During the three years of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly during its first six months, more than 6,800 members of the Catholic clergy were killed in the Republican rearguard. At the same time, hundreds of churches were partially or totally destroyed or, most commonly, used for secular purposes. Additionally, countless other cases of iconoclasm, or what anthropologist Manuel Delgado has termed “sacrophobia,” occurred. The intensity—and singular nature in the European context—of this anticlerical violence left contemporary observers baffled and has continued to perplex historians, who only decided to try to interpret the phenomenon relatively recently.

And this is what Maria Thomas does in The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm, 1931–1936. In this book, the author sets out to explore the motivations behind the acts of violence perpetrated against church property, rituals and individuals during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936) and the Civil War (1936–1939). She proposes moving beyond what she describes as “standard” interpretations, which associate these types of actions with the furious and primitive reaction of uncontrolled masses venting their irrational fury on the Church. Instead, Thomas presents a study that looks at the true agents of the violent action, identifying the faces in the crowd, and ascribing motivations to the masses. These agents were mainly workers acting according to a logic derived from their participation in a left-wing anticlerical collective identity that began to be constructed in the nineteenth century and underwent a profound process of reconfiguration in the first third of the twentieth century, adding even more adherents from 1931 onward. The military coup of July 17–18, 1936 brought about such changes in the existing structure of political opportunities that it enabled a brutal escalation of the violence that already existed against the Church. The killing of clergy and acts of iconoclasm also became one of the main instruments used by the revolutionaries in the construction of a new society.

The book develops its theses in six chapters. Chapter 1 explains how collective anticlerical identities were constructed among Spanish workers during the first third of the twentieth century, identities built on the basis of the wrongs inflicted by the Church and the socialization of workers within political parties and trade unions where a radical anticlerical discourse prevailed. Chapter 2 looks at the intensification of anticlerical mobilization during the years of the Republic as a consequence of popular impatience with the perceived slowness with which the Republican authorities were dismantling Church power. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 study anticlerical violence during the first months of the Civil War, analyzing different aspects: the profile (class and profession, political militancy, age) of its agents, the importance of gender in defining subjects and forms of violence and the crucial role played by anticlerical violence in constructing the revolutionary bloc that emerged in the Republic rearguard. Finally, chapter 6 describes some additional characteristics of the “task of obliterating the Church from the public spaces and body politic” with such “rigorous, meticulous dedication” exhibited by “the people who burned churches and killed priests” (145).

Generally speaking, this analysis provides a plausible interpretation of anticlerical violence for Spain as a whole, essentially basing its study on two cases: the provinces of Madrid and Almeria. By concentrating on two cases, the author is able to make intensive and fruitful use of very different sources, most especially the interesting and useful documents produced by the Francoist military trials, in which the authors of the “crimes” committed in the Republican rearguard during the war were judged. The empirical base provided by the primary sources is one of the strong points of the study.

The main strength of The Faith and the Fury does not really lie in the originality of its thesis. After all, ever since Joan C. Ullman published The Tragic Week: a Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), academic historiography has rejected the “myth” of anticlerical violence as a consequence of the actions of irrational maddening mobs. Neither is it particularly novel to regard the violence against the Church as a revolutionary instrument in the hands of left-wing militants infused with a powerful anticlerical identity constructed in the preceding decades—this reviewer has held the position since the 1990s. Furthermore, it seems somewhat trite and unnecessary to turn to an ostensible “pacto de olvido” (“pact of forgetting”) about certain periods of Spanish history to justify the need for particular lines of research. Equally unnecessary and excessively simplistic is the view offered of workers accumulating endless grievances against the Catholic Church, some of them impossible, such as when the author asserts that “at the turn of the century . . . many monastery buildings were situated on the outskirts of villages, and peasant day laborers often worked on their vast expanses of land” (39), an assertion that, incidentally, derives from William Callahan's The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 ([Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998], 12), which naturally contains nothing to support the claim. This is one of several errors in the text that should be corrected in any subsequent edition.

The strength of the book, as noted, lies in the quality of the empirical research, its contribution to understanding the agents of anticlerical violence and iconoclasm during the Civil War, its timely and thought-provoking introduction of the gender question and, fundamentally, the explanation of the mechanisms of continuity—and rupture—between the growing but contained anticlerical violence of the Republican period and the unrestrained anticlerical fury of the war.

In any event, the overall impression of The Faith and the Fury is a positive one. It will be an essential work for anyone interested in the history of anticlericalism in Spain, a work whose main strength lies in its pioneering character as a monographic study in book form on a matter of great importance for the history of Spain and the Church.