The Spanish Civil War began on 17-18 July 1936 with a rising by part of the army against the government of the Second Republic and ended on 1 April 1939 with the victory of General Francisco Franco. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives, in combat, bombing and repression behind both lines, and opened almost forty years of dictatorship.
Causes
The Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931, tried to modernise a country marked by deep inequality: land reform, separation of Church and State, army reform, a statute of autonomy for Catalonia and votes for women. The reforms provoked opposition from the right, the Church, the great landowners and part of the military, while revolutionary socialist and anarchist movements grew on the left. After the Asturias revolution of 1934 and the victory of the Popular Front in the February 1936 elections, political violence worsened, culminating in the murder of the monarchist leader Calvo Sotelo on 13 July.
The coup and the two Spains
On 17 July the Army of Africa rose in Morocco; the next day the revolt spread to the peninsula. The coup failed in the big cities such as Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, thanks to resistance by loyal forces and workers' militias, but succeeded in Galicia, Castile, Navarre and part of Andalusia: Spain was split in two. On one side were the Republicans, a mixed front of democrats, socialists, communists, anarchists and Basque and Catalan nationalists; on the other the Nationalists, soldiers, monarchists, Carlists, Falangists and Catholics, who chose Franco as their leader in October 1936.
An international war
France and the United Kingdom promoted non-intervention, but Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany sent men, aircraft and arms to Franco: Italy sent an expeditionary force of tens of thousands of soldiers, defeated at Guadalajara in 1937. The Soviet Union helped the Republic, and anti-fascist volunteers from many countries joined the International Brigades, including thousands of Italians in the Garibaldi battalion, writers such as George Orwell and journalists such as Ernest Hemingway.
The phases
Franco advanced quickly on Madrid, but the capital withstood the siege from November 1936. In 1937 the Nationalists conquered the north: on 26 April the German Condor Legion, with Italian aircraft, bombed Guernica, the symbolic town of the Basques, a massacre Picasso turned into his most famous painting (see Pablo Picasso). In 1938 the Nationalists reached the Mediterranean, cutting Republican territory in two; the long Battle of the Ebro, the last Republican offensive, ended in defeat. In January 1939 Barcelona fell and half a million people fled to France; in March Madrid fell.
After the war
The end of the war was followed by years of harsh repression: executions, concentration camps, prison and purges, while hundreds of thousands of Spaniards remained in exile, especially in France and Mexico. Among the war's victims was the poet Federico García Lorca, killed in 1936. Franco ruled until his death in 1975 (see the history of Spain).
Memory
During the democratic transition the 1977 amnesty law chose not to prosecute past crimes. Only in the 2000s did the Historical Memory Law (2007) and the Democratic Memory Law (2022) address the recognition of victims and the exhumation of mass graves. In 2019 Franco's remains were moved from the Valley of the Fallen, now renamed Valle de Cuelgamuros, to Mingorrubio cemetery. The civil war remains a divisive subject in Spanish politics and society.