The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Catalonia, which was made part of the kingdom of Aragon during the Middle Ages, was very different from the rest of the peninsula. Not surprisingly, friction developed later between Madrid and Barcelona. The Catalans had enjoyed a considerable amount of power in the Mediterranean. Their empire had included the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the Duchy of Athens. But as it had been the Castilian Isabella, not Ferdinand of Aragon, who financed Columbus, they did not have direct trading access to the Americas.

In 1640 Catalonia and Portugal rose against Philip IV of Spain and his minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Portugal won its independence but Catalonia acknowledged Louis XIII of France as its king, until Barcelona fell to Philip IV in 1652. Then, after the death of the last Spanish Habsburg in 1700, the War of the Spanish Succession started and Catalonia sided with England against Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. The Catalans were betrayed by the English in the Treaty of Utrecht, and the Bourbon Philip V abolished Catalonia’s rights, after it was reduced in 1714. The castle of Montjuich was built to dominate the city and remind the Catalans that they were ruled from Madrid. With this beginning Philip proceeded to implement the centralist idea of his Sun King grandfather. The unifying force of the Church had waned, so a new centripetal strength was needed if the monarchy was to control non-Castilians. The twentieth-century Basque philosopher Unamuno, who was no separatist, stated that ‘the aim was unity and nothing else; unity stifling the slightest individuality and difference…It is the dogma of the ruler’s infallibility.’ But ruthlessness did not solve the problem; it only stored up trouble for the future.

The backwardness of Spanish commercial activity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was mainly due to the way that Spanish Catholicism had maintained an anti-capitalist line by clinging to medieval teaching on usury. The code of the hidalgo (Spanish nobleman) forced him to despise money in general and the earning of it in particular. The census of 1788 showed that almost 50 per cent of the adult male population was not involved in any form of productive work. The army, the Church and, above all, the vast nobility were a dead weight on the rest of the population. It was perhaps this statistic which provoked the well-known saying that ‘one half of Spain eats but does not work, while the other half works but does not eat’.

In reaction against the commercial backwardness and rigidity of the ruling order, Spain was to experience a middle-class revolution in advance of most of Europe. The country enjoyed a brief easing of the chains in the mid eighteenth century, during Charles III’s reign, when the influence of the Enlightenment was felt. Reforms severely reduced the Church’s influence over the army, while many officers were attracted to Freemasonry. This anti-clerical and, therefore, political movement, was inextricably linked with the development of liberalism among Spain’s very small professional middle class. Liberalism became a recognizable force early in the nineteenth century as a result of the ‘War of Independence’ against Napoleon’s armies. The faint-hearted Charles IV was overthrown in a popular revolt because of the corruption and scandals of his favourite, Manuel de Godoy, and the arrival of the French army. Napoleon refused to recognize his heir, Ferdinand VII, and much of the Spanish aristocracy sided with the occupying power. Then Murat’s executions in Madrid provoked a spontaneous rising by the people on the ‘Second of May’ 1808, when they ferociously attacked the French emperor’s Mameluke cavalry with knives. ‘Napoleon’s ulcer’, as the rising was called, was the first large-scale guerrilla war of modern times and 60,000 Spaniards died in the defence of Saragossa. The bitter resistance came from a popular movement, though some liberal army officers played a major role, especially within the local juntas of defence.

The traditional ruling structure of ‘Old Spain’ suffered its first formal upset in 1812, when the central junta of defence proclaimed the Constitution of Cádiz, which was based upon middle-class liberal principles. This opportunity of dispensing with the stifling restrictions of monarchy and Church prompted many towns and provinces to declare themselves self-governing cantons within a Spanish federation. These changes did not last. Ferdinand VII was allowed to return on condition that he accepted the constitution, but he later broke his word and invoked the Holy Alliance, under which in 1823 the French King Louis XVIII sent an army, called ‘The Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis’, to crush Spanish liberalism. Ferdinand dismantled the liberal army and reintroduced the Inquisition to destroy ‘the disastrous mania of thinking’.