monday, February 17, which announces the victory of the Popular Front by an absolute majority. The photographs of the candidates who have been chosen on the list of Madrid (from left to right): Julián Besteiro, Manuel Azaña, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, Luis Araquistain, Francisco Largo Caballero and Luis Jiménez de Asúa. The newspaper also highlights on the first page that the former president of the government Alejandro Lerroux has not been elected. He also announced that the government of Manuel Portela Valladares has declared the state of alarm throughout Spain.

Faced with the electoral coalition of the left, the right could not oppose a homogeneous front as in 1933, because the CEDA, in its attempt to obtain power and prevent the triumph of the left, allied itself in some constituencies with the anti-republican forces (Alfonsino monarchists, Carlists) and in others with the republican center-right (radicals, liberal-democrats, progressive republicans), so it was impossible to present a common program. What Gil Robles wanted to form was a "National Antirevolutionary Front" or a "Counterrevolution Front", based more on "anti" slogans than on a specific government program ("Against the revolution and its accomplices" was one of his slogans; "For God and for Spain!" was another; and framed the campaign as a battle between "Catholic Spain... and the frightful, barbaric, atrocious revolution").

A third "centrist" option was also presented to the elections led by the president of the government Portela Valladares and sponsored by the person who had appointed him, the president of the republic Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, who sought to consolidate a republican center that would overcome the bipolarization arising from the October Revolution.

The elections registered the highest turnout of the three general elections that took place during the Second Republic (72.9%), which was attributed to the workers' vote that did not follow the usual abstentionist slogans of the anarchists. According to the study carried out by the historian Javier Tusell on the elections, which is still considered today as the best analysis of them, the result was a very balanced distribution of votes with a slight advantage for the left (47.1%) over the right (45.6%), while the center was limited to 5.3%, but since the electoral system prioritized the winners, this translated into a comfortable majority for the "Popular Front" coalition. In total, the "Popular Front" » had 263 deputies (including the 37 from the «Front d'Esquerres» of Catalonia) the right had 156 deputies (among them only one fascist, who was from the Spanish Nationalist Party, since the Spanish Falange did not want to join the coalitions of the right because they offered him few positions) and the center-right parties (including in them the nationalists of the Regionalist League and the PNV, and the Center Party that Portela Valladares had quickly formed with the support of the Presidency of the Republic) totaled 54 deputies. "In the Popular Front, the first positions in the candidacies were almost always occupied by the Republicans from Azaña's party and on the right they went to the CEDA, which does not confirm, compared to what It has been said on occasions, the triumph of extremes. The communist candidates were always in last place on the lists of the Popular Front and the 17 deputies obtained, after obtaining only one in 1933, were the result of having managed to join that coalition and not the result of their real strength. The Falange added only 46,466 votes, 0.5% of the total".

The Popular Front Government (February-July 1936)

As soon as the victory in the Popular Front elections was known, there was a first attempt at a “coup de force” by the right to try to stop the handover of power to the victors. Gil Robles himself was the first to unsuccessfully try to get the acting president of the government, Manuel Portela Valladares, to declare a "state of war" and annul the elections. He was followed by General Franco, still chief of the Army General Staff, who went ahead to give the pertinent orders to the military commanders to declare a state of war (which according to the 1933 Public Order Law meant that power passed to the military authorities), but was disavowed by the still head of government Portela Valladares and by the Minister of War, General Nicolás Molero.

The result of the "coup de force" attempt was exactly the opposite of what was expected. The acting president of the government handed over power to the winning coalition prematurely, without waiting for the second round of the elections (scheduled for March 1). Thus, on Wednesday, February 19, Manuel Azaña, the leader of the "Popular Front", formed a government that, according to the agreement, was only made up of left-wing Republican ministers (nine from the Republican Left and three from the Republican Union). One of the first The decisions made by the new government was to remove the most anti-republican generals from the centers of power: General Goded was assigned to the Balearic Islands military command; General Franco, to that of the Canary Islands; General Mola to the military government of Pamplona. Other significant generals, such as Orgaz, Villegas, Fanjul and Saliquet were made available.

Manuel Azaña's presidential banner.

The most urgent measure that the new government had to take was amnesty for those convicted of the events of October 1934, something that was clamorously demanded in the demonstrations that followed the electoral triumph, and that had already led to the opening from various prisons, from which not only the "political" prisoners but also the "social" ones were released. The amnesty released some 30,000 "political and social" prisoners. Another urgent measure was to reinstate the mayors and councilors elected in 1931 and suspended during the "black biennium" by the radical-Cedista governments that controlled them. They were replaced by right-wing managers. And on February 28, the government decreed not only the reinstatement of all the workers dismissed for political and union reasons related to the events of 1934, but also, pressured by the unions, ordered the companies to compensate to these workers for unpaid wages.

The release of the members of the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia from prison, benefiting from the amnesty, was immediately accompanied by a Decree of March 1 that resumed the functions of the Parlament and reinstated in his post Lluís Companys as president of the Generalitat and his advisers. The Azaña government also decided to restore the functions of the suspended Basque councils in 1934.

The «agrarian question» was another problem that the new government had to urgently address because of the intense peasant mobilization that was taking place with the determined support of the responsable local authorities and that threatened to provoke serious conflicts in the countryside. "A few days after the elections, some eighty thousand peasants from Andalusia, La Mancha and Extremadura summoned by the FNTT [socialist], began to occupy the farms from which they had been evicted in the winter of 1934-35 [by the radical-cedist governments]. Thus, a fait accompli was produced, which forced the Ministry of Agriculture to adopt appropriate measures to put the legislation of the first biennium back into force." The most spectacular movement to occupy farms was the one organized by the FNTT from March 26 in the province of Badajoz in which some 60,000 day laborers participated who invaded and began to clear some two thousand properties. On April 19, the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz Funes, presented several bills, including one that repealed the Law of the Reform of the Agrarian Reform of August 1935, which became law on June 11, so that the Agrarian Reform Law of 1932 was fully in force again. Thanks to various decrees and this law between March and July 1936 Some 115,000 peasants settled, more than in the three previous years. However, the high level of conflict in the countryside continued, due mainly to the attitude of the owners and the radicalization of the orgs. peasant organizations, resulting in all of this with violent incidents. The most serious case occurred in Yeste (Albacete) where at the end of May 1936 "the arrest of some peasants who tried to cut down trees on a private farm led to a bloody confrontation between the Civil Guard and the day laborers, in which a man died." guard and 17 peasants, several of them murdered in cold blood by the agents".

Santiago Casares Quiroga in 1931

On April 3, once the heated discussion of the parliamentary acts had been resolved, the left presented an initiative to dismiss the President of the Republic, accusing him of having failed to comply with article 81 of the Constitution. Four days later, on April 7 On April 238, by 238 votes to 5 (the right wing abstained, after having supported the measure), Alcalá Zamora was dismissed by parliament. On April 26, the elections for delegates established by the Constitution were held and Manuel Azaña, the candidate of the left, obtained 358 mandates, and 63 the opposition, part of which had abstained from appearing in the elections. Thus, on May 10, 1936, he was sworn in as the new president, establishing his residence in the Quinta de El Pardo, where his kidnapping by conspiratorial elements was planned. However, Azaña's project to name the socialist Indalecio Prieto as his replacement at the head of the government did not materialize due to the opposition of the "caballerista" wing of the PSOE and the UGT that was ratified in the agreement to remain out of the cabinet, and on May 13 the government's presidency was held by one of the most Azaña faithful, Santiago Casares Quiroga, after other names had been considered and the candidate proposed by all the Popular Front groups, Diego Martínez Barrio, resigned from assuming office one day before.

The new Casares Quiroga government continued with the reformist policy that the Azaña government had already started, which basically consisted of reinstating the decrees that had been repealed or modified during the second biennium ("black biennium" the left called it) and to which some others were added.

One of the problems that the government had to face was the wave of strikes that were declared and sustained many times by joint CNT/UGT committees, in which many of them spoke of revolution, but neither the UGT nor the CNT were preparing any insurrectionary movement after the failures of 1932, 1933 and 1934, and the only possibility of one occurring would be in response to an attempted military coup.

Another of the problems of the Casares Quiroga government was the internal division of the PSOE, the most important party of the Popular Front that should have supported the government, as well as the increasingly pronounced bias of the CEDA towards anti-republican positions. "In this way, the government was left unassisted by its natural allies and harassed from the right by an emboldened monarchical opposition that was already strongly dragging the Catholics and from the left by a sector of the PSOE that, if it had renounced the revolution, expected with impatience when it comes to replacing the republican government with an exclusively socialist one". As for the socialists, the differences between the "prietista" and "largocaballerista" sectors were accentuated, since Largo Caballero, who dominated the UGT and the parliamentary group of the PSOE, he continued to oppose the entry into the government of the socialists and defending the understanding between the "labor organizations" to wait for the moment when the failure of the "bourgeois republicans" would facilitate the conquest of power by the working class. Largo Caballero also had the unconditional support of the Socialist youth who called him the "Spanish Lenin." These increasingly radicalized youths ended up merging with the Communist Youth of the PCE to form the Unified Socialist Youth in June 1936, under the direction of the young socialist Santiago Carrillo. As for the CEDA, the sector headed by José María Gil Robles became increasingly opted for the boycott of republican institutions and for support for the path defended by the monarchist right of the National Bloc of José Calvo Sotelo, which openly advocated the violent rupture of the constitutional order through a military coup d'état in the preparation of which they were already preparing. collaborating (for their part, the Carlist monarchists accelerated the formation of their requetés militias with a view to the military uprising with whose leaders they maintained contacts).

Another problem was the increase in political violence caused by the "tension strategy" deployed by the fascist Falange Española party. After the triumph of the Popular Front and some catastrophic results for FE de las JONS in the elections, this formation continued the escalation of violence in the confrontation that it was already having with socialists and communists and registered an avalanche of affiliations of right-wing youth. The first important attack they committed was the one perpetrated on March 12 against the socialist deputy and "father" of the 1931 Constitution Luis Jiménez de Asúa, in which he was unharmed but his escort, the policeman Jesús Gisbert, died. The response of the Azaña government was to ban the party, arrest its top leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera and other members of his "Political Board" on March 14, and shut down its newspaper Arriba. But going underground did not prevent him from continuing to carry out attacks and participating in brawls with young socialists and communists. He also continued to carry out a work of violence and intimidation against elements of the institutional order of the Republic. On the night of April 13, two Falangist gunmen assassinated Manuel Pedregal, a magistrate of the Supreme Court, in the street in retaliation for having acted as a rapporteur in the trial for the attempted murder of Jiménez de Asúa. The judge had previously received death threats for this reason. Several of those involved fled to France in a plane flown by then-Falange collaborator Juan Antonio Ansaldo. In fact, the Falange disseminated blacklists of judges with the purpose of intimidating them, and its clandestine newsletter No Importa threatened magistrates such as Ursicino Gómez Carbajo or Ramón Enrique Cardónigo, who had intervened in cases with a sentence unfavorable to their interests.

The most important incidents occurred on April 14 and 15. On the 14th, a military parade took place on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the republic and next to the main tribune, occupied by the acting president of the republic Diego Martínez Barrio and by the president of the government Manuel Azaña, an artifact exploded and several shots were then fired that caused the death of Anastasio de los Reyes, a lieutenant of the Civil Guard who was there in plain clothes, and injured several spectators. Rightists and leftists accused each other of the attack. The following day the burial of the lieutenant was held, which turned into an anti-republican demonstration attended by deputies Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo, army officers, and armed Falangists. Shots were fired at the procession from various places, which were answered, leaving six dead and three wounded. One of the dead was the student Andrés Sáenz de Heredia, a Falangist and first cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The death of Sáenz de Heredia was attributed by the right to members of the Assault Guard section commanded by Lieutenant Castillo, instructor of the Unified Socialist Youth militias. A young Carlist medical student named José Llaguno Acha was also injured. In the first hours there were more than 170 detainees for crimes such as public disorder, use of firearms or resistance to authority, most of them affiliated with the Falange.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Falange Española

Between April and July, the attacks and brawls carried out by Falangists caused more than fifty victims among the workers' left organizations, most of them in Madrid. Some forty members of the Falange died in these acts or in reprisal attacks by left-wing organizations. These were directed against businessmen and militants from right-wing parties, such as the former minister and deputy of the Republican Liberal Democrat Party Alfredo Martínez^{[ citation required]}, shot in Oviedo on March 22 and died three days later (according to the family, the crime was prepared by right-wing elements, within the framework of the daily destabilization of republican institutions, although it remained unclear), as well as anti-republican social headquarters and newspapers, such as the Madrid newspaper La Nación. Religious buildings were also the target of violence (a hundred churches and convents were assaulted and set on fire) although there were no members of the clergy among the victims of political violence from February to July.

This "tension strategy" carried out by Falangist gunmen that was responded to by left-wing organizations, together with the growth of paramilitary youth organizations both among the right (Falangist militias, Carlist requetés) and the left (militias of the socialist, communist and anarchist youth), and among the Basque and Catalan nationalists (militias of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and militias of the PNV), although they were not armed and their main activity was parading, provoked the perception among part of public opinion public, especially the conservative one, that the Popular Front government was not capable of maintaining public order, which served as a justification for the military "coup" that was being prepared. This perception was also contributed to by the Catholic press and of the extreme right that incited rebellion against the "disorder" that it attributed to the "tyrannical Government of the Popular Front", "enemy of the e Dios y de la Iglesia", taking advantage of the fact that the confrontation between clericalism and anti-clericalism returned to the fore after the February elections with continuous disputes over symbolic matters, such as the ringing of bells or manifestations of worship outside churches, such as processions or Catholic burials. Likewise, in parliament the deputies of the right, singularly José Calvo Sotelo and José María Gil Robles, accused the government of having lost control of public order, although Minister Casares Quiroga responded thus to Calvo Sotelo on one occasion: «The absolute order that was registered throughout Spain on May 1 (1936) has created great spite on the right and they do everything necessary to alter it. In searches carried out by the police in right-wing homes, even dum-dum explosive bullets have been found. Thirteen thousand weapons have been collected in Granada and seven thousand in Jaén, all in the hands of people and organizations of the extreme right". On the other hand, in the session of June 17, 1936, Gil-Robles denounced the disorders that had occurred, according to him, from February 1 to June 15: «160 churches destroyed, 251 assaults on temples, fires put out, destruction, assault attempts. 269 dead. 1,287 wounded of varying severity. 215 frustrated personal aggressions or whose consequences are not recorded. 69 private and political centers destroyed, 312 buildings assaulted. 113 general strikes, 228 partial strikes. 10 newspapers totally destroyed, all right-wing. 83 assaults on newspapers, assault attempts and destruction. 146 bombs and explosive devices. 38 collected unexploded'.

Statutes of autonomy

In 1931, a Statute of Autonomy for the Balearic Islands was proposed.

The proposal for the Statute of Autonomy for Galicia is submitted to a plebiscite for four years on June 28, 1936, in accordance with the norms of a decree of the State Presidency of May 1933. The project for the Statute of Autonomy for Galicia it was delivered to the Cortes on July 15, 1936, together with the Draft of the Statute of Autonomy of Aragon, and was transferred to the Congress of Deputies to be admitted for processing.

In Old Castilla and in the León Region, during the Second Republic, especially in 1936, there was great regionalist activity favorable to a region of eleven provinces (Ávila, Burgos, León, Logroño, Palencia, Salamanca, Santander, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid and Zamora), they even came to draw up some bases for the statute of autonomy that were published in El Norte de Castilla. The Diario de León advocated for the formalization of this initiative and the constitution of an autonomous region with these words: «uniting León and Old Castilla in a single personality around the great Duero basin, without now fall into village rivalries» (Diario de León, May 22, 1936). In the end, the civil war ended the aspirations of autonomy for the two regions.

A national Assembly is scheduled for the last Sunday of September 1936 to debate and modify the draft and approve the draft of the Andalusian Statute of Autonomy. On October 1, 1936, the Parliament approved the Statute of the Basque Country by acclamation.

On February 1, 1938, the Cortes admitted the Galician Statute of Autonomy for processing, which was neither rejected nor approved.

In Asturias, a statute of autonomy was drafted by the law professor from Avila, Sabino Álvarez Gendín, which was never processed.

A Project for the Statute of Autonomy for Cantabria was presented on June 5, 1936 at the Santander City Council, and on June 8 at the Provincial Council. The Socialists did not wait for the counting of the votes, in fact, countless polling stations were assaulted, proclaiming a victory by fait accompli

The military conspiracy

The military conspiracy to unleash a «coup de force» (as the conspirators called it) that would overthrow the government began immediately after the victory of the «Popular Front» in the February 1936 elections, initially relying on the coup plots that had been redone after the failure of the Sanjurjada. The last battle would be fought, if not in the field of armed struggle" and that struggle would start from "a new Covadonga that in the face of the revolution would serve as a refuge for those who fled from it and would undertake the Reconquest of Spain".

General Sanjurjo in 1932.

On March 8, a meeting of several generals (Emilio Mola, Luis Orgaz Yoldi, Villegas, Joaquín Fanjul, Francisco Franco, Ángel Rodríguez del Barrio, Miguel García de Herrán, Manuel González Carrasco, Andrés Saliquet and Miguel Ponte, together with Colonel José Enrique Varela and Lieutenant Colonel Valentín Galarza, as a man from the UME), in which they agreed to organize a "military uprising" that would overthrow the Frente government. newly constituted Popular Party and "restore order within and the international prestige of Spain." It was also agreed that the government would be carried out by a Military Junta chaired by General Sanjurjo, who at that time was in exile in Portugal.

The political nature of the "military movement" was not agreed upon, but for its organization they would resort to the clandestine structure of the UME made up of conservative and anti-Azañista officers and they even set the date of the coup for April 20, but the suspicions of the government and the arrest of Orgaz and Varela, confined in the Canary Islands and in Cádiz, respectively, forced them to postpone the date. In addition, the government had already decided to "disperse" the suspected generals and had assigned Goded to the Balearic Islands, Franco to the Canary Islands and Mola to Pamplona.

Since the end of April, it was General Mola who took charge of the coup plot (thus moving the center of the conspiracy from Madrid to Pamplona), adopting the code name "El Director". He continued with the project of establishing a Military Junta chaired by General Sanjurjo, and began to write and distribute a series of circulars or "Reserved Instructions" in which he outlined the complex plot that would carry out the coup d'état.

The first of the five “reserved instructions” was issued on May 25 and in it the idea that the coup would have to be accompanied by violent repression already appeared:

It will be taken into account that action must be extremely violent to reduce the enemy as soon as possible, which is strong and well organized. Of course, all the leaders of political parties, societies and trade unions will be imprisoned, not affecting the Movement, and exemplary punishments will be applied to those individuals to strangle rebel movements or strikes.

General Miguel Cabanellas.

Mola managed to get Republican generals such as Gonzalo Queipo de Llano (chief of the police) and Miguel Cabanellas to join the conspiracy. With the latter, who was the head of the V Organic Division, he held an interview in Zaragoza on the 7th June in which they agreed on the measures to dominate the opposition that "would oppose the great syndicalist mass" and the organization of the "columns that were to oppose the Catalans invading Aragonese territory".

Mola managed to involve numerous garrisons in the coup, thanks also to the clandestine plot of the UME led by Colonel Valentín Galarza (whose code name was "El Técnico"), but Mola did not have all of them, and especially he had doubts about the triumph of the coup in the fundamental place, Madrid, and also about Catalonia, Andalusia and Valencia.

So, the problem for the military involved was that, unlike the 1923 coup, now they did not have the entire Army (neither the Civil Guard nor the other security forces) to back it up. «The divisions that had manifested themselves within the army since the Dictatorship... during the Republic had reached a singular degree of virulence with the creation of military unions confronted by the question of the political regime». [the UME, Military Union Spanish, monarchist; and the Republican Anti-Fascist Republican Military Union, UMRA, with much less influence]

Nor could they count on the collusion of the Head of State (King Alfonso XIII then, and the President of the Republic Manuel Azaña now) as in 1923). A third difference with respect to 1923 was that the attitude of the worker and peasant organizations would not be passive in the face of the military coup, as in 1923, but rather, as they had announced, they would unleash a revolution. For these reasons, the date of the military coup was delayed time and time again, and for this reason, in addition, General Mola, "the Director", sought the support of the militias of the anti-republican parties (requetés and falangistas) and financial backing. of the right-wing parties. But the participation of these civilian paramilitary forces was put on hold for the moment because the main Carlist leader Manuel Fal Conde wanted to give "traditionalism" a leading role in the coup, going so far as to directly contact General Sanjurjo, something that the military were not willing to consent to, and because the Falange leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, imprisoned in Alicante, who at first expressed his willingness to collaborate, demanded his share of power, which was not accepted by the conspiring generals either..

The government of Casares Quiroga received news of what was being plotted through various sources, but it did not act forcefully against the conspirators because, according to historian Julio Aróstegui, "Azaña and many elements of his party, and Casares Quiroga himself, head of the government, did not believe that after having easily neutralized the Sanjurjo coup in 1932, the army would have the capacity to prepare a serious action, also estimating that they had controlled the possible leaders and that in the event that this rebellion was If it occurred, it would be easy to abort it". On May 1, 1936, at a rally held in Cuenca, the socialist Indalecio Prieto warned that a military uprising led by Franco was being prepared; of the city council of Candelaria (Tenerife), who urges this municipal corporation to take the agreement to request from the Government of the Republic the urgent and immediate relief of the co military commander Francisco Franco, as well as to reiterate to the civil governor of the province the adhesion of the Corporation for its energetic and resolute attitude in defense of civil power.

Maps that represent the plans outlined by Mola to give the coup d'état to the Second Republic.

At the beginning of July 1936, the preparations for the military coup were almost complete, although General Mola recognized that "enthusiasm for the cause has not yet reached the necessary degree of exaltation" and accused the Carlists of continuing to make difficulties for the continue asking for "inadmissible concessions". The plan of General Emilio Mola, "the Director", was a coordinated uprising of all the committed garrisons, which would establish a state of war in their demarcations, beginning with the Army of Africa, which between July 5 and 12 carried out some maneuvers in the Llano Amarillo where the details of the uprising in the Protectorate of Morocco were finalized. As it was expected that in Madrid it would be difficult for the coup to succeed on its own (the uprising in the capital would be led by General Fanjul), it was planned that from the north a column led by Mola himself would head towards Madrid to support the uprising. of the garrison of the capital. And if all that failed, it was also planned that General Franco (who on June 23 had addressed a letter to the president of the government Casares Quiroga in which he said that the suspicions of the government that a military coup was being plotted were not true -when he himself was one of the generals involved -, alleging that "those who present the Army as disaffected by the Republic are untrue; those who simulate plots tailored to their shady passions are deceiving"), after revolting in the Canary Islands From there he would direct the Protectorate of Morocco aboard the Dragon Rapide plane, chartered in London on July 6 by the correspondent of the newspaper ABC Luis Bolín thanks to the money contributed by Juan March, to lead the colonial troops, cross the Strait of Gibraltar and will advance on Madrid, from the south and from the west.

Once the capital was controlled, the president of the republic and the government would be deposed, the courts would be dissolved, the Constitution of 1931 would be suspended, all the leaders and significant militants of the parties and organizations of the left as well as the military who had not wanted to join the uprising and, finally, a military Directorate would be set up under the leadership of General Sanjurjo (who would fly from Lisbon to Spain). But what would happen next was never clear as nothing had been agreed on the form of state, or republic or monarchy (for example, nothing was decided on which flag would be used, whether the two-color of the monarchy, instead of the tricolor of the Republic, since it was thought of a fast and forceful action). The objective was to establish a military dictatorship following the model of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship, headed by the exiled General Sanjurjo.

So, what the military conspirators were going to launch was not a 19th-century pronouncement (since in these cases the regime or the political system was not discussed in general, but rather they only tried to force certain partisan "situations"), but went much further. The problem was that the military and the political forces that supported them (fascists, Alfonsino monarchists, Carlists, Catholics from the CEDA) defended different political projects, although they all agreed that the "future situation" would not be democratic, nor liberal, because the basic social meaning of the conspiracy was unequivocal: the "counterrevolution", even if it was against a revolution that did not exist in practice. «The insurgents carried out their action pretending that they were rising up against a revolution that absolutely did not exist at the time in which they were acting, they invented false documents that Tomás Borrás composed and that spoke of a Soviet government that was being prepared, and in fact what they represented was the defense of the positions of the old ruling classes, the fight against the social reforms, more or less profound, that the Popular Front puts back in motion".

On the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, the lieutenant of the Assault Guard, José del Castillo Sáez de Tejada, a military instructor, was assassinated on a central street in Madrid by extreme right-wing gunmen (apparently from the Traditionalist Communion). of the socialist militias. In retaliation, his fellow police officers, led by a Civil Guard captain, Fernando Cortés, kidnapped José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the "Alfonsinos" monarchists (who had nothing to do with the murder of Lieutenant Castillo), and left the body in the mortuary of the Almudena cemetery. At Calvo Sotelo's funeral, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea solemnly swore "to consecrate our lives to this triple task: to imitate your example, avenge your death and save Spain." For his part, the leader of the CEDA, José María Gil Robles, in the Cortes told the deputies of the left that "the blood of Mr. Calvo Sotelo is on you" and accused the government of having "moral responsibility" for the crime for "sponsor violence".

The assassination of Calvo Sotelo accelerated the commitment to the uprising of the Carlists and also of the CEDA, and finished convincing the military that they had doubts. In addition, Mola decided to take advantage of the commotion that the double crime had caused in the country, and on the 14th he brought forward the date of the uprising, which was set for July 17 and 18, 1936.

Second Republic at war

The government's reaction to the military uprising

Diego Martínez Barrio

On the afternoon of Friday, July 17, it was known in Madrid that a military uprising had begun in the Protectorate of Morocco. The next day the uprising spread to the peninsula and the workers' organizations (CNT and UGT) demanded "weapons for the people" to put an end to it, to which the government of Santiago Casares Quiroga refused.

On the night of that Saturday, July 18, Casares Quiroga presented his resignation to the president of the republic, Manuel Azaña, who commissioned Diego Martínez Barrio, president of the Parliament and leader of the Republican Union, to form a government that would manage to "stop the rebellion" without resorting to the armed support of the workers' organizations. Martínez Barrio included in his cabinet moderate politicians who were willing to reach some kind of agreement with the insurgent military and in the early hours of Saturday July 18 to Sunday July 19, he spoke by telephone with General Emilio Mola, "El Director" of the uprising, but he flatly refused any type of transaction. Thus the "conciliation government" of Martínez Barrio resigned and Azaña appointed on the same Sunday, July 19, the new president of the government, a man from his party, José Giral, who formed a government made up solely of left-wing republicans, although with the explicit support of the socialists, who made the decision to hand over weapons to the workers' organizations, something that Martínez Barrio had also refused because, like Casares Quiroga, he considered that this fact crossed the threshold of the constitutional and "legal" defense of the Republic.

Because of this decision to "hand over arms to the people" the republican State lost the monopoly of coercion, so it could not prevent the start of a social revolution, since the workers' organizations did not take to the streets "exactly to defend the Republic... but to make the revolution. (...) A counterrevolutionary coup d'état, which tried to stop the revolution, finally ended up unleashing it».

The social revolution of 1936 and the government of José Giral (July-September 1936)

Escudo del Consejo Regional de Defensa de Aragón, organ creado durante la Revolución social española de 1936

The delivery of arms to the workers' parties and organizations prompted them to quickly set up «armed militias to face the rebellion in the military arena and to proceed to a profound social revolution (disengaging from the republican authorities, whom they did not tore down): they seized and collectivized farms and industrial and commercial companies to ensure the continuity of the production and distribution of goods, and they took charge of maintaining the main functions of the State. Production, supplying the population, surveillance, repression, communications and transportation, health, were left in the hands of union committees, which in not a few localities abolished currency to replace it with vouchers. Faced with the collapse of the mechanisms of public power ["a government that distributes arms is a government that has run out of instruments to guarantee public order and impose its authority"], a new workers' power emerged in the summer of 1936, which was at the same time military, political, social, economic". Autonomy, finally approved on October 1, 1936, there was no social revolution and a Catholic and nationalist party remained until June 1937 at the head of an autonomous government with power over little more than the territory of Vizcaya".

The committees that sprang up everywhere were autonomous and did not recognize limits to their actions, but the paradox was that at the same time the revolution did not put an end to the republican State, but simply ignored it and reduced it to ineffectiveness. In Catalonia, the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias was established, but the Generalitat government was not dismissed and continued in its position. In Valencia the Popular Executive Committee appeared. In Malaga and Lleida two separate Public Health Committees emerged. In Cantabria, Gijón and Jaén, provincial committees of the Popular Front. In Vizcaya, a Defense Board. In Madrid, a National Committee of the Popular Front was set up, which organized militias and life in the city, but alongside it the government of José Giral continued to exist, made up only of left-wing republicans.

But the Giral government, despite the fact that real power was not in its hands, did not stop acting, especially at the international level. It was this government that requested the sale of arms to the government of the Popular Front of France, and when it did not get it, then to the Soviet Union, for which it disposed of the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain. Internally, he dismissed the officials suspected of supporting the uprising and issued the first measures to try to control the indiscriminate, arbitrary and extrajudicial "executions" of "fascists" carried out by dozens of "revolutionary tribunals", also known as "Czech », set up by the workers' organizations and parties that had imposed the «red terror» in Madrid and elsewhere. Thus, the Giral government created special courts "to judge the crimes of rebellion and sedition and those committed against the security of the State." However, these "people's courts" did not put an end to the activities of the "Checas" who continued to murder "fascists" through "walks" (illegal arrests that ended with the murder of the detainee and whose corpse was thrown in a ditch or next to the wall of a cemetery) or the "sacks" (releases of prisoners who supposedly were going to be released but who were actually taken to the wall).

When on September 3, 1936, the insurgent Army of Africa took Talavera de la Reina (already in the province of Toledo, after having occupied Extremadura), and Irún also fell into the hands of the insurgents (with which the north was isolated from the rest of the republican zone), José Giral presented his resignation to the president of the republic Manuel Azaña.

The government of Largo Caballero (September 1936-May 1937)

After Giral's resignation, the president of the republic Manuel Azaña commissioned the formation of a "coalition government" to Francisco Largo Caballero, the socialist leader of the UGT, one of the two union centrals that were leading the revolution. Largo Caballero, who in addition to the presidency assumed the key Ministry of War, understood this government as a great "anti-fascist alliance", and thus gave entry into the cabinet to the greatest possible number of representations of the parties and unions that fought against the rebellion ". fascist” (as the workers' organizations called the July military uprising). But the government was not really completed until two months later, when on November 4 (by the time the rebel troops were already on the outskirts of Madrid) four CNT ministers joined it, among them the first woman to was a minister in Spain, Federica Montseny.

The new government of Largo Caballero, self-proclaimed "government of victory", immediately concluded that the war had to be given priority, and hence the political program that he immediately launched, whose main measure was the creation of a new army and the unification of the direction of the war (which included the incorporation of the militias into the mixed brigades and the creation of the corps of commissars). Thus, the union leaders of the UGT and CNT, upon accepting and promoting this program, "agreed that the implantation of libertarian communism, to which the CNT aspired, or of the socialist society, which the UGT sought, should wait for the military triumph." ».

But all these measures failed to stop the Army of Africa's advance towards Madrid and on November 6 it was about to enter the capital. That day the government decided to leave Madrid and move to Valencia, entrusting the defense of the city to General Miaja who should form a Madrid Defense Board. "A hasty departure, kept secret, for which no public explanation was given." defending. Madrid resisted the first attack and repelled the following ones, thus stopping the advance of the rebel army."

The second major objective of the government of Largo Caballero was to restore the authority of the government and the powers of the State. But the tensions with the governments of the "autonomous regions" of Catalonia and the Basque Country were not resolved, nor with the regional councils that had sprung up elsewhere. In Catalonia, the government of the Generalitat, which on September 26 incorporated various advisers from the CNT and the POUM, for which reason the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias was dissolved, organized its own army and on October 24 approved the decree of collectivities, both issues that exceeded the scope of its powers. As for the Basque Country, on October 1 the Parliament approved the Euskadi Statute of Autonomy and the Basque nationalist José Antonio Aguirre was invested as "lehendakari" of the Basque government, among whose members he did not include any representative of the CNT (in the Basque Country In the Basque Country there had been no social revolution and hardly any anti-clerical violence and the churches continued to be open). Aguirre built a "quasi-sovereign" State on the Basque territory that had not yet been occupied by the rebel side and that was practically reduced to Vizcaya. In addition to a Basque police force, the Ertzaña, he created his own army and did not accept the command of the general sent by the Madrid government to lead the Army of the North. As for the Council of Aragon, dominated by anarchists, the government of Largo Caballero had no choice but to legalize it.

In the spring of 1937, after the decision of «generalisimo» Franco to put an end to the capture of Madrid for the moment after the republican victory in the battle of Guadalajara, the prospect of a long war arose and it soon broke out the crisis between the political forces that supported the Republic. The fundamental conflict was the one between the anarchists of the CNT, who defended the compatibility of the revolution with the war, and the communists of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the PSUC in Catalonia, who understood that the best way to stop the military uprising was to restore the republican state and unite all the forces of the political left, including the parties of the petty and medium bourgeoisie, for which reason the social revolution and give priority to war. However, Santos Juliá affirms, contrary to the opinion of other historians, that in the spring of 1937 among the forces that supported the government of Largo Caballero "the divide did not run between war and revolution but between parties and unions" because the priority given to the war had already been decided on September 4 when the government of Largo Caballero was formed, to which two months later the four anarchist ministers joined.

The crisis broke out due to the confrontations that began in Barcelona on Monday, May 3, 1937, when a detachment of the Assault Guard by order of the Generalitat tried to regain control over the Telefónica building in Plaza de Cataluña, held by of the CNT since the "glorious" days of July 1936. Several anarchist groups responded with arms and the POUM joined the fight. On the other side, the Generalitat and the communists and socialists united in Catalonia under the same party (the PSUC) faced the rebellion, which they themselves had provoked, and the fight lasted several days. On Friday, May 7, the situation could be controlled by the public order forces sent by the government of Largo Caballero from Valencia, aided by militants of the PSUC, although the Generalitat paid the price that its powers over public order were withdrawn. The confrontation in the streets of Barcelona was recounted by the British George Orwell in his Homage to Catalonia.

The events of May 1937 in Barcelona had an immediate impact on the government of Largo Caballero. The crisis was caused on May 13 by the two communist ministers who threatened to resign if Largo Caballero did not leave the Ministry of War (the PCE, especially since the fall of Malaga on February 8, held him responsible for the continuous republican defeats), and to dissolve the POUM. In this attack on Largo Caballero they had the support of the socialist faction of Indalecio Prieto, which controlled the leadership of the PSOE, which, like the communists, wanted to eliminate the union organizations, UGT and CNT, from the government, and rebuild the Popular Front. Largo Caballero refused to accept the two conditions of the communists and when he did not find sufficient support for his government, he resigned on May 17. President Manuel Azaña, who also disagreed with the presence of the two union centrals in the government, appointed a "Prietista" socialist, Juan Negrín, as the new head of government. The following day the CNT organ Solidaridad Obrera declared in its editorial: "A counterrevolutionary government has been constituted."

Alginet Weapons Factory

The government of Juan Negrín (May 1937-March 1939)

The new government formed by the socialist Juan Negrín in May 1937 followed the model of the Popular Front coalitions: three socialist ministers occupying the fundamental positions (Negrín himself, who kept the Treasury portfolio that he had already held in the government of Largo Caballero, Indalecio Prieto, on whom fell all the responsibility for conducting the war, upon being appointed head of the new Ministry of Defense, and Julián Zugazagoitia in the Interior), two leftist Republicans, two communists, one from the PNV and another from Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña. According to Santos Juliá, behind this government was Manuel Azaña, who wanted "a government capable of defending itself at home and not losing the war abroad. (...) With Prieto in charge of a unified Ministry of Defense, it would be possible to defend oneself; with Negrín in the presidency, one could harbor hopes of not losing the war abroad".

The policy of the new government had five fundamental axes, some already initiated by Largo Caballero: the culmination of the formation of the Popular Army and the development of the war industry (which led the government to move from Valencia to Barcelona in November 1937 to, among other reasons, "put the Catalan war industry at full capacity"), the continuation of the recovery by the central government of all powers, with the justification that the war leadership demanded it so (The Council of Aragon, the last stronghold of the CNT, was dissolved; the transfer of the government from Valencia to Barcelona to "definitely establish the authority of the government in Catalonia" relegated the government of the Generalitat of Lluís Companys to a secondary role). of public order and legal certainty (with Zugazagoitia in the Interior and Irujo in Justice, "extrajudicial" executions and the activities of the "checas" were reduced, but in the "desap "arition" of the leader of the POUM, the government let the communists and the Soviet agents of the NKVD do it); guarantees were given to small and medium-sized property; an attempt was made to change the "non-intervention" policy of Great Britain and France for that of mediation in the conflict, so that they put pressure on Germany and Italy and cease their support for the insurgents, with the ultimate goal of reaching a "negotiated peace", but nothing was achieved. The great loser of this political line was unionism, both that of the UGT and that of the CNT. On the contrary, those who were most reinforced were the communists, hence the accusation launched against Negrín of being a "crypto-communist".

Map of the Spanish Civil War in July 1938

The defeats of the republic in the battle of Teruel and in the offensive of Aragón provoked the crisis of March 1938. Azaña and Prieto considered that what had happened showed that the republican army could never win the war and that it was necessary to negotiate a surrender with Franco-British support. Against them, Negrín and the communists were firm supporters of continuing to resist. The crisis began when Negrín tried to get Prieto to change ministers (having declared his conviction that the war was lost, Prieto was the worst defense minister possible), but Azaña supported Prieto, as well as the rest of the Republicans in left and the nationalists of Esquerra and the PNV. However, they did not manage to articulate any alternative to Negrín, and he ended up emerging stronger from the crisis, with the consequent departure of Prieto from the government.

Negrín recomposed the government on April 6 and personally assumed the Ministry of Defense and incorporated the two unions, UGT and CNT, into the cabinet. In addition, José Giral was replaced in the Ministry of State by the socialist Julio Álvarez del Vayo. The positions of the new government with a view to possible peace negotiations were established in his "Declaration of the 13 points", made public on the significant date of May 1. In it, “the government announced that its war goals consisted of ensuring independence from Spain and establishing a democratic republic whose legal and social structure would be approved in a referendum; He affirmed his respect for legitimately acquired property, the need for an agrarian reform and advanced social legislation, and announced a broad amnesty for all Spaniards who want to cooperate in the immense work of rebuilding and aggrandizing Spain. In his attempt to appear before the foreign powers with the internal situation under control, Negrín began unsuccessful negotiations with the Vatican to reestablish diplomatic relations and open the churches to worship.

Negrín was aware that the survival of the republic depended not only on strengthening the Popular Army and maintaining the resistance of the civilian population in the rear, but also on France and Great Britain putting an end to the policy of "non-intervention" or at least put pressure on the fascist powers so that they in turn would convince "Generalissimo" Franco to accept a negotiated end. Negrín thought that his policy was the only possible one. As he said in private "no other thing can be done." Thus, his idea was to resist in order to negotiate an armistice that would avoid the "reign of terror and bloody revenge" (retaliation and executions by the victors on the defeated) that Negrín knew that Franco was going to impose, as indeed it ended up happening..

In addition, Negrín, General Vicente Rojo Lluch, chief of the General Staff, and the communists believed that the republican army was still capable of a last offensive, which began on July 24, 1938, thus beginning the Battle of the Ebro, the longest and most decisive of the civil war. But after three months of hard fighting, there was a new defeat for the Republican army that had to return to its initial positions, "with tens of thousands of casualties and a considerable loss of war material that could no longer be used to defend Catalonia against to the decisive Francoist offensive".

Shortly before the end of the battle of the Ebro, another event occurred that was also decisive for the defeat of the Republic, this time coming from abroad. On September 29, 1938, the Munich Agreements were signed between Great Britain and France, on the one hand, and Germany and Italy, on the other, which closed any possibility of intervention by the democratic powers in favor of the Republic. In the same way that this agreement meant the handing over of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, it also meant abandoning the allies of the Nazis and fascists to the Spanish republic. It was useless that in a last desperate attempt to obtain foreign mediation Negrín announced before the Society of Nations on September 21, a week before the Munich agreements were signed, the unilateral withdrawal of foreign fighters fighting in republican Spain, accepting (without waiting for the "nationals" to do the same) the resolution of the Non-Intervention Committee that proposed a Plan for the withdrawal of foreign volunteers from the Spanish War. On November 15, 1938, the day before the end of the Battle of the Ebro, the International Brigades paraded down Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona as a farewell. In the rebel camp, for their part, in October 1938, already certain of their military superiority and that victory was close, they decided to reduce the Italian forces by a quarter.

The last military operation of the war was the campaign of Catalonia, which ended in a new disaster for the Republic. On January 26, 1939, Franco's troops entered Barcelona practically without a fight. On February 5, they occupied Gerona. Four days earlier, "on February 1, 1939, in the sessions held by what was left of the Congress in the castle of Figueras, [Negrín] reduced the 13 points to the three guarantees that his The government presented the democratic powers as conditions of peace: independence from Spain, that the Spanish people determine what their regime and destiny would be, and that all persecution and reprisals cease in the name of a patriotic work of reconciliation. A few days later, he informed the French and British ambassadors that he was prepared to order an immediate cessation of hostilities if his government obtained guarantees that there would be no reprisals. But he did not receive them ».

On February 6, the main Republican authorities, led by President Azaña, crossed the border followed by a huge exodus of Republican civilians and soldiers who were going into exile. On February 9, the president of the government, Juan Negrín, did the same, but in Toulouse he caught a plane to return to Alicante on February 10 accompanied by some ministers with the intention of reactivating the war in the center-south zone. The only support that Negrín already had, in addition to a part of his own party (the PSOE was divided between "Negrinistas" and "Antinegrinistas") were the communists.

The Casado coup and the collapse of the republic (March 1939)

Map of the two Spains in March 1939.

In the territory that was still in the hands of the republic, a last battle broke out between those who considered it useless to continue fighting and those who still thought that "to resist is to win" (hoping that the tensions in Europe would end up exploding and Great Britain and France, finally, would come to the aid of the Spanish republic, or that they would at least impose a peace without reprisals on Franco), but the fatigue of war and famine and the crisis of subsistence that devastated the republican zone were undermining the capacity of resistance of the population. But the problem for Negrin was how to end the war without fighting in a way other than surrender without conditions.

On February 24, Negrín left Madrid after holding a council of ministers and installed his headquarters in the El Poblet estate in the Alicante town of Petrel (whose code name was «Posición Yuste»). Three days later, on February 27, France and Great Britain recognized Franco's government in Burgos as the legitimate government of Spain, and on February 28, given this international recognition, the resignation of the presidency of the republic was made official. of Manuel Azaña and his provisional replacement by the president of the Cortes, Diego Martínez Barrio (both were in France). After all these facts, Negrín's position was untenable.

Meanwhile, the military and political conspiracy against the Negrín government led by the head of the Army of the Center, Colonel Segismundo Casado, who had made contact through the "fifth column" with the General Headquarters of the " generalissimo» Franco for a surrender of the republican army «without reprisals» in the manner of the «embrace of Vergara» of 1839 that put an end to the first Carlist war (with the conservation of military jobs and positions, included). Something to which General Franco's emissaries never committed themselves. Casado obtained the support of various military leaders, including the anarchist Cipriano Mera, head of the IV Army Corps, and some important politicians, such as the socialist Julián Besteiro, who had also maintained contact with the "fifth columnists" of Madrid. All of them criticized Negrín's strategy of resistance and the "dependence on him" of the Soviet Union and the PCE.

On March 5, Colonel Casado mobilized his forces (convinced that "it would be easier to settle the war through an understanding between the military") and seized the nerve centers of Madrid and then announced the formation of a Council National Defense Council chaired by General Miaja and made up of two Republicans, three Socialists (among them Julián Besteiro) and two anarchists. The Council issued a radio manifesto addressed to "anti-fascist Spain" deposing the Negrín government, but made no mention of peace negotiations. Communist-controlled military units put up resistance in and around Madrid but were defeated (there were about 2,000 deaths). On March 6, Juan Negrín, his government and other important figures of the republic such as Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) and Rafael Alberti finally left the El Poblet farm where they were installed in the Alicante town of Petrel to the El Poblet aerodrome. They settled in Monóvar from where they left Spain and went into exile in four planes to avoid being captured by the "casadistas" and the possible Francoist repression that would take place after the defeat, shortly after the main communist leaders did the same.

After Casado's coup was consummated, General Franco refused to accept a new "embrace from Vergara" and did not grant Casado "none of the guarantees implored almost on their knees by his emissaries [who met with members of the General Headquarters], and he replied to the British and French, eager to act as intermediaries in the surrender of the republic in order to contain the German and Italian influence on the new regime, that he did not need them that the "spirit of generosity" of the victors constituted the best guarantee for the defeated".

Franco only accepted an "unconditional surrender" so all that remained was to prepare the evacuation of Casado and the National Defense Council. They embarked with their families in Gandía on March 29 in the British destroyer that took them to Marseille (Julián Besteiro decided to stay). The day before, the "national" troops entered Madrid and the insurgents quickly occupied the entire center-south area, which had remained under the authority of the republic throughout the war, practically without a fight. In Alicante, since March 29, some 15,000 people, including military leaders, Republican politicians, combatants and the civilian population who had fled Madrid and other places, crowded into the port waiting to board a British or French ship. but the majority did not succeed and were captured by the Italian troops of the Littorio Division, under the command of General Gastone Gambara. On April 1, 1939, the radio of the rebel side ("Radio Nacional de España") broadcast the last part of the Spanish civil war.

The Republic in exile

Chronological list of the last acts of the last government and the first in exile:

• 23 January 1939, the Government of the Republic proclaims the state of war.
• February 1, last meeting of the Courts in Figueras.
• 12 February, meeting of the Council of Ministers in Madrid.
• 27 February, France and the United Kingdom recognize the Francoist Government.
• February 28, 1939, Manuel Azaña resigns in France. Provisional replacement by Diego Martínez Barrio (President of the Courts) by art. 74 of the 1931 Constitution.
• 3 March, first meeting of the Standing Committee of the Courts in Exile (Paris). Confirmation of Martínez Barrio as Acting President.
• March 5 (night of 4 to 5), coup d'etat of Colonel Casado; resistance of military units associated with the PCE in Madrid.
• April 1, the insurrectioned soldiers end the war.
• The Spanish Refugee Evacuation Service (SERE) (PC) is created.
• April 5, second meeting of the Standing Committee of the Courts in the Exile (Paris), following which Diego Martínez Barrio resigns.
• 27 July 1939, the Permanent Council of the Courts affirms the dissolution of the Government of the Republic.
• November 24, 1939, the Spanish Republics (JARE) (CDN) Auxilio Board is created in Paris.
• Summer of 1940, the Spanish Democratic Alliance (ADE) (CDN) is created in London
• November 1942, the Spanish National Union (UNE) (PC) is created in France
• November 1943, the Spanish Liberation Board (JEL) (PSOE) is created in Mexico.
• September 1944, the National Alliance of Democratic Forces (ANFD) (former Popular Front) was established in Toulouse
• October 1944, the ANFD is integrated into the JEL.
• January 1945, the first meeting of the Courts in Exile (Mexico) at the initiative of the JEL.
• June 1945, third meeting of the Standing Committee of the Courts in Exile (Mexico).
• Dimite Juan Negrín (August 1945)
• September 1945, creation of the Government of the Republic in the Exile.

Although the Civil War forced the end of the republican government in Spain, different republican institutions were operating until 1977 and various countries such as Mexico or Yugoslavia continued to recognize the government in exile as the legitimate government.

List of presidents

Chair of the Second Spanish Republic.

Presidents of the Republic (heads of State)

• Niceto Alcalá-Zamora (1931-1936)
• Manuel Azaña (1936-1939)

Presidents of the Council of Ministers (Chief of Government)

• Niceto Alcalá-Zamora from 14 April 1931 to 14 October 1931.
• Manuel Azaña from October 14, 1931 to September 12, 1933 (first period); from February 1936 to May 10, 1936 (2nd period).
• Alejandro Lerroux from 12 September 1933 to 8 October 1933 (1.^♪period); from 16 December 1933 to 28 April 1934 (2nd period); from 4 October 1934 to 25 September 1935 (3.♪ period).
• Diego Martínez Barrio from October 8, 1933 to December 16, 1933 (first period); and a few hours on July 1936 (2nd period).
• Ricardo Samper from April 28, 1934 to October 4, 1934.
• Joaquín Chapaprieta from 25 September 1935 to 14 December 1935.
• Manuel Portela Valladares from 14 December 1935 to 19 February 1936.
• Augusto Barcia Trelles from May 10, 1936 to May 13, 1936.
• Santiago Casares Quiroga from 13 May 1936 to 19 July 1936.
• José Giral from July 1936 to September 4, 1936.
• Francisco Largo Caballero from September 4, 1936 to May 17, 1937.
• Juan Negrín from May 17, 1937 to March 6, 1939.
• National Defence Council chaired by General José Miaja, constituted after the coup of Colonel Casado of March 5, 1939 and which served until the defeat of the Republic.