In 1931 the Second Republic became the government of Spain, countering the European norm as Fascist and fascist-style governments appeared to proliferate. The Republic's arrival raised public expectations and it too speedily implemented radical reform, exemplified by its attempt to separate church and state. Church desecrations and anticlerical violence were one manifestation of Spaniards' desire for a more secular society in May 1931.

The faithful reacted swiftly by creating Acción Popular, a proto-political party led by lawyer and Catholic newspaper editor, José María Gil Robles, by October 1932. Gil Robles and his coreligionists preferred altering the republic's content rather than overthrowing it, an approach known as accidentalism. Robles' political wit and charisma unified the right in the largest political party in Spanish history, Confederación Español de Derechas Autonomas (CEDA, Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right Wing Groups). In 1933, CEDA won a parliamentary majority but never led the government, nor captured the majority of cabinet posts. Legal takeover thus blocked, CEDA then obstructed government and eventually collaborated with military conspirators who waged war to destroy the Republic in 1936.

Simon (Sid) Lowe's meticulously researched study of CEDA's youth wing, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP, Youth of Popular Action) is set against this background. Lowe, a Madrid-based British journalist reporting on Spanish Futbol for The Guardian, spent a great deal of time nosing about Spanish archives acquiring documentary evidence that eventually became his doctoral thesis, supervised by Mary Vincent, for the University of Sheffield. Lowe accessed JAP documents, party publications, contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, speeches, and eye witness narratives, including those of Gil Robles, to assert that, “the party-political basis of the Franco régime is more properly sought in the radical wing of the CEDA and the JAP, which did much to provoke the conditions necessary for the rising and the foundation of the New State and closely foreshadowed the nature of that régime” (8). The Spanish Civil War's bibliography is huge, unwieldy and, I mistakenly thought, devoid of silences that required filling. Sid Lowe's book revises the historical record, revealing the Juventud's seminal role in the outbreak of civil war in Spain. It also demonstrates that the ideological underpinnings of Francoism resided in JAP ideology.

The book's six chronological and thematic chapters relate the Juventud's birth, development, and eventual demise from 1931–1939. Chapter 1 convincingly examines the JAP's infusion with fascist ideology and its hispanicization through amalgamation with Catholicism but its assertion that, between the JAP and the Falange, the latter resorted to less political violence, falls short of the mark. Lowe's argument, that a broader view of what constitutes violence is key, is less convincing, especially when it praises the JAP precisely for its willingness to engage in physical confrontation against the October revolution in 1934. The second chapter outlines the JAP's vision for a new state that foreshadows, in remarkable detail, the Spanish Francoist state. Lowe's narrative clearly reveals CEDA's opportunistic use of the Juventud's vision with the main problem being the relationship between the two; the latter struggling between dependence and independence with the former, especially given CEDA's tepid commitment to the core values the JAP held dear. Lowe's narrative then tackles the difficult task of describing CEDA and he seems to want to deny CEDA political party status while, simultaneously, calling it a party throughout the book. Ideological and operational cleavages existing between CEDA and the JAP are the main foci of chapter three. It also compares the Juventud and Falange, prior to 1936, by profiling their constituencies and masterfully demonstrating the JAP was a more consequential and populous fascist-style organization with broader appeal, more resources, and better organization. Chapter 4 accurately describes the 1936 election and what the defeat of the right meant for Gil Robles, CEDA, and the Juventud. It rationalizes CEDA's disintegration, Gil Robles' loss of prestige and political authority, and the reaction of the JAP membership: some joined the army; many migrated to other right-wing organizations, especially the Falange; more did nothing at all. The recruitment and membership boon enjoyed by the Falange and the Carlists once war began is the core of chapter 5. The JAP's disintegration was largely self-inflicted as its members too hastily deserted to other groups or did nothing in response to their leadership's lack of initiative. Gil Robles' departure from Spain, politically fatal, and the memory of CEDA-JAP's collaboration with the Republic, now the enemy, precipitated additional problems. Thus, when war erupted the Falange and the Carlists actively recruited against the Juventud. Lowe provides a detailed account of Franco and Suñer's, a former JAP leader, usurpation of political authority in the burgeoning new state in the last chapter. It is a sad recounting of the rapid anonymity and irrelevance suffered by CEDA and JAP as they were completely excluded from the post-war settlement. Despite that outcome, Lowe contends that the Juventud's ideology survived and flourished in the core values of the Francoist state.

Sid Lowe's Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Juventud de Acción Popular in Spain, 1931–1939, a richly detailed study of the rise and fall of a fascist style organization and its political counterpart during the politically tumultuous Spanish Second Republic, must surely revise the history of the Republic's descent into civil war. The origins of Francoist ideology and its installation as the bulwark of a thirty-six year dictatorship in Spain must also take Dr. Lowe's narrative into account. Lowe's experience as a journalist makes the book highly readable, even if it is still somewhat more to an academic's taste. Few books address the JAP at all. No study of the JAP, in any language, is as carefully and copiously researched, well judged, and engagingly written as this one. The volume of Lowe's documental sources and fastidiousness of his work becomes apparent when one considers that one of the book's six chapters contains 199 citations, another 193, and still another 189! Though requiring another revision of my own lectures on the Second Republic, I enthusiastically recommend this tome to anyone interested in adding another vignette to the story of the destruction of the Second Republic and decline of Spain into civil war in 1936.