Although the Spanish civil war (1936–39) occurred in a second-tier power in a relatively peripheral part of the European continent, the war and its consequences continue to provoke great interest among the general public and historians. The literature on the conflict and the breakdown of the Second Republic (1931–9) is enormous and still growing. The failure of republican forces during the civil war and the victory of General Francisco Franco led to the longest personal dictatorship in European history (1936–75).Footnote ¹ Although Franco remained in control of Spain for thirty-nine years, his regime – as it had during the war – proved able to adapt to changing circumstances. After his death, the understandable disgust at the unusual longevity of a ‘fascist’ regime with its compulsory hero worship of a bloody dictator produced a historiography that was determined to debunk the Caudillo and his rule. More recently, some historians have taken a more detached view and, while not forgetting the regime's murderous repression and unrelenting authoritarianism, have attempted to comprehend its nearly four decades of survival and transmutation.

Stanley Payne attributes the origin of the dictatorship to the failures of the Second Republic. His unparalleled command of Spanish and many other national historiographies as well as his extraordinary grasp of comparative politics allow him to place the Spanish civil war within the framework of a broader European struggle between tradition and modernity. The First World War opened the era of revolutionary civil wars between ‘whites’ and ‘reds’. Unlike the full-scale or mini-civil wars in Russia, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Italy that followed the First World War, the Spanish revolutionary–counter-revolutionary confrontation was not the by-product of world war and was dependent nearly exclusively on endogenous developments. The Spanish ‘revolution’, as Payne terms it, began in 1931. In contrast to Weimar and the French Third Republic, its origins were not rooted in the counter-revolutionary crushing of the extreme left. On the contrary, the ‘Jacobin’ leaders of the Second Republic, especially Manuel Azaña, had as their top priority ‘the permanent exclusion of Catholic and conservative interests’ (p. 23). Their socialist allies went one step further by asserting that the advent of the Republic demonstrated that Spain had become so modern and developed that a permanently weakened right could no longer stop the coming of socialism. The result of the alliance between Azaña's left republicans and the socialists was a democracy without democrats. According to Payne, the Republic restricted civil rights and censored newspapers more severely than had the parliamentary monarchy. At the same time, he admits that the conditional loyalty of much of the right to the republican regime and its barely concealed preference for authoritarian solutions aroused legitimate suspicions on the left. However, Payne attributes to the left more responsibility for the breakdown of democracy in 1930s Spain. He explicitly agrees with the pro-franquista historian, Pío Moa, that the insurrection of the socialists and their communist and anarchist allies in Asturias in 1934 was indefensible since, unlike the Austrian socialist revolt of 1934, it was not a reaction to the imposition of an authoritarian government.Footnote ²

Unlike Moa, Payne asserts that the Asturias revolt was not the beginning of the civil war, which was not inevitable after 1934. He argues that the only secure path for the survival of the Republic was to massively and severely repress the radical left as had the French Third Republic during the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Weimar Republic during the Spartacist uprising of 1918–19. Even though the elections of February 1936 demonstrated only limited polarisation of a supposedly hyper-politicised society, the Popular Front's failure to maintain order and its anti-democratic actions – manipulation of elections and the assassination of the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo – contributed greatly to further polarisation. The assassins of the head of the opposition were close to the socialist leader, Indalecio Prieto, who protected them from any investigation. Like the Italian fascists, the Spanish socialists ‘were the principal source of violence in their respective countries’ (p. 72). The Popular Front government failed to realise that unconsolidated democracies were best governed from the centre; this blunder resulted in civil war.

Both the left and the right miscalculated that the war would be short. Instead, it turned into a war of attrition between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, both of whom engaged in massive and murderous terror, one of the hottest topics in current Spanish civil war historiography. Nationalists embarked upon campaigns of political cleansing or what some historians have called politicide, whereas republicans adopted a more synthetic politico-religious variety.Footnote ³ The revolutionaries’ massacres and numerous acts of iconoclasm showed their desire to replace the old religion with their new secular faith. In reaction to a massive wave of iconoclasm and the killing of approximately 6,000 priests, Catholicism became the most cohesive cultural force in the nationalist zone and the Spanish conflict the greatest war of religion of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴ In contrast to its counterparts in Germany and Italy, the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, became ultra-Catholic. It is symptomatic that after the war, the church regained privileges that it had possessed during the reign of Alfonso XIII (1886–1931).

Although Payne asserts that an often unimaginative Franco missed opportunities for a quicker victory, the Caudillo ultimately proved to be a competent logistician and strategist in a long civil war.Footnote ⁵ His airlift of North African troops – executed with German and Italian assistance – saved the failing Alzamiento. The combined aerial–infantry operations that the Generalísimo employed to conquer the north anticipated those of the Second World War. The commitment of his elite forces, who often held out against much greater numbers of their republican enemy, immensely contributed to the nationalist victory. On the other side, as in many revolutions – the English, French, Russian and Chinese – the Republic attempted to create a ‘new model army’ but eventually copied the old military structures, adding a special Soviet bent. Although the Popular Army had a number of important defensive successes – the battles of Madrid, Guadalajara and Valencia – its lack of well-trained and dedicated low-ranking officers and its logistical difficulties weakened it decisively. The republican inability to provide food for civilians in urban areas created tragic hunger.Footnote ⁶

Unlike other contemporary European civil wars, the Spanish conflict also involved naval and aerial forces. Despite the high degree of politicisation of revolutionary rank-and-file sailors who were able to dominate the fleet at the beginning of the war, the republican navy proved to be incompetent, whereas the nationalists used their own smaller naval forces more skillfully. The air war during the conflict prefigured – on a much reduced scale – that of the Second World War. Both sides responded to offensive aerial assaults with reprisals against urban populations, although the nationalists considerably outdid the republicans in numbers of civilians slaughtered.Footnote ⁷ The insurgents harvested a worldwide barrage of negative publicity, exemplified by Pablo Picasso's Guernica.Footnote ⁸

The most surprising aspect of the Spanish conflict may have been the nationalist economic performance. The relatively efficient nationalist economy outperformed not only that of its republican enemy but also its counter-revolutionary (but quite corrupt) counterparts in White Russia or nationalist China. The nationalists’ comparative success throws doubt upon the consensus of many political and diplomatic historians that the nationalists won because of aid furnished by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.Footnote ⁹ As the western Allies experienced when aiding the Russian whites and the Americans when assisting the Chinese nationalists, it is not the amount of foreign aid which is ‘decisive’, but rather how its recipients employ it. The nationalists used German and Italian aid effectively and proved more willing to sacrifice their own money and blood than their failed counter-revolutionary foils in Russia and China.

In the republican zone, the most profound worker revolution of the twentieth century probably harmed the republican cause more than it helped. Not only did production remain relatively stagnant in the republican zone, but the revolutionary confiscation of private property also alienated the capitalist democracies from the Republic. The United Kingdom, France and the United States were reluctant to aid what was perceived to be a disorderly and bloody, even if legal, regime. Hitler successfully used the conflict to cement his alliance with Italy and to distract the democracies from German expansionist plans in central and eastern Europe. Mussolini regarded Spain as part of his Mediterranean sphere of influence and pushed the nationalists to adopt his fascist model. A shared vision of a fascist Spain friendly to Italy and Germany helped to create the future Axis.

Payne is especially expert on Soviet policy towards Spain.Footnote ¹⁰ He interprets the Popular Fronts encouraged by the Third International not as an indication of any real moderation of communist goals but as a tactic which would more reliably lead to revolution. During the civil war, the communist objective was to establish a new kind of republic that in many ways resembled the ‘popular democracies’ that the Red Army would impose on eastern Europe following the Second World War. Thus, in contrast to the anarchist and trotskysant extreme left (and liberal historians such as Hugh Thomas), Payne does not view communist policy as counter-revolutionary but rather as oriented towards the construction of ‘a leftist authoritarian regime’ (p. 195) with a partially nationalised economy. The socialist prime minister Juan Negrín (1937–9) shared this vision, but the ‘semi-pluralist’ Republic never became a Stalinist puppet state, even though communists dominated its Popular Army. The Spanish conflict greatly enhanced the prestige of the Soviet Union. In general, antifascism gave communism a new life and provided it with prestigious artistic, intellectual and scientific fellow travellers.Footnote ¹¹ Some of the latter included espionage agents who would eventually offer information – usually of only limited value – on the development of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹²

Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García share perspectives quite similar to Payne's. All three authors consider the advent of the Second Republic as ‘revolutionary’ and the Jacobin and exclusivist left more responsible for the regime's failure than the corporatist and authoritarian right. Álvarez and Villa are conscious of French republican models and show the Third Republic's counter-revolutionary origins. The authors argue that – in contrast to the French Third Republic in its early years – the inability of the Second Spanish Republic to integrate a large body of Catholics doomed it to failure. The moderate left of the French Third Republic – led by Léon Gambetta – circumscribed its Jacobinism and successfully reached out to ‘the rural middle classes’, groups which would turn against the Spanish Second Republic. Catholic republicans – such as Niceto Alcalá-Zamora – wanted to play a role similar to Adolphe Thiers, the French monarchist who became a reluctant but committed republican. However, Alcalá-Zamora received insufficient support from left republicans and socialists, who cemented their alliance on the basis of anticlericalism. The left, whose strength was in the cities, imposed an urban-centred electoral system on rural Spain in order to limit the power of local rural bosses (caciques). An even more progressive change was to award the right to vote to women, although Álvarez and Villa convincingly refute the claim by many on the left that the female vote gave victory to the right in the 1933 elections. More dangerously, the Law of Republican Defence (1931) allowed too much arbitrary power to a government willing to suppress any campaign to revise its anticlerical constitution. Governmental arbitrariness intensified after the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936. Local authorities illegally dismissed rightist municipal councillors and protected neither the property nor the lives of their political and social adversaries. The Popular Front coalition manipulated election results in Cuenca and – as the authors persuasively demonstrate – in Granada. They argue that the Granada election of May 1936 marked the end of ‘the process of political modernization’ begun under the constitutional monarchy in 1876. Like Payne, Álvarez and Villa conclude that by 1936 the Republic had become an undemocratic regime representing only the parties of the left.

Álvarez and Villa distance themselves from social explanations for the breakdown of the Republic and the outbreak of the civil war. They focus exclusively on politics and emphasise the similarities between Spain and more advanced European nations. They contend that the left republicans and the socialists erred in believing that Spain was a backward society in need of a radical project of modernisation. The left's negative judgement of the legacy of the liberal constitutional monarchy led to their Jacobinism.

However, it seems to me that the persistence in the mid-twentieth century not only of Jacobinism but also of violent revolutionary movements – whether socialist, communist or anarchist – reflected an underdeveloped society that differed sharply from its northern neighbour. In fact, the authors provide perhaps the best analysis of the anarchist revolt of December 1933, which prefigured the even bloodier Asturias revolt of the following year. Both resembled the kinds of proletarian rebellions that had erupted in nineteenth- but not twentieth-century France. The Second Spanish Republic was forced to confront a series of issues – the relationship between church and state, military and civilian government, region and nation, and land reform – that more developed nations had resolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The attempt to simultaneously confront all these problems weakened the Republic, but its failure after February 1936 to protect private property and personal safety was even more fatal. The violent civil war that followed resembled most closely the brutal conflicts in the even more backward societies of Russia and China in the twentieth century.

Payne, Álvarez and Villa underestimate the right's commitment to subvert the Republic. Payne states that Alcalá-Zamora constantly asked the Confederación española de derechas autónomas (CEDA) to declare itself loyal to the Republic, but that the CEDA refused because ‘republicanism in Spain meant support for a sectarian regime that denied rights to Catholics’ (p. 41). Although Álvarez and Villa admit that the CEDA was never fully loyal to the regime, they blame the revolutionary Jacobinism of the left for the failure to reconcile Catholics with the Republic. A number of measures restricting religious expression – secularising Catholic cemeteries, forbidding street processions and imposing lay education – may have been ill-timed and overly provocative, but any regime that separates church from state will inevitably negate some Catholic privileges. If the left can be criticised for not supporting moderate Catholics, such as Alcalá-Zamora, so can the right. Gambetta is remembered for his 1877 battle cry, ‘cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi’, as well as for his moderation.

The loss of privileges or even rights should not be confused with the persecution of a church which had created a global model of intolerance during its many centuries of religious monopoly. Its position in Spain in the early 1930s was certainly better than its counterpart in Mexico in the 1920s or even France in the 1910s. Even so, many of its publications viciously attacked the Republic.Footnote ¹³ Gil Robles, the CEDA leader who showed increasing sympathy for fascism after Hitler came to power in early 1933, understandably frightened the left.Footnote ¹⁴ So did the right's indiscriminate crackdown on the left after the Asturias revolt. Unfortunately, both left and right believed that only repression could save the Republic or Spain, and both felt that tolerance of the enemy would lead to their own destruction. As Payne points out, only a dwindling number of conservative republicans and especially the Radical Party supported liberal democracy. The latter's commonplace corruption proved to be preferable to the mass murders that each side executed at the war's outbreak. Both the left and the right persecuted or killed those who obeyed the law and the constitution.

Zira Box's España, Año Cero is part of a recent cultural turn and has been influenced by European and American discussions of ‘political religions’.Footnote ¹⁵ Her book revolves around the struggle in the nationalist zone during the civil war and immediately afterwards between, on the one hand, traditional monarchists and Catholics who desired a return to Catholic Spain and, on the other, revolutionary fascists of the Falange who deified the nation and wished to subordinate the church to a totalitarian state. The fascists feared the return of a decadent old Spain; the traditionalists abhorred a pagan Caesarism that was nearly as bad as liberalism or democracy. Early Francoism was a hybrid of the two. The Catholics became fascistic as the fascists were catholicised. In practice, a Solomonic Franco divided official holidays between the two tendencies, and the national–Catholic calendar of the regime offered an extreme-right ecumenicism. In 1938 Cardinal Isidro Gomá, the primate of Spain, militarised the Virgin's holiday, Immaculate Conception (8 December), by declaring it also the Day of the Crusader that celebrated soldiers who were defending Spain from atheistic communism. Commemoration of the Día de la Raza (Day of the Race, 12 October) – also known as Columbus Day – continued as it had under previous regimes. Like their predecessors, nationalists rejected the sensible suggestion of Miguel de Unamuno who had recommended that the name be changed to Day of our Language, which would celebrate the common linguistic heritage of Spain and Latin America. Instead, more than a few nationalists, usually Falangists, nursed the illusion that they could re-establish the Spanish Empire in the New World.

Box ably explores the commonalities of the two sporadically antagonistic currents. Both believed that the nationalist victory meant the rebirth of Spain or, in a more religious metaphor, the ‘Easter’ of the nation, whose sacrifice would bring salvation. The fascist current was absorbed into the more hegemonic Catholic one. In the mid-twentieth century, the traditionalists finally found themselves on the winning side. Their victory was symbolised by the omnipresent cross on monuments throughout the country, the largest of which can be seen today at the Valley of the Fallen. Franco himself conceived this monument to the nationalist war dead, which was constructed in part by republican prisoners in the 1940s and 1950s and is still one of the most visited in Spain. Other nationalist lieux de mémoire, such as the Alcázar de Toledo and the village of Belchite – the defence of both during the war demonstrated the bravery and fortitude of Franco's elite troops – were purposefully left in ruins to display the supposed ‘barbarism’ of the ‘reds’.

Box's work shows the strong connection that exists in Spanish historiography between cultural and political history and the difficulty of separating the two. This can be a virtue when it leads to new discoveries but also a vice when it repeats themes that are well known to historians. Her cultural history avoids the recent trend towards neo-idealism, i.e. the substitution of a cultural determinism for a supposedly outmoded social or economic one.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, Box's book needs a more precise periodisation. The beginning and ending of ‘año cero’ (foundational year) should be made clearer. Certainly, the author shows that political and cultural periodisations overlap, but it would be useful to know to what extent they are identical. Ultimately, the Falange failed to impose its political religion, and the ‘mouldy smell’ (p. 366) of the Mass and other Catholic liturgies replaced the fascist salute and other rituals.

Antonio Cazorla's volume on the post-war years opens with the author's moving summary of his childhood as a member of a family of nine, whose parents were illiterate workers but who wisely protected themselves and their children by avoiding any public or even private political discussions. In his rich social history of the regime, the suppressed nonetheless returns. Cazorla deplores the regime's awful repression, which eliminated 100,000 to 150,000 persons. Thus, the urban and especially the rural poor were leery of men of ‘ideas’ (i.e. political dissidents) and avoided public protest during most of the Franco period. Furthermore, and not unreasonably, many concluded that hyper-politicisation during the Second Republic was responsible for the war and therefore abandoned all political activity. Ironically, this included any serious commitment to the regime's official party, the Falange, which even at its height, as Box shows, never matched the mobilising ability of the Nazi or Italian fascist movements. When collective protest erupted during the early Franco period, it usually expressed concrete, not regime-changing, grievances – the hike of streetcar fares in Barcelona in 1951 or the reduction of coalminers’ wages in 1957–8.

The hostility to economic liberalism (identified with ‘Jewish capitalism’), a counterproductive autarky, and unenlightened militarism were causes of the regime's dismal economic record during the first generation of its rule. At the same time, its supporters – who believed with some justification that Franco had saved their property and religion from the ‘reds’ – profited from its favouritism. Corruption pervaded both the state and the Falange and produced massive apathy and cynicism among the population. Black marketeering became much more popular and common than any form of political or even religious participation. Nearly everyone defied the state's controlled economy as a vendor or a consumer. The poorest engaged in petty thefts from the fields, marketplaces and at the ports and railroad stations.Footnote ¹⁷

The church's quest, even though aided by the most clerical state in Europe, to re-catholicise the masses was generally ineffective during Spain's long 1950s. Nevertheless, well into the 1960s the regime maintained a rural base, consisting of both large and small landowners, who benefited from its toleration of the black market and the defence of religion. Marxist historians have emphasised the regime's links to big capital, but its system of price controls and the consequent dominance of the black market acted as a form of protectionism for inefficient small farmers. The poor and modest classes, especially urban housewives, developed survival networks of buyers and sellers, in which the latter provided micro-credit to consumers for the purchase of basic commodities.

Although Cazorla's portrait of the regime is hostile, he also argues that the long post-civil war period was a time of significant progress or at least change. Other works have confirmed this view of a regime which was able to integrate or at least pacify the rural and urban lower middle classes.Footnote ¹⁸ The massive migrations of the poor from 1950 to 1975 terminated the many centuries of rural domination of Spanish society. In 1950 the agricultural sector represented 46 per cent of working people; by 1970, only 22 per cent. Former peasants sought salaried labour in Spanish and European cities. The female proletariat was particularly exploited as low-wage labourers, maids and even prostitutes. The hypocritical and clerical moral order, which criminalised abortions, was responsible for the annual deaths of thousands of women.

The Spanish ‘economic miracle’, which created widespread prosperity after 1959, ‘was made possible only by the extraordinary exploitation and sacrifice of ordinary Spaniards’ (p. 15).Footnote ¹⁹ They paid dearly for development through low salaries, unfair taxation and poor state services, in particular what Cazorla claims was a terrible or often non-existent system of public education. Wage earners exploited themselves by moonlighting. Their children – 25 per cent of whom never graduated from elementary school – began employment at an early age and therefore sacrificed schooling for salaries. The regime shortsightedly promoted the formation of an ignorant workforce suitable for only low-skilled jobs. Newly urbanised families lodged precariously in makeshift housing on the outskirts of cities, where, despite wretched conditions, neighbourhoods with some social and even political cohesion formed.

Although public health was generally mediocre, prenatal care improved and infant mortality fell. The originally rural-based and culturally reactionary regime transformed society and laid the basis for an urban, secular and consumerist modernity. The spectacular growth of mass tourism and the foreign influx provided new models of freedom for a repressed society.Footnote ²⁰ Half-clothed foreign blondes and brunettes sartorially and sensually challenged a moral order that had regularly fined both the parents of children who swam in the nude and women who refused to wear the albornoz (a full robe favoured by church authorities). Commodities – such as tobacco, cinema, radio, automobiles and, finally, television – appealed to both sexes. Nevertheless, inequalities between the wealthy and the poor and between rich and depressed regions supposedly expanded. So did political discontent by the end of the dictatorship when students, Catalan and Basque nationalists and militant workers challenged its multiple repressions. The gradual rise of a Christian democratic culture encouraged the decline of the crude anticlericalism of the left.

Although in many ways Cazorla's volume is the most important social history of Spain's transition to democracy, I do have several reservations. The author's explanation of the hunger in the republican zone during the civil war is superficial. Although the Republic had a geographical disadvantage in agriculture during the civil war, its system of price controls and devalued currency encouraged peasant hoarding and therefore urban starvation. Cazorla also overemphasises the financial contribution to the regime of the direct expropriation of the property of its leftist political enemies. During the civil war, although not afterwards, the Francoist upper and middle classes proved exceptionally capable of taxing themselves to support their counter-revolution and its defence of property and religion. The figure of 200,000 deaths due to starvation between 1939 and 1945 (p. 9) needs more exploration and precision, even if Cazorla correctly emphasises that its victims were mainly young children and the elderly of southern Spain who were neither peasants nor regular wage earners. The latter could benefit economically during the civil war and in the 1940s from the black market either by wage creep that defied wage controls or by participating directly in the black market, if they were paid in kind, a practice which remained widespread throughout rural Spain during the first half of the twentieth century. We need more research into this important issue that the dominant political and now cultural historiography has ignored.

Cazorla also presents an overly victimist picture of exploited females, who exercised more power in the household than the author indicates. He takes the testimony of prostitutes – who claimed to have joined the oldest profession because of male seduction and abandonment – at face value. His comparison between Francoist and Nazi rationing overestimates the success of the latter. He may have exaggerated the supposedly increasing differences between rich and poor regions and under-rated the educational achievements of the regime which did manage to eliminate mass illiteracy. The slow process of the mellowing of the regime and its increasing reluctance to engage in massive violent repression should have been discussed at greater length. Perhaps the social mobility – in all senses – of Spanish society, his own family and the author himself during this extraordinary period of change might modify Cazorla's intensely critical perspective on the regime's policies, at least in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cazorla's deep archival investigations, bolstered by oral history, amount to a major contribution which challenges the hegemonic political historiography of the ‘transition’, the term used to describe the transformation of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Instead of the usual summary of the democratisation of Spain, which focuses on the overly brief period between Franco's death in 1975 and the approval of the democratic constitution in 1978, Cazorla provides a longer and broader investigation into the modernisation of a backward and repressive society. He and Box show a considerable increase in methodological sophistication of the historiography of the Republic, civil war and the terribly long Franco regime. Although insufficiently critical of the right and the church, Álvarez, Villa and Payne demonstrate the continuing vitality of research on the Second Republic and civil war. Álvarez and Villa put forth a fresh and well-researched case for the sectarianism of the Republic. Payne's synthesis is full of provocative and stimulating observations from a historian of great ability.