R4.10 Democracy, authoritarianism and conflict in Spain (circa 1920–2020)

Spain in the twentieth century moved from a parliamentary monarchy to dictatorship, to a democratic republic, through a civil war, to 36 years of authoritarian rule and finally to a stable parliamentary democracy. Its civil war of 1936–1939 drew in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and its peaceful transition after 1975 became a model studied in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

The timeline of Spain from 1920 to 2020 shows five periods, which give the study its shape: the last years of the monarchy, the Second Republic and civil war, the Franco dictatorship, the transition, and parliamentary democracy.

Spain in crisis: the parliamentary monarchy, 1917–1923

The Restoration system

Spain in 1920 was a constitutional monarchy under Alfonso XIII (king 1902–1931). Its political system dated from the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874 and the constitution of 1876. Two parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, took turns in office by private agreement, the turno pacífico ("peaceful rotation"). When one party had governed for a time, the king appointed a prime minister from the other, who then organised elections to give himself a majority.

Caciquismo worked in the countryside, where most Spaniards lived and many could not read. It worked less well in the growing cities, where Republicans, Socialists and regional parties won seats. Universal male suffrage had existed since 1890, but the system was built to prevent it changing who ruled. The result was a parliament that did not represent the main social forces of the country: industrial workers, landless labourers, the Catalan middle class and, increasingly, the army.

Critics called for the regeneration of Spain after the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the USA in 1898. Regenerationism, associated with the writer Joaquín Costa, demanded honest government, schools and irrigation in place of what Costa called "oligarchy and caciquismo". Many later movements, from Primo de Rivera to the Republicans of 1931, claimed to be completing this regeneration.

Social and economic tensions

Spain was still mainly agrarian: in 1920 more than half the working population lived from the land. In the north, small farmers owned or rented their plots. In Andalusia, Extremadura and La Mancha, huge estates (latifundia) were worked by landless day labourers (braceros), who were hired by the day, unemployed for months each year and often hungry. Land hunger in the south fed the anarchist movement and later the Socialist landworkers’ union.

Industry was concentrated on the edges of the country: textiles in Catalonia, iron, steel, shipbuilding and banking in the Basque Country, and coal mining in Asturias. Spain’s neutrality in the First World War brought a boom, as it sold to both sides, but prices rose faster than wages. When the war ended, exports fell, factories laid off workers and strikes spread.

The table of the main organisations shows how much of Spanish society was organised outside the two parties of the turno. The PSOE and UGT grew steadily; the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union, claimed more than 700,000 members by 1919. Anarchism had deeper roots in Spain than anywhere else in Europe.

The crisis of 1917 and the violence of 1919–1923

In 1917 three challenges came together. Army officers in the home garrisons formed Juntas de Defensa (defence committees) to demand better pay and promotion by seniority, and the government gave way to them. Catalan deputies led by Cambó called an Assembly of Parliamentarians in Barcelona to demand constitutional reform. In August the UGT and CNT called a general strike. The army crushed the strike, killing about 70 people, and the Assembly movement collapsed.

The monarchy survived, but at a price. The army had shown that it could defy governments, and politicians knew they depended on it. Between 1917 and 1923 Spain had about a dozen governments. In Barcelona a war of assassinations, known as pistolerismo, developed between CNT activists and gunmen hired by employers, tolerated by the civil governor General Severiano Martínez Anido. Hundreds died, including the CNT leader Salvador Seguí in 1923 and the prime minister Eduardo Dato, killed by anarchists in 1921.

The 1919 strike at the Barcelona electricity company known as La Canadiense showed the CNT’s power: it cut off power to the city for weeks and won the eight-hour day, which the government made law for all workers in April 1919. Employers answered with lockouts and pistoleros.

Morocco and the Annual disaster, 1921

Spain held a protectorate over northern Morocco from 1912. The war there against the Rif tribes was unpopular, because conscripts from poor families did the fighting while the rich could buy exemption. A group of officers who made their careers in Morocco, the Africanistas, valued promotion for merit in battle and despised politicians. Francisco Franco was one of them: by 1926, aged 33, he was the youngest general in Europe.

In July 1921 the Rif leader Abd el-Krim routed the Spanish army at Annual. In the retreat towards Melilla the Spanish forces collapsed; estimates of Spanish dead range from about 8,000 to more than 13,000. The disaster caused outrage. A military inquiry led by General Juan Picasso collected evidence of incompetence and corruption, and the Cortes debated who was responsible. Many believed the king had encouraged the commander, General Silvestre, to advance recklessly.

The diagram of the collapse of the parliamentary monarchy groups the pressures by type. None of them alone destroyed the system. Together they left it with few defenders by 1923, when a parliamentary commission was due to report on Annual in the autumn.

The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, 1923–1930

The coup of September 1923

On 13 September 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera, captain-general of Catalonia, issued a manifesto in Barcelona declaring that the army would rescue Spain from the politicians. It was a classic pronunciamiento: a declaration by a general that the army would no longer obey the government, followed by a wait to see whether the rest of the army and the king would support it. No unit resisted. Alfonso XIII, who was in San Sebastián, returned to Madrid and appointed Primo head of a Military Directory on 15 September.

The coup succeeded because almost nobody defended the old system. Business leaders in Barcelona wanted an end to pistolerismo; officers wanted to stop the parliamentary inquiry into Annual; many middle-class Spaniards accepted Primo’s promise of a short dictatorship to clean up politics. The king’s acceptance was decisive, and it tied the monarchy to the dictatorship’s fate.

Policies and achievements

Primo first governed through a Military Directory (1923–1925), suspending the constitution and dissolving the Cortes. In 1925 he replaced it with a Civil Directory of ministers, including the young finance minister José Calvo Sotelo. He founded an official party, the Unión Patriótica (1924), and in 1927 created an appointed National Assembly to draft a new constitution, which was never adopted.

• Morocco. Primo had once favoured withdrawal, but in September 1925 Spanish and French forces landed at Alhucemas Bay. Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French in 1926 and the Rif War ended in 1927. It was the regime’s greatest success and made the reputations of officers such as Franco.

• Public works. Spending on roads, railways, dams and irrigation schemes (the river basin confederations from 1926) and the telephone network expanded rapidly, financed by borrowing. The state oil monopoly CAMPSA was created in 1927.

• Labour relations. Primo banned and repressed the CNT but brought the Socialist UGT into comités paritarios, joint committees of workers and employers that settled wages and conditions. The Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero became a councillor of state. This corporatism gave the UGT influence while its anarchist rival was underground.

• Order. Strikes and political killings fell sharply. The 1920s boom in the world economy helped.

Opposition and fall, 1926–1930

The dictatorship never built institutions to outlast its founder, and it gradually lost each of the groups that had accepted it. Catalan regionalists turned against Primo when he banned the Catalan flag, restricted the Catalan language in public life and abolished the Mancomunitat (the joint government of the four Catalan provinces, 1914–1925). Intellectuals protested against censorship; the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno was exiled to the Canary Islands in 1924. University students demonstrated in 1928–1929. The artillery corps, angry at promotion by merit, rebelled and was dissolved in 1926. Old politicians of both parties attempted coups in 1926 and 1929.

The economy turned in 1929. Public debt had risen, the peseta fell sharply on the exchanges and the world depression began. When Primo asked the captains-general whether he still had their support and received lukewarm answers, he resigned on 28 January 1930. He died in Paris weeks later.

The balance sheet of the dictatorship shows why historians judge it in two ways. It brought seven years of order and modernisation, but by destroying the old parties and governing without consent it left the monarchy without political support once it fell.

From the dictablanda to the Republic, 1930–1931

Alfonso XIII appointed General Dámaso Berenguer to restore the constitution gradually. His government relaxed censorship and repression, and the period became known as the dictablanda, a pun on dictadura (dura, hard; blanda, soft). Delay allowed the opposition to organise. In August 1930 Republicans, Catalan left-wing nationalists and, soon after, the Socialists agreed the Pact of San Sebastián to overthrow the monarchy and set up a republic with autonomy for Catalonia. A military rising for the Republic at Jaca in December 1930 failed, and its leaders, captains Fermín Galán and Ángel García Hernández, were shot, becoming Republican martyrs.

The government then held municipal elections on 12 April 1931 as a first step back to constitutional rule. Monarchist candidates won more council seats in total, mainly in rural areas still controlled by caciques, but the Republican–Socialist coalition won in 41 of the 50 provincial capitals. The elections were read as a plebiscite on the monarchy. Crowds filled the streets, the head of the Civil Guard, General Sanjurjo, told the government he could not guarantee the king’s position, and on 14 April 1931 the Second Republic was proclaimed. Alfonso XIII left Spain without formally abdicating.

The Second Republic: reform and reaction, 1931–1933

The Republic inherited problems that had defeated the monarchy: a poor and angry rural population, a powerful Catholic Church identified with the old order, an army with too many officers and a tradition of intervening in politics, and demands for home rule in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Its leaders tried to solve all of them at once, in the middle of the world depression. Historians often divide its five years into three phases.

The names of the phases come from the left. Supporters of the right called the first period the time of persecution of the Church and the second the bienio rectificador ("two years of correction"). The label a historian uses can signal a judgement about which side threatened the Republic.

The constitution of 1931

Elections to a Constituent Cortes in June 1931 gave a large majority to the Republican and Socialist parties of the Pact of San Sebastián. The constitution they wrote, approved on 9 December 1931, was one of the most democratic in Europe. Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, a Catholic liberal, became president of the Republic.

Spain is a democratic Republic of workers of every class, organised on a regime of Liberty and Justice. The powers of all its organs derive from the people.

The Spanish State has no official religion.

Constitution of the Spanish Republic, Articles 1 and 3, approved by the Constituent Cortes, 9 December 1931 (translated from the Spanish). The phrase "workers of every class" was a compromise between Socialists, who wanted a "republic of workers", and liberal Republicans; it shows how the constitution tried to hold a broad coalition together. For Catholics the separation of Church and state in Article 3 was less contentious than what followed it.

Article 26 went further than separation. It ended state payment of clergy within two years, dissolved religious orders that took a vow of obedience to an authority other than the state (meaning the Jesuits, dissolved in January 1932) and barred the remaining orders from industry, commerce and teaching. Other articles allowed civil marriage and divorce, gave the vote to women and men from the age of 23, permitted regional autonomy statutes and allowed property to be expropriated for social use with compensation.

The debate on Article 26 in October 1931 led the Catholic prime minister, Alcalá-Zamora, and the interior minister, Miguel Maura, to resign. Manuel Azaña, the war minister, replaced Alcalá-Zamora as prime minister after a speech in which he said that Spain had "ceased to be Catholic", meaning that Catholicism no longer shaped the country’s culture and could not shape its laws. Catholic opinion heard it as a declaration of war on religion.

The vote for women was carried on 1 October 1931 after a famous debate between two of the three women deputies. Clara Campoamor of the Radical Party argued that women had a right to vote whatever their likely choice; Victoria Kent, a Radical Socialist, argued that it should wait, because she feared that women under the influence of the clergy would vote for the right. Many on the left blamed women’s votes for the right’s victory in 1933, but historians find little evidence that women voted very differently from men; the left’s defeat owed more to its own divisions and to anarchist abstention.

Manuel Azaña and the reforms of 1931–1933

Manuel Azaña (1880–1940), a writer and civil servant who led the small party Acción Republicana (from 1934 Izquierda Republicana, Republican Left), was the leading figure of the Republic. As war minister (April–October 1931) and prime minister (October 1931–September 1933) he aimed to create a secular, democratic state in which the army and Church obeyed elected governments. His anticlericalism and his military reforms made him the figure the right most hated.

• The army. The officer corps was far too large for an army of its size. Azaña’s decrees of April 1931 offered officers retirement on full pay; about 8,000 accepted, though many of those who stayed were hostile. The General Military Academy at Zaragoza, directed by Franco, was closed. Officers resented these measures and a remark of Azaña’s that the press reported as a vow to "crush" the army; he said he had spoken of breaking up its old organisation, but the report was widely believed.

• Church and education. Crucifixes were removed from schools, cemeteries were secularised and the Law of Religious Congregations (June 1933) ordered Catholic orders to close their schools. The government built thousands of new state schools and recruited teachers, and the Misiones Pedagógicas took libraries, theatre and films to villages.

• Land. The Agrarian Reform Law of September 1932 allowed the expropriation of large estates in the south and centre with compensation, through an Institute of Agrarian Reform (IRA). It was complex, underfunded and slow: only about 12,000 families had been settled on land by the end of 1933. Decrees by the Socialist labour minister Largo Caballero set minimum wages for rural workers and required landowners to hire local labour first.

• Catalonia. The Catalan Statute of Autonomy of September 1932 gave Catalonia its own government, the Generalitat, under Francesc Macià of the left-wing Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). Many army officers and conservatives saw it as the first step to breaking up Spain.

Challenges from right and left

The Republic faced violence from both sides from its first months. In May 1931, after a monarchist provocation in Madrid, crowds burned churches and convents in Madrid, Málaga and other cities while the government hesitated to use force. The images confirmed Catholic fears.

On the right, General José Sanjurjo led a military rising in Seville on 10 August 1932 (the Sanjurjada). It collapsed within a day. The failure taught conspirators that a future coup would need careful preparation and wider army support.

On the left, the CNT and the more radical FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation, founded in 1927) saw the Republic as another bourgeois state. They organised insurrections in January 1932 and January 1933. At Casas Viejas (Cádiz) in January 1933, Assault Guards, the Republic’s new urban police, besieged anarchist villagers and shot prisoners; about twenty people were killed. The government’s handling of the affair damaged Azaña in parliament and alienated many workers from the Republic.

By 1933 the reforming coalition was falling apart. The Socialists were frustrated by the slow pace of land reform, the Radicals had left the government, and the economy was hit by the depression and by landowners’ refusal to cultivate. President Alcalá-Zamora dissolved the Cortes and called elections for November 1933.

Polarisation: the CEDA, the bienio negro and Asturias, 1933–1936

José María Gil-Robles and the CEDA

The Catholic right reorganised quickly after 1931. In March 1933 José María Gil-Robles (1898–1980), a lawyer and Catholic journalist from Salamanca, united Catholic and agrarian groups in the CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups). Its programme was the defence of religion, property and the family, and the revision of the constitution. It had a large youth movement, the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular), which held mass rallies at which Gil-Robles was hailed as Jefe ("Chief").

Whether the CEDA was a threat to democracy is one of the central questions of the period. Its leaders spoke of a corporative state and its youth borrowed the style of fascist movements; Gil-Robles had attended the Nazi rally at Nuremberg in 1933. Yet the CEDA also contested elections, worked within the Cortes, and did not attempt a coup. Its accidentalism allowed both readings.

We must move towards a new State, and for that duties and sacrifices are imposed. What does it matter if it costs us even the shedding of blood!

José María Gil-Robles, speech at the Monumental cinema, Madrid, 15 October 1933, during the election campaign (translation of the text as given by Paul Preston). The speech was made to a rally of supporters, and campaign rhetoric aimed to mobilise Catholic voters against the reforms of 1931–1933. Its value as a source lies in showing why the left came to believe that the CEDA would use power to dismantle the Republic, whatever its leaders did in practice.

The election of November 1933 and the bienio negro

The election of 19 November 1933 was the first in which Spanish women voted. The left was divided (the Socialists ran separately from the left Republicans) and the CNT urged its members to abstain. The CEDA became the largest party with 115 seats, and Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Party came second with about 100. Lerroux formed a centrist government that depended on CEDA votes.

The governments of 1933–1935 slowed land reform, let landowners cut wages and evict tenants, restored state payments to clergy and in April 1934 amnestied Sanjurjo and other conspirators. In the countryside, where wages fell and unemployment rose with the depression, the period became known on the left as the bienio negro. The Socialists became more radical. Largo Caballero, now leader of the UGT, spoke of proletarian revolution, and his supporters called him "the Spanish Lenin".

The Asturias rising, October 1934

In October 1934 three CEDA ministers entered the government. To the left, this looked like the first step towards fascism: Hitler had come to power through a coalition in January 1933, and in February 1934 Engelbert Dollfuss had crushed the Socialists in Austria. The Socialists called a general strike, which failed in most of Spain. In Barcelona, Lluís Companys, president of the Generalitat, proclaimed a "Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic"; the army ended it within hours.

In the mining region of Asturias, Socialist, anarchist and Communist miners united in a revolutionary commune, seized Oviedo and fought for two weeks. The government sent the Foreign Legion and Moroccan troops of the Army of Africa, with General Franco directing operations from Madrid. Estimates of deaths range from about 1,100 to over 2,000, including priests and civil guards killed by revolutionaries and prisoners executed by troops; some 15,000–30,000 people were imprisoned, and there were reports of torture.

The Asturias rising was a turning point for both sides. The right saw it as proof that the left would not accept an election it had lost and was preparing a Soviet-style revolution. The left saw the repression, carried out by colonial troops against Spanish workers, as proof that the right would use the army to crush them. Franco gained a reputation as the saviour of order.

Comparing Azaña and Gil-Robles

The comparison of the two leaders shows why compromise became so hard. Each was a parliamentary politician, yet each was seen by the other side as the leader of a movement that would deny it any place in Spain.

Disintegration of the centre, 1935

As war minister in 1935, Gil-Robles appointed Franco chief of the general staff and promoted other officers hostile to the Republic. The Radical Party collapsed late in 1935 after the Straperlo scandal, in which Radical politicians were found to have taken bribes to license a rigged roulette machine. President Alcalá-Zamora refused to appoint Gil-Robles prime minister, dissolved the Cortes and called new elections for February 1936.

Outside parliament, groups that rejected democracy altogether were growing. The Falange Española, founded in October 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator, merged in 1934 with the JONS to form a small fascist party that called for a national-syndicalist revolution. Monarchists of Renovación Española, led by José Calvo Sotelo, called openly for an authoritarian state. The Carlists, traditionalist Catholic monarchists strong in Navarre, trained their own militia, the Requetés. On the left, Socialist and Communist youth movements merged in 1936 and drilled in uniform.

The immediate causes of the Civil War, February–July 1936

The election of February 1936

For the election of 16 February 1936 the left reunited in the Popular Front: Azaña’s Republican Left, Martínez Barrio’s Republican Union, the Socialists, the Communists, the small anti-Stalinist Marxist party POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, founded 1935) and, in Catalonia, the ERC. Its common programme promised an amnesty for the prisoners of October 1934 and the restoration of the reforms of 1931–1933. Many anarchists voted this time, to free their comrades. The right formed a looser alliance around the CEDA.

The Spanish electoral system gave a large bonus in seats to the winning list in each province. With the two blocs close in votes (the Popular Front had a narrow lead, in most calculations about 47 per cent against about 46 per cent), the Popular Front won a clear majority of seats in the Cortes, about 263 of 473 after the Cortes reviewed disputed results. Some historians, notably Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García (2017), argue that irregularities in several provinces, and the review of results by the new majority, inflated the Popular Front’s total; others accept that it won fairly but narrowly. Both sides treated the result as decisive.

Policies of the Popular Front

Azaña became prime minister on 19 February. His government released the prisoners of 1934, restored the Catalan Generalitat and reinstated the reforms of 1931–1933. Land reform now moved fast, partly because it was pushed from below: in March 1936 tens of thousands of peasants in Extremadura occupied estates, and the government legalised the occupations. Between March and July more land was distributed than in the previous five years.

The government moved generals it distrusted away from Madrid: Franco to command the Canary Islands, Manuel Goded to the Balearic Islands and Emilio Mola to Pamplona. It banned the Falange in March and arrested José Antonio Primo de Rivera. In May the Cortes removed Alcalá-Zamora as president, and Azaña was elected in his place; Santiago Casares Quiroga became prime minister. Largo Caballero refused to let the Socialists join the government and blocked the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto from becoming prime minister. The government was therefore weak, a minority of Republicans relying on a divided working-class movement.

Strikes multiplied in the spring of 1936, including a long building strike in Madrid. Churches were burned, especially in the south. Falangist and left-wing gunmen fought in the streets. Estimates of political killings between February and July range from about 270 to more than 400. Historians disagree about how to interpret the disorder. Stanley Payne sees a government that had lost control and was unwilling to restrain its own supporters; Paul Preston stresses deliberate provocation by Falangist gunmen, financed by the right, to create the chaos that would justify a coup.

The final crisis came in July. On 12 July Falangist gunmen killed José Castillo, a lieutenant of the Assault Guards known for his left-wing views. In the early hours of 13 July Assault Guards and Socialist militants, seeking revenge, seized José Calvo Sotelo, the monarchist leader, at his home and murdered him. That a leader of the opposition had been killed by members of the state’s own police shocked the right and convinced waverers to join the conspiracy.

The military coup of 17–18 July 1936

Planning for a rising began soon after the February election. The organiser, known as "the Director", was General Mola in Pamplona; the nominal leader was Sanjurjo, in exile in Portugal. Mola’s secret instructions show what kind of rising was intended.

It will be borne in mind that the action must be extremely violent so as to reduce the enemy, who is strong and well organised, as soon as possible. Of course, all the leaders of political parties, societies or trade unions not committed to the movement will be imprisoned, and exemplary punishments applied to them in order to strangle movements of rebellion or strikes.

General Emilio Mola, Reserved Instruction No. 1, 25 May 1936 (translated from the Spanish). The instruction was a secret order to fellow conspirators, not propaganda, which makes it strong evidence of intention: terror against the organised left was planned before the rising and before the murder of Calvo Sotelo, which the rebels later presented as the reason for acting.

The rising began in Spanish Morocco on 17 July and spread to the mainland on 18 July. Franco flew from the Canary Islands to Tetuán in Morocco on a British-chartered aircraft, the Dragon Rapide, to command the Army of Africa: some 30,000–40,000 professional troops by most estimates, including the Spanish Foreign Legion and Moroccan Regulares, the best units in the army.

The coup succeeded where the army was strong and the left weak: Morocco, the Canaries, Galicia, Old Castile and León, Navarre (where Carlist volunteers joined it), parts of Aragon, and Seville, which General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano took by a bold bluff and terror. It failed in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and most of the industrial and eastern regions, where loyal police and armed workers’ militias defeated the rebels. Goded was captured and executed in Barcelona. The navy’s crews mostly mutinied against their officers and stayed loyal.

A coup intended to take power in days had become a civil war. The Republic held the capital, the main industrial areas and the gold reserves; the rebels held between a third and two-fifths of Spain, much of the wheat-growing land, and the best army.

The two sides came to be known as the Nationalists, the name the rebels gave themselves, and the Republicans or loyalists, who defended the government of the Republic. Each side’s enemies called it by other names: "fascists" for the rebels, "Reds" for the Republicans. Both labels described only part of each coalition, so historians generally prefer the neutral terms.

The diagram of the causes of the Civil War separates conditions from triggers. The long-term problems explain why Spain was divided; the polarisation of 1931–1936 explains why politics could no longer contain those divisions; the half-success of the coup explains why the result was a war and not a military dictatorship.

Franco’s emergence as leader, 1936–1937

In July 1936 Francisco Franco (1892–1975) was one of several rebel generals, and not the most senior. Within three months he was head of the rebel state. Four advantages explain his rise.

1. Command of the Army of Africa. The rebels’ best troops were in Morocco, and the loyal navy blocked the Strait of Gibraltar. Franco’s envoys obtained transport aircraft from Hitler (Junkers Ju 52s) and Mussolini (Savoia-Marchetti bombers) at the end of July. In one of the first large military airlifts in history, some 14,000 soldiers were flown to Seville by early October, while others crossed by sea under air cover.

2. Foreign contacts. Because Hitler and Mussolini dealt with Franco, German and Italian aid ran through him, and other generals had to go through him to obtain it.

3. The deaths of rivals. Sanjurjo was killed when his plane crashed on take-off in Portugal on 20 July 1936. Goded was executed by the Republic. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Falange’s leader, was tried and shot in Alicante jail on 20 November 1936. Mola, the only general with a comparable claim, died in an air crash on 3 June 1937.

4. Military success and propaganda. The Army of Africa advanced rapidly north through Extremadura, taking Badajoz on 14 August amid mass killings. In late September Franco diverted his columns to relieve the besieged military academy at the Alcázar of Toledo, where some 1,000 Nationalists had held out for ten weeks. The relief (27–28 September) delayed the attack on Madrid but gave the rebels a powerful heroic legend at the moment when the generals were choosing a leader.

On 21 September a junta of generals near Salamanca chose Franco as Generalísimo, supreme military commander. On 29 September a decree named him "Head of the Government of the Spanish State", and on 1 October 1936 he was installed in Burgos as head of state, taking the title Caudillo, the leader, used as Il Duce and Der Führer were in Italy and Germany.

Franco then made himself the leader of a political movement. By the Decree of Unification of 19 April 1937 he merged the Falange and the Carlists into one party, the FET y de las JONS (Traditionalist Spanish Falange and of the Councils of the National-Syndicalist Offensive), with himself as its leader. The Falangist leader Manuel Hedilla, who objected, was sentenced to death, then reprieved and imprisoned. Gil-Robles’s CEDA dissolved itself.

The course of the Civil War, 1936–1939

The vertical timeline of the war shows its main phases. The Nationalists failed to take Madrid in 1936, conquered the Basque and Asturian north in 1937, split the Republic in two in 1938 and took Catalonia and then the centre in early 1939.

1936: the failure to take Madrid

By early November 1936 Nationalist columns were in the suburbs of Madrid. The government left for Valencia, leaving a Defence Junta under General José Miaja. Madrid was defended by militias, the new Popular Army, Soviet tanks and aircraft and the first units of the International Brigades: volunteers recruited mainly by the Communist International, about 35,000 in total from some 50 countries over the course of the war. The slogan ¡No pasarán! ("They shall not pass") became famous across Europe. Frontal attacks through the University City failed, and later attempts to encircle the city at Jarama (February 1937) and Guadalajara (March 1937, a defeat for the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie) also failed.

1937: the war in the north and Guernica

Franco then turned to the isolated northern zone, with its iron, steel and coal. On 26 April 1937 aircraft of the German Condor Legion, with Italian support, bombed the Basque town of Guernica on a market day. Estimates of the dead range from about 125 (the number of victims named in later local research) to 1,654 (the Basque government’s claim at the time); many historians now accept a figure of a few hundred. Nationalist propaganda first claimed that retreating Basques had burned the town themselves. Picasso’s painting Guernica, shown in Paris that summer, made it a symbol of the bombing of civilians. Bilbao fell in June, Santander in August and Asturias in October 1937.

1938–1939: the Republic divided and defeated

The Republic’s offensives were costly and short-lived. It took Teruel in January 1938 but lost it in February. In April 1938 Nationalist forces reached the Mediterranean at Vinaròs, splitting the Republican zone into Catalonia and a central zone around Madrid and Valencia. The Republic’s last great effort, the crossing of the Ebro (July–November 1938), the largest battle of the war, ended in defeat after months of attrition. The Munich agreement of September 1938 destroyed the Republican prime minister Juan Negrín’s hope that a European war would bring Britain and France to its side.

The two maps of 1936 and 1938 show how the balance of territory changed. The Republic began with the cities and industry; by July 1938 it held two separated zones and could no longer move troops or food between them.

Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939. About 450,000–470,000 soldiers and civilians fled across the French border in the Retirada (retreat) of February 1939, many to be held in camps on French beaches. Britain and France recognised Franco’s government on 27 February. In Madrid, Colonel Segismundo Casado overthrew Negrín in March, hoping to negotiate a surrender, and a brief civil war within the civil war followed. Franco would accept only unconditional surrender. Nationalist troops entered Madrid on 28 March 1939.

Today, with the Red Army captive and disarmed, the national troops have reached their final military objectives. The war is over.

Francisco Franco, last war communiqué, Burgos, 1 April 1939 (translated from the Spanish). The communiqué was broadcast to the whole country. Its language of a defeated "Red Army" and of victory, not peace, set the tone for the regime that followed, which divided Spaniards into victors and vanquished for decades.

Why the Nationalists won the Civil War

The Republic began the war with advantages: the capital, the main cities and industry, most of the navy and air force, the gold reserves and the larger population. The Nationalists began with the professional army and a third or more of the country. Explaining the Nationalist victory means explaining how these starting positions were reversed. Historians group the reasons as economic, individual, foreign and military, and argue about their relative weight.

The diagram of the two sides shows the structure of each coalition. The Republic was defended by groups with very different aims; the Nationalists, though also divided, were held together by military command.

Economic factors

The Republic held the industrial regions and Spain’s gold reserves, the fourth largest in the world. Its economic advantages were real but wasted or lost. In October–November 1936 the government sent about 510 tonnes of gold, more than 70 per cent of the reserves, to Moscow to pay for Soviet arms; historians disagree about whether the Soviet Union charged fair prices, and much of the equipment it supplied was old or of mixed quality. Part of its industry was in the northern zone, lost in 1937. Food was short in the cities, inflation was rapid, and the Republican zone was flooded with refugees.

The Nationalists held the main wheat-growing regions of Castile and so could feed their soldiers and civilians. They had no gold, but Germany and Italy supplied arms on credit, to be repaid with raw materials (Germany took Spanish iron ore and pyrites through the company HISMA). The US oil company Texaco, whose chairman Torkild Rieber sympathised with the rebels, supplied much of their oil on credit throughout the war, using its own tankers despite US neutrality legislation. Their currency held its value far better than the Republican peseta, and business and foreign investors trusted them more.

The role of individuals

Franco was a cautious, methodical commander. Critics, including some of his German advisers, complained that he wasted chances to end the war quickly, as at Toledo in 1936 or after reaching the sea in 1938, when he turned to Valencia instead of Catalonia. Many historians, Paul Preston among them, argue that slowness was a choice: a long war of attrition allowed him to destroy the enemy region by region, purge the conquered areas and consolidate his own power. His political skill in uniting the right in 1937 mattered as much as his generalship. Other Nationalist leaders added to his strength: Mola directed the northern campaign, and Queipo de Llano’s nightly radio broadcasts from Seville spread terror and propaganda.

Republican leadership was divided and frequently changed. Largo Caballero, prime minister from September 1936 to May 1937, brought the Socialists and anarchists into government but was a weak war leader. Juan Negrín, a Socialist physiologist, prime minister from May 1937 to March 1939, centralised the war effort, worked closely with the Communists and argued that resistance should continue until a European war came; his opponents accused him of making the Republic dependent on Moscow. Indalecio Prieto, defence minister in 1937–1938, became a defeatist and was dismissed. Azaña, as president, was isolated and pessimistic. The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti was killed in Madrid in November 1936.

Foreign involvement

In August 1936 France and Britain proposed a Non-Intervention Agreement to stop arms reaching either side, supervised by a Non-Intervention Committee in London from September; 27 states signed it. The British government feared that the war could spread into a European conflict and distrusted the revolution in the Republican zone; the French Popular Front government of Léon Blum wanted to help the Republic but was restrained by British policy and its own divisions. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union signed and ignored the agreement, while the democracies observed it. The war as a crisis of European diplomacy, and its place on the road to the Second World War, are treated with Europe and the Second World War; the concern here is how foreign involvement shaped the war inside Spain. The USA extended its arms embargo to Spain in January 1937.

Figures are approximate: totals for the Condor Legion, the CTV, the Portuguese volunteers and Soviet personnel vary between historians’ estimates.

The table of foreign involvement shows that both sides received foreign help, but not on equal terms. German and Italian aid was larger, came on credit, arrived steadily throughout the war and included the airlift and air power at decisive moments. Soviet aid arrived from October 1936, saved Madrid, then fell away from 1938, and it was paid for in advance. Non-intervention denied the Republic the market it most needed, while the rebels’ suppliers ignored it. It also shaped Republican politics: dependence on Soviet arms gave the small Communist Party great influence.

Military and strategic factors

The Nationalists had a unified command under Franco from October 1936, most of the professional officers, and the Army of Africa. Their strength in the air grew as German and Italian aircraft arrived, and by 1938 they had clear superiority. After taking the north in 1937 they had the industry, mines and ports of Bilbao and Asturias as well.

The Republic had to build an army from scratch. In July 1936 power in its zone passed to the parties, unions and militias that had defeated the coup, and in Catalonia and Aragon anarchists carried out a social revolution: factories and land were collectivised, and churches were burned and thousands of clergy killed. The British writer George Orwell, who arrived in December 1936 to fight with the POUM militia, described Barcelona.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938. Orwell wrote after he had been wounded and had escaped the suppression of the POUM in 1937, and his book defends the revolutionary left against the Communists. That purpose makes it a partial source on Republican politics, but a vivid and valuable one on how the revolution looked to a sympathetic foreigner.

The central argument inside the Republic was whether to win the war first or make the revolution first. Communists, Socialists such as Negrín and Prieto, and the Republicans wanted a regular army, central control and a defence of the Republic that would reassure Britain and France. Anarchists and the POUM wanted militias and revolution. The conflict exploded in the May Days of 3–8 May 1937 in Barcelona, when government forces and Communists fought anarchists and the POUM; about 500 people were killed. Largo Caballero fell, the POUM was outlawed and its leader Andreu Nin was abducted and murdered by Soviet agents. The Popular Army that resulted was more disciplined, but it never matched its enemy in officers, equipment or air power, and its offensives, at Brunete, Belchite, Teruel and the Ebro, exhausted it.

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Violence and the human cost of the war

Both sides killed civilians and prisoners behind their lines, especially in the first months. The two kinds of violence differed in pattern. In the Republican zone, killings were carried out mainly in the summer and autumn of 1936 by militias, revolutionary committees and checas (party and union prisons), while the authority of the state had collapsed; they targeted priests, landowners, right-wing politicians and suspected rebels. The worst single episode was at Paracuellos, near Madrid, in November–December 1936, where at least 2,000 prisoners were taken from Madrid’s jails and shot. Republican governments condemned and gradually curbed such killings from late 1936.

In the Nationalist zone, killing was organised by the military authorities and the Falange and continued throughout the war and after it, as Mola’s instructions had foreseen. Victims included Popular Front politicians, union members, teachers, Freemasons and anyone suspected of left-wing sympathies, among them the poet Federico García Lorca, shot near Granada in August 1936. After the capture of Badajoz in August 1936 between about 1,300 and 4,000 people were killed.

Estimates as compiled in Santos Juliá (ed.), Víctimas de la guerra civil (1999), Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust (2012) and Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime (1987); every figure in the table is disputed.

The table of estimates shows why the figures are so contested. Victims of the Republican zone were counted, commemorated and compensated by the Franco regime for four decades; many victims of the Nationalist zone were buried in unmarked graves and, until the 2000s, never counted. Historians who stress the Nationalist repression, such as Preston, argue that it was an intended policy of extermination, which is why he uses the term "Spanish Holocaust"; critics, including Payne, reject that term and stress that both sides killed on a large scale. Both groups agree that the Nationalists killed more people, and that killings in the Republican zone were concentrated in the first months of the war.

Franco’s regime: consolidating and maintaining power, 1939–1975

Franco’s personal power

Franco ruled Spain for 36 years; only Salazar in Portugal ruled a western European state for as long in the twentieth century. He was head of state, head of government until 1973, commander-in-chief and head of the single party. A law of August 1939 allowed him to issue laws by decree without consulting the cabinet. His coins carried the words "Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God", and official doctrine held him responsible only "before God and history".

The regime presented the Civil War as a Crusade to save Catholic Spain from communism, and its victory as the founding act of the "New State". Its legitimacy rested at first on the victory itself, which was celebrated every year on 1 April.

Balancing the "families" of the regime

Franco governed by balancing the groups that had supported the rising, the so-called families of the regime, and by keeping each of them dependent on him. He chose ministers from different families in each cabinet, moved them in and out and let none become strong enough to replace him.

The diagram of the families shows the balance at its fullest. In the 1940s the Falange was strongest, controlling the official unions (the vertical syndicates), the press and the youth and women’s sections. After the Axis defeat in 1945 Franco reduced its role and gave more posts to Catholics acceptable abroad, such as the foreign minister Alberto Martín-Artajo. From 1957 he brought in technocrats, economists and lawyers linked to the Catholic organisation Opus Dei, such as Laureano López Rodó, Mariano Navarro Rubio and Alberto Ullastres, to run the economy. The army was the ultimate guarantee: military officers held a large share of ministries in the 1940s and staffed the courts that tried political crimes.

The Fundamental Laws

Franco never wrote a constitution. Instead a series of Fundamental Laws gave the regime a legal façade that could be adapted to circumstances.

The table of Fundamental Laws shows a pattern: each law answered a political need, such as the Charter of 1945 for Allied opinion, or the Law of Succession of 1947 for monarchists and for the question of what would happen after Franco.

Spain, as a political unit, is a Catholic, social, and representative state which, in accordance with its traditions, declares itself to be a kingdom.

Law of Succession, Article 1, dated 7 June 1947 (passed by referendum on 6 July) (English translation made available by the Embassy of Spain in Washington, as printed in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook). The law was issued when Spain was ostracised by the United Nations, and its language of a "representative" Catholic kingdom was meant to make the regime acceptable to Catholics, monarchists and Western governments. Article 2, which made the "Caudillo of Spain and of the Crusade" head of state, shows where power remained.

In July 1969 Franco named Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of Alfonso XIII, as his successor with the title of king, passing over Juan Carlos’s father, Don Juan, who had called for a return to constitutional monarchy. Juan Carlos swore loyalty to the Principles of the National Movement. In June 1973 Franco made his closest collaborator, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, prime minister to guarantee the continuity of the regime; ETA assassinated him in Madrid on 20 December 1973. His successor, Carlos Arias Navarro, promised a limited opening (the "spirit of 12 February" 1974) but could not deliver it against the resistance of the regime’s hard-liners.

Foreign policy and survival

Foreign policy helped Franco survive. During the Second World War Spain declared itself neutral, then in June 1940 "non-belligerent". Franco met Hitler at Hendaye on the French border on 23 October 1940 and offered to join the war in return for French Morocco and other territory, plus large supplies of food and fuel; Hitler would not pay that price, and Spain stayed out. The Blue Division of about 45,000 volunteers fought for Germany on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1943. As the Allies began to win, Franco withdrew it and returned to neutrality.

After 1945 Spain was isolated. The United Nations recommended in December 1946 that its members withdraw their ambassadors from Madrid, and Spain was excluded from the Marshall Plan. The regime used the isolation to rally Spaniards against foreign interference. The Cold War then turned an embarrassment into an asset: a firmly anti-communist Spain was useful to the USA. In 1953 Franco signed a Concordat with the Vatican (August), confirming the Church’s privileges, and the Pact of Madrid with the USA (September), which gave the USA air and naval bases in return for economic and military aid. Spain joined the United Nations in December 1955. Morocco became independent in 1956, ending the protectorate, and Moroccan irregulars attacked Ifni and the Spanish Sahara in 1957–1958; Spain held on with French help but handed over the Tarfaya strip in 1958 and Ifni in 1969. In November 1975, as Franco lay dying, Morocco’s Green March of some 350,000 unarmed civilians into the Spanish Sahara forced Spain to agree to leave the territory, which it handed to Morocco and Mauritania in 1976 without the referendum on self-determination promised to its Sahrawi people.

The photograph of Franco with Eisenhower in 1959 shows the result of this policy. International acceptance did not bring full integration: Spain applied to the European Economic Community in 1962 but was refused because it was not a democracy.

Repression and opposition under Franco

The repression of the 1940s

Franco’s victory was followed by a systematic purge of the defeated. The Law of Political Responsibilities (February 1939) made support for the Republic since October 1934 a crime, punishable by fines, confiscation of property and loss of jobs, backdated to before the war. The Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (March 1940) set up a special court for those offences. Military courts tried tens of thousands of people in brief hearings, often without a real defence.

Historians estimate that about 20,000 people were executed after the war ended, most of them by 1945, and some estimates reach 50,000 when deaths from hunger, disease and ill-treatment in prisons are included. Official figures put the prison population at about 270,000 in 1940. Hundreds of thousands more passed through concentration camps and labour battalions, and political prisoners were hired out to build dams, railways and the monument at Cuelgamuros known as the Valley of the Fallen (1940–1958), where Franco was later buried. Teachers, civil servants and university staff were purged. Children of executed or imprisoned Republicans were placed in state or Church institutions, and some were given to regime families; the number of these "stolen children" is disputed.

Hundreds of thousands of Republicans went into exile, mainly in France and Mexico. Thousands who stayed in France were deported by the Nazis after 1940; about 7,000 Spanish Republicans were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where most of them died. Republican guerrillas, the maquis, fought on in the mountains of Asturias, León, Galicia and Aragon. In October 1944 several thousand Communist-led exiles invaded the Val d’Aran in the Pyrenees, expecting a popular rising that did not happen. The guerrilla war was largely over by the early 1950s.

Repression had a purpose beyond punishment. It destroyed the organisations of the left, removed potential leaders, enriched loyal supporters with confiscated property and jobs, and taught a whole generation that politics was dangerous. Fear, memory of the war and the struggle to survive in the hungry 1940s kept most Spaniards passive.

Opposition in the 1960s and 1970s

Repression became less lethal after the 1940s but never stopped; the Communist leader Julián Grimau was executed in 1963. A special Court of Public Order (TOP), created in 1963, tried political offences. A new opposition grew from the social changes of the 1960s:

• Workers. The Asturian miners’ strike of spring 1962 spread to other regions and forced wage increases. Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions), clandestine unions led largely by Communists, used the official syndicate elections to win representation. Strikes rose sharply in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

• Students. University protests in Madrid in 1956 and 1965 led to the dismissal of professors and the closing of faculties. Many future democratic politicians began as student activists.

• The Church. After the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), younger priests and Catholic workers’ organisations criticised the regime. Under Cardinal Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, president of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference from 1971, the Church publicly distanced itself from Franco.

• The regions. Catalan cultural and political groups organised the Assembly of Catalonia (1971). In the Basque Country, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Homeland and Freedom"), founded in 1959, turned to armed struggle; its first planned killing was of the police chief Melitón Manzanas in August 1968.

The regime’s answer mixed concession and force. The Burgos trial of December 1970, in which sixteen ETA members were tried by a military court and six sentenced to death, provoked protests across Spain and Europe; Franco commuted the death sentences. In September 1975, two months before his death, five members of ETA and the revolutionary group FRAP were executed despite appeals from the Pope and European governments.

Franco’s economic policies: from autarky to the "Spanish miracle"

Autarky and the hunger years, 1939–1959

In the 1940s the regime pursued autarky: economic self-sufficiency, imitating Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Imports were restricted, prices and wages were fixed by the state, and a state holding company, the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI, 1941), was set up to build heavy industry. The policy was also a necessity, as Spain was isolated after 1945.

Autarky failed. Agricultural output stayed below pre-war levels until the 1950s, real wages collapsed, and fixed prices drove food onto the black market (estraperlo), which enriched the well-connected. Bread was rationed until 1952. The 1940s became known as the años del hambre, the "years of hunger"; estimates of deaths from hunger and related disease in the early 1940s run into the tens of thousands, and some historians place them much higher. US aid after 1953 and the end of rationing brought some improvement, but by 1957–1958 Spain faced inflation, a trade deficit and almost no foreign currency reserves.

The Stabilisation Plan of 1959 and the boom

Faced with possible bankruptcy, Franco reluctantly accepted the advice of the Opus Dei technocrats. Spain joined the IMF and the OEEC in 1958, and the Stabilisation Plan of July 1959, designed with them by the commerce minister Alberto Ullastres and the finance minister Mariano Navarro Rubio, devalued the peseta to 60 to the US dollar, cut public spending, froze wages, opened Spain to foreign investment and reduced import controls. A short recession followed, then a decade of rapid growth.

The bar chart of growth shows the scale of the boom: from 1961 to 1973 the economy grew by about 7 per cent a year. Indicative Development Plans drawn up by Laureano López Rodó from 1964 guided investment. The term Desarrollismo ("developmentalism") describes this period, in which the regime sought legitimacy through prosperity instead of ideology.

Three external sources financed the boom:

• Tourism. Foreign visitors rose from about 4 million in 1959 to about 34 million in 1973, bringing foreign currency and building booms on the Mediterranean coasts. The ministry of information and tourism under Manuel Fraga (1962–1969) promoted the slogan "Spain is different".

• Emigration. Between about 1 and 2 million Spaniards went to work in France, West Germany and Switzerland in 1959–1973. Their remittances paid for imports, and their departure lowered unemployment.

• Foreign investment. US and European firms set up factories, and the car maker SEAT, founded with Fiat in 1950, put the SEAT 600 on the road from 1957.

Inside Spain, millions moved from the countryside to Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia. The share of the workforce in agriculture fell from about 42 per cent in 1960 to about 23 per cent in 1975, by most estimates. A consumer society of televisions, cars and holidays appeared.

Historians debate how much credit the regime deserves. The technocrats did open the economy, and the boom transformed Spain. Critics stress that growth came from a booming Western Europe, that it began only when Franco abandoned the policies of the 1940s, and that two decades of autarky had cost Spain dearly: in 1960 Spain’s income per head was still well below that of most of Western Europe. The oil shock of 1973 ended the boom and left the transition governments with inflation and rising unemployment.

The social and cultural impact of Francoism

Church, education and censorship

National Catholicism shaped everyday life in the 1940s and 1950s. The Church regained control over much of secondary education, religious instruction became compulsory in all schools, civil marriage and divorce were abolished, and public morality (dress, cinema, dancing, beaches) was policed by Church and state together. The Concordat of 1953 confirmed state payment of clergy and the Church’s right to censor publications on matters of faith and morals.

The Press Law of 1938, drawn up during the war, required prior approval of everything published. The NO-DO newsreel, compulsory in cinemas from 1943, presented the regime’s version of events; football, especially the European successes of Real Madrid in the 1950s, and popular films gave a sense of national pride and entertainment. The Press Law of 1966, introduced by Fraga, ended prior censorship but allowed the government to fine and close publications afterwards, so self-censorship continued.

Women under Franco

The regime rejected the legal equality that the Republic had granted women. The Sección Femenina, the women’s section of the Falange, led by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of José Antonio, trained women for their role as wives and mothers and organised the Social Service, six months of compulsory work and training for most single women who wanted a passport, a driving licence or a public job.

Laws of the 1940s restored the Civil Code of 1889, under which a married woman needed her husband’s permission (permiso marital) to take a job, open a bank account, sign a contract or travel. Coeducation was banned. Married women were pushed out of many jobs, and contraception was illegal. The economic changes of the 1960s brought more women into education and work, and a law of 1961 removed some barriers to employment, but the permiso marital was abolished only in May 1975.

Regions and minorities

Franco’s Spanish nationalism treated regional identities as a threat to national unity. The autonomy statutes of Catalonia and the Basque Country were abolished, and the public use of Catalan, Basque and Galician was banned or restricted in the 1940s; Lluís Companys, the Catalan president, was handed over by the Gestapo and shot in Barcelona in October 1940. Two Basque provinces, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, which had fought for the Republic, lost their fiscal privileges as "traitor provinces", while Navarre and Álava, which had supported the rising, kept theirs. Restrictions on regional languages eased from the 1960s, but the experience made defence of regional identity a central part of the opposition to Franco. Homosexuality was persecuted under the Law on Vagrants (amended 1954) and the Law on Social Dangerousness and Rehabilitation (1970).

A changing society, 1960–1975

By the 1970s Spain was a very different society from the one Franco had conquered in 1939: urban, more secular, increasingly educated, with a large middle class, tens of millions of foreign tourists each year and more than a million citizens who had worked abroad. The regime’s own economic success undermined its values. This gap between a modern society and an archaic political system is central to explanations of why the transition after 1975 succeeded.

The table of continuity and change shows the central paradox of the regime: its political institutions barely changed, while the society beneath them was transformed.

The transition to democracy, 1975–1982

Franco died on 20 November 1975. Two days later Juan Carlos I was proclaimed king under the Law of Succession. Within seven years Spain had a democratic constitution, free elections, regional governments and a peaceful change of party in power. The Spanish transition (la Transición) has been studied as a model of democratisation by negotiation, in which reformers inside an authoritarian regime and moderates in the opposition agreed to change the system without a violent break.

The chain of the transition shows how each step depended on the one before. The key decisions were taken between July 1976 and December 1978.

The first months: Arias Navarro and Fraga, 1975–1976

The king at first kept Franco’s last prime minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, who planned only limited reforms. The interior minister, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, wanted a controlled opening on the British model, with a two-party system that excluded the Communists. The opposition responded with mass strikes in early 1976. In March 1976 police killed five workers during a strike in Vitoria. The opposition parties united in Coordinación Democrática (March 1976) to demand a ruptura. Arias could neither satisfy the opposition nor control the regime’s hard-liners, the inmovilistas, who wanted no change at all.

Juan Carlos and Suárez

In July 1976 the king forced Arias to resign and, from a list of three names prepared by the Council of the Realm under its president Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, chose Adolfo Suárez. Suárez was 43, a career official of the Movimiento who had been its minister-secretary general. The opposition and the press were dismayed by the choice; within a year he had dismantled the system that had promoted him.

Suárez’s method was to use Francoist legality against itself. The Law for Political Reform, drafted with Fernández-Miranda, provided for a two-chamber parliament elected by universal suffrage. Because it was formally an eighth Fundamental Law, the Francoist Cortes had to pass it. On 18 November 1976 the procuradores voted 425 to 59 to approve it, voting their own institution out of existence, an act often called the regime’s harakiri. In a referendum on 15 December 1976 about 94 per cent of voters approved it, on a turnout of about 78 per cent.

Suárez then negotiated with the opposition. He legalised parties and trade unions, and on 9 April 1977, the Saturday of Easter week when much of the army was on leave, he legalised the Communist Party (PCE). Many senior officers felt betrayed; the navy minister resigned. The PCE leader Santiago Carrillo, a leading figure of Eurocommunism, in return accepted the monarchy and the red-and-yellow flag. The murder of five people at a labour lawyers’ office in Atocha, Madrid, by far-right gunmen in January 1977, and the disciplined, silent funeral march organised by the Communists, had helped persuade Suárez that the PCE could be trusted.

Data: Spanish general elections of 15 June 1977 and 28 October 1982, Congress of Deputies (350 seats); results from the Ministry of the Interior.

The table of the elections of 1977 and 1982 shows the shape of the new democracy. In 1977 voters chose moderation: the two largest parties were the centrist UCD and the Socialists, while the Communists and the Francoist-led AP came far behind. By 1982 the UCD had collapsed and the PSOE won an absolute majority.

Consensus: the Moncloa Pacts, the amnesty and the constitution

The governments and parties elected in June 1977 worked by consensus, agreeing the main decisions among themselves instead of imposing them by majority vote. The Moncloa Pacts of October 1977, signed by all the main parties and backed by the unions, limited wage rises to fight inflation of over 20 per cent in return for tax reform, social spending and political freedoms. The Amnesty Law of 15 October 1977 released remaining political prisoners, including members of ETA, and also prevented the prosecution of officials for crimes committed under the dictatorship.

A committee of seven deputies from the main parties, including Fraga, drafted the constitution, approved by the Cortes and then by referendum on 6 December 1978, with about 88 per cent of votes in favour on a turnout of about 67 per cent. It made Spain a parliamentary monarchy in which the king reigns but does not govern, guaranteed rights, abolished the death penalty, ended the Church’s status as official religion while recognising its special place, and created a framework for regional autonomy.

The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation, the common and indivisible country of all Spaniards; it recognises and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed, and the solidarity amongst them all.

Spanish Constitution of 1978, Article 2 (official English translation, Congress of Deputies). The article was a compromise between parties that saw Spain as one nation and Basque and Catalan nationalists who saw their regions as nations. The word "nationalities" was its key concession; the phrase "indissoluble unity" was the guarantee that the army and the right demanded. Both sides of the Catalan crisis of 2017 appealed to it.

Manuel Fraga Iribarne

Fraga’s career shows how Francoists became democrats. As minister of information and tourism (1962–1969) he promoted tourism and the 1966 Press Law; as interior minister in 1975–1976 he was responsible for the police during the Vitoria killings. In October 1976 he founded Alianza Popular with six other former Francoist ministers, and it fared badly in 1977. Yet he helped draft the constitution, led the main conservative opposition throughout the 1980s, and refounded AP as the People’s Party (PP) in 1989, before serving as president of Galicia from 1990 to 2005. His role was to bring much of the Francoist right into the democratic system instead of leaving it outside to oppose it.

The coup attempt of 23 February 1981 (23-F)

By 1980 the UCD was divided, the economy was in crisis and ETA was killing about 100 people a year. Suárez resigned in January 1981. On 23 February, as the Congress voted to approve his successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero of the Civil Guard burst into the chamber with about 200 armed men and held the deputies hostage. In Valencia, General Jaime Milans del Bosch put tanks on the streets. The plotters expected the king to support them; General Alfonso Armada, a former member of the royal household, hoped to emerge as head of a government of national salvation.

Juan Carlos telephoned the captains-general to keep them loyal and, after 1 a.m. on 24 February, appeared on television in the uniform of commander-in-chief.

The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate in any way actions or attitudes of persons who seek to interrupt by force the democratic process that the Constitution, voted for by the Spanish people, determined in its day through a referendum.

Juan Carlos I, televised message, 24 February 1981 (translated from the Spanish). The message was addressed to the nation but above all to the army, whose officers had sworn loyalty to Franco’s chosen successor. Its value as a source lies in its timing and audience: it ended the coup’s hope of royal support. The message came some seven hours after the assault on the Congress, and writers on 23-F, among them Javier Cercas in The Anatomy of a Moment (2009), have examined what happened in those hours; some critics read the delay as hesitation, but most historians accept that the king’s stand was decisive.

The 23-F coup collapsed by midday on 24 February. Its failure strengthened the monarchy’s democratic legitimacy, and the trials of 1982–1983 sentenced Tejero, Milans del Bosch and Armada to 30 years in prison. In May 1982 Spain joined NATO, partly to give the army a new professional role. In October 1982 the PSOE won the general election, and the peaceful transfer of power to a party that had lost the Civil War is often taken as the end of the transition.

External support and social factors

The transition took place in a favourable international setting. Western European governments and parties wanted a democratic Spain and offered the prospect of membership of the European Economic Community, for which Spain applied in July 1977; democracy was the condition of entry. The West German Social Democrats and their Friedrich Ebert Foundation funded and advised the PSOE, as the Christian Democrats advised the centre-right. The USA, which valued its Spanish bases, accepted change once it was clear that it would not bring the Communists to power. Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 1974, which led to a period of revolutionary turmoil, served as a warning to both the Spanish right and the left of what an uncontrolled rupture might bring.

Social change made a return to dictatorship unlikely. The prosperity of the 1960s had created an urban middle class with a stake in stability, a secularised and educated youth, and a labour movement able to bring the economy to a halt, as it did in early 1976. The Church under Tarancón supported democracy. Above all, the memory of the Civil War made almost every political leader determined to avoid another one. This shared determination underlay the unwritten Pacto del Olvido (pact of forgetting): an agreement among political elites not to use the crimes of the war and the dictatorship as a political weapon.

The table of factors in the transition allows them to be weighed. Elite-centred accounts stress the king and Suárez; accounts "from below" stress the strikes and regional movements that made continuity impossible; structural accounts stress the society created by the 1960s boom.

Democratic Spain: party politics, 1982–2020

For three decades after 1982 Spanish politics was dominated by two parties: the centre-left PSOE and the centre-right People’s Party (PP), with Catalan and Basque nationalist parties often holding the balance in the Cortes. The system broke up after the economic crisis of 2008, when new parties entered parliament.

Felipe González and the PSOE, 1982–1996

Felipe González (born 1942), a Seville lawyer who had led the PSOE since 1974, persuaded it to drop its Marxist label in 1979 and won the 1982 election with 202 of the 350 seats. His governments completed the transition and modernised the state. Civilian control of the army was established and military service reduced. The Education Law of 1985 (LODE) and the General Health Law of 1986, which created a universal national health system, expanded the welfare state, and pensions and public spending rose towards the European average. Abortion was partially legalised in 1985.

Economic policy was more orthodox than many Socialists had expected. The government closed or shrank loss-making state industries in steel, shipbuilding and mining (reconversión industrial) to prepare for European competition, and unemployment rose above 20 per cent. The unions, including the Socialist UGT, called a successful general strike against its policies on 14 December 1988. Entry into the European Economic Community in 1986 brought investment and EU regional funds that paid for motorways and high-speed rail. In 1992 the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo presented a modern Spain to the world.

The later González years were damaged by scandal. Party financing (the Filesa case), the flight of the Civil Guard director Luis Roldán with public money, and above all the GAL (Antiterrorist Liberation Groups), death squads organised by police officers and officials that killed 27 people in a "dirty war" against ETA between 1983 and 1987. In 1998 the former interior minister José Barrionuevo was convicted for his part in a GAL kidnapping. The PSOE narrowly lost the election of 1996.

José María Aznar and the PP, 1996–2004

José María Aznar (born 1953) had rebuilt the right after Fraga, making the PP a modern conservative party able to win the centre. His first government depended on the votes of Catalan and Basque nationalists, to whom he gave more tax powers. With an absolute majority from 2000 he governed alone. His governments privatised state companies such as Telefónica, Repsol and Endesa, cut the deficit to meet the conditions for the euro (adopted in 1999), and presided over strong growth; unemployment fell from over 22 per cent in 1996 to about 10 per cent by 2001. A construction boom, fuelled by cheap credit, began.

Aznar’s firm line against ETA and Basque nationalism was popular in most of Spain but polarising in the Basque Country. His foreign policy moved closer to the USA. In 2003 he supported the US-led invasion of Iraq, which about 90 per cent of Spaniards opposed according to polls, and sent troops to the occupation; millions marched against the war.

On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election, bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and injured about 2,000. The attack was carried out by an Islamist cell inspired by al-Qaeda. The government insisted for two days that ETA was responsible, as evidence pointed elsewhere. Many voters believed it was misleading them to avoid a link with Iraq, and on 14 March the PSOE, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, won unexpectedly.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, 2004–2011

Zapatero (born 1960) withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq within weeks. His first government passed a series of social reforms that made Spain one of the most socially liberal countries in Europe: a law against gender violence (2004), same-sex marriage (July 2005, the third country in the world to legalise it), a law providing care for dependent people (2006), an equality law requiring balanced lists of candidates (2007), faster divorce and, in December 2007, the Historical Memory Law. About 570,000 undocumented immigrants were given legal status in 2005. The Catholic Church and the PP organised large demonstrations against several of these laws.

The global financial crisis of 2008 hit Spain especially hard because its growth had depended on construction and debt. When the housing bubble burst, unemployment rose from about 8 per cent in 2007 to more than 21 per cent in 2011. Under pressure from the EU and financial markets during the eurozone crisis, Zapatero turned to austerity in May 2010, cutting public salaries and pensions, and in 2011 the PSOE and PP amended Article 135 of the constitution to give priority to paying public debt. On 15 May 2011 young protesters occupied the Puerta del Sol in Madrid; the 15-M or Indignados movement spread across Spain with demands for "real democracy" and an end to austerity and corruption.

Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez, 2011–2020

Mariano Rajoy (born 1955) won an absolute majority for the PP in November 2011. His government cut spending, raised taxes, passed a labour reform (2012) that made dismissal cheaper, and in 2012 accepted a eurozone loan to rescue the savings banks. Unemployment peaked at 26 per cent in 2013 before falling as growth returned. The two-party system broke up. Podemos (founded 2014), which grew out of the 15-M protests, and the liberal Ciudadanos won many seats in the elections of 2015 and 2016, and forming governments became difficult.

In May 2018 the court in the Gürtel corruption case found that the PP had benefited from illegal financing, and on 1 June 2018 the Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez won the first successful motion of no confidence since 1978. In 2019, after two elections, the far-right party Vox entered parliament, the first far-right party with significant representation since the transition. In January 2020 the PSOE and Unidas Podemos formed the first coalition government since the Second Republic. In March 2020 it declared a state of alarm to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The monarchy

Juan Carlos’s prestige after 23-F made the monarchy one of the most trusted institutions of the 1980s and 1990s. It fell after 2012, when he was injured on an elephant hunt in Botswana during the economic crisis, and his son-in-law was investigated in the Nóos corruption case. Juan Carlos abdicated in June 2014 in favour of his son, Felipe VI. Investigations into his private finances followed, and in August 2020 he left Spain for the United Arab Emirates. Felipe VI’s televised speech of 3 October 2017 against the Catalan referendum made the Crown itself a subject of controversy in Catalonia.

Economic and social change, 1982–2020

The line graph of unemployment shows the greatest weakness of the Spanish economy after Franco. Unemployment rose above 20 per cent three times, in the mid-1980s, in 1993–1997 and in 2010–2015, and youth unemployment was often twice the national rate. Economists link this to a labour market split between protected permanent contracts and insecure temporary ones, to the collapse of construction after 2008 and to the end of the old industries in the 1980s.

Yet in most other respects the decades after 1982 were a period of rapid catch-up. Income per head rose towards the Western European average, Spain built one of the largest high-speed rail networks in the world, and Spanish banks, construction and telecommunications companies expanded across Latin America and Europe. Tourism grew into one of the largest in the world: in 2019 Spain received about 83.5 million international tourists, second only to France.

A transformed society

• From emigration to immigration. Spain, a country of emigrants until the 1970s, became a country of immigration. Foreign residents rose from about 1.6 per cent of the population in 1998 to about 12 per cent in 2010, mainly from Latin America, Morocco, Romania and other EU states, according to the municipal register (INE).

• Women. Women entered higher education and paid work in large numbers; by the 2000s more women than men graduated from university. Divorce was legalised in 1981 and abortion partially in 1985. The equality law of 2007 and laws against gender violence made Spain a leader in gender legislation, though women remained under-represented in senior posts and did most unpaid care work.

• Secularisation. Spain remained nominally Catholic, but regular church attendance fell sharply, and the laws on divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage were passed against the opposition of the bishops.

• Demography. The birth rate fell to one of the lowest in the world (about 1.2–1.3 children per woman in the 2010s), and life expectancy became one of the highest, raising concern about the cost of pensions and the depopulation of rural "empty Spain".

• Inequality and regions. Wealth remained concentrated in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country, while Andalusia and Extremadura stayed poorer, despite large EU regional funds.

Spain in the world: NATO, the European Union and beyond

The democracies of 1977–1982 saw membership of the European and Western organisations as both a reward for democracy and a guarantee of it. Joining them was the main aim of foreign policy after Franco.

NATO

The UCD government of Calvo-Sotelo took Spain into NATO on 30 May 1982, without a referendum and against the opposition of the PSOE, which campaigned under the slogan "NATO: from the start, no". In government González changed his mind, partly because NATO membership was linked in practice to EEC entry. He promised and held a referendum on 12 March 1986 on staying in NATO under three conditions: Spain would stay outside NATO’s integrated military command, no nuclear weapons would be based in Spain, and the US military presence would be reduced. About 52.5 per cent voted yes and about 40 per cent no, on a turnout of about 59 per cent. Spain joined NATO’s military structure fully in 1999; a Spanish Socialist, Javier Solana, was NATO’s secretary-general from 1995 to 1999.

The European Union

Spain and Portugal signed treaties of accession in June 1985 and joined the European Economic Community on 1 January 1986. Spain was a strong supporter of European integration: it took part in the Maastricht treaty (1992) that created the European Union, the Schengen area of free movement (from 1995) and the euro (from 1999; notes and coins in 2002). EU structural and cohesion funds paid for much of its new infrastructure. Spanish public opinion remained among the most pro-European in the EU, although the austerity imposed during the eurozone crisis after 2010 and the 2012 bank rescue caused resentment.

Other relationships

• Latin America. Spain promoted the Ibero-American summits from 1991 and became a major investor in the region; it also received large numbers of Latin American immigrants.

• The USA. Relations moved from González’s distance (reducing US bases) to Aznar’s close alliance in the Iraq War, and back to distance when Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops in 2004.

• Morocco and Gibraltar. Relations with Morocco were shaped by migration, fishing, the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla and the Western Sahara, which Spain left in 1975–1976; in July 2002 the two countries confronted each other over the islet of Perejil. Spain continued to claim Gibraltar, held by Britain since 1713; the border, closed by Franco in 1969, fully reopened in 1985.

Spain’s international position by 2020 was the reverse of the isolation of 1946: a member of every major Western organisation, with troops in NATO and UN missions. Membership also limited its choices: the austerity of 2010–2013 was imposed largely through the rules and institutions of the eurozone.

Regional autonomy: the Basque Country and Catalonia

The constitution of 1978 created the Estado de las autonomías ("State of the Autonomies"). By 1983 all of Spain was divided into 17 autonomous communities, each with its own parliament, government and statute of autonomy; Ceuta and Melilla became autonomous cities in 1995. The "historic nationalities" (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia) reached autonomy first, but other regions soon demanded the same powers, a process summed up as café para todos ("coffee for everyone"). By the 2000s the communities ran health, education and much of public spending, making Spain one of the most decentralised states in Europe.

The Basque Country and ETA

The Basque Statute of Gernika, approved by referendum in October 1979, restored a Basque government and parliament, recognised the Basque language, Euskara, as co-official and gave the region the concierto económico, under which it collects almost all its own taxes and pays an agreed sum to the state. The moderate PNV led every Basque government from 1980 to 2009 and again from 2012.

ETA rejected the statute and continued its campaign for independence. It killed about 850 people between 1968 and 2010, most of them after 1977, including soldiers, police, politicians, journalists and civilians; its worst attack, the bombing of the Hipercor supermarket in Barcelona in 1987, killed 21 people. It also extorted a "revolutionary tax" from businesses. Its political wing, Herri Batasuna (later Batasuna), won 10–20 per cent of Basque votes.

The response of the state mixed police and judicial action, cooperation with France after the mid-1980s and, under González, the illegal GAL. A turning point came in July 1997, when ETA kidnapped Miguel Ángel Blanco, a young PP councillor in Ermua, and killed him when its deadline expired; millions marched in protest, including many Basques. Talks and truces in 1998–1999 (after the Lizarra pact of nationalist parties) and 2006 failed. Batasuna was banned in 2003 under a new Law of Political Parties. Weakened by arrests, loss of support and the shock of 11-M, which discredited political violence, ETA announced a "definitive cessation of its armed activity" on 20 October 2011, gave up its weapons in 2017 and dissolved itself in May 2018.

Basque nationalism continued by peaceful means. In 2005 the Spanish Cortes rejected the Ibarretxe Plan, a proposal by the Basque premier Juan José Ibarretxe for a "free association" of the Basque Country with Spain. After 2011 the main issues became the reintegration of prisoners and the recognition of victims of all sides.

Catalonia: from autonomy to the procés

Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy of 1979 restored the Generalitat. Jordi Pujol of the centre-right nationalist coalition CiU (Convergence and Union) governed from 1980 to 2003, building Catalan institutions, a Catalan-language education system and a Catalan television service, while supporting governments in Madrid in return for more powers. His reputation collapsed in 2014, when he admitted keeping an undeclared fortune abroad for decades.

A new Catalan Statute, which described Catalonia as a "nation" in its preamble and claimed more powers, was negotiated with Zapatero and approved by referendum in Catalonia in 2006. The PP challenged it, and on 28 June 2010 the Constitutional Court struck down 14 articles and reinterpreted many others, ruling that the reference to a Catalan nation had no legal effect. Hundreds of thousands protested in Barcelona in July 2010. Combined with the economic crisis, austerity and a long-standing complaint that Catalonia paid much more in taxes than it received (fiscal deficit), the ruling turned many autonomists into supporters of independence. Support for independence in the Catalan government’s own opinion surveys rose from under a fifth in the mid-2000s to around 40–48 per cent in the 2010s.

From 2012 the Generalitat under Artur Mas and then Carles Puigdemont pursued the procés ("process") towards independence. A non-binding consultation on 9 November 2014, held despite a court ban, drew about 2.3 million votes, about 80 per cent of them for independence. On 1 October 2017 the Generalitat held a referendum that the Constitutional Court had suspended. National police and Civil Guards tried to close polling stations and used force against voters; hundreds were injured. The Generalitat reported about 90 per cent for independence on a turnout of about 43 per cent, figures that could not be independently verified and that reflected a boycott by most opponents of independence. On 27 October the Catalan parliament declared independence. The same day the Senate authorised the Spanish government to apply Article 155 of the constitution for the first time.

If an Autonomous Community does not fulfil the obligations imposed upon it by the Constitution or other laws, or acts in a way seriously prejudicing the general interests of Spain, the Government […] may, following approval granted by an absolute majority of the Senate, take the measures necessary in order to compel the latter forcibly to meet said obligations, or in order to protect the above-mentioned general interests.

Spanish Constitution of 1978, Article 155.1 (official English translation, Congress of Deputies). The article, modelled on a clause of the German Basic Law, had never been used, and its vague wording ("the measures necessary") left wide discretion. Supporters of the Rajoy government saw its use as a lawful defence of the constitution; Catalan independence supporters saw it as the suspension of self-government.

Rajoy dismissed the Catalan government, dissolved the parliament and called elections for December 2017, at which pro-independence parties kept a narrow majority of seats although the anti-independence Ciudadanos became the largest single party. Direct rule ended in June 2018. Puigdemont fled to Belgium. In October 2019 the Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan leaders, including the former vice-president Oriol Junqueras, to between 9 and 13 years in prison for sedition and, in some cases, misuse of public funds, which provoked weeks of protests in Catalonia.

YouTube

The comparison of the two regions shows that the most serious challenge to the democratic state changed over time: from Basque terrorism, which killed hundreds but lost support, to a Catalan movement that was peaceful and mass-based but rejected the constitutional order itself.

Remembering the war and the dictatorship

The transition’s decision not to judge the past held for about twenty-five years. From around 2000 a movement for the recovery of historical memory, led by grandchildren of Republican victims, began to locate and excavate mass graves; more than 2,000 graves have since been mapped. Its supporters argued that the victims of the Nationalist zone had never received the recognition given to those of the Republican zone, and that Spain was unusual among democracies in leaving tens of thousands of people in unmarked graves.

The Historical Memory Law of December 2007, passed under Zapatero, declared the political sentences of the Franco era unjust, gave state help to families seeking to exhume victims, ordered the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings and banned political events at the Valley of the Fallen. The PP opposed it as reopening old wounds; some victims’ associations thought it did too little, because it did not annul the sentences or end the protection of the Amnesty Law. In 2008 the investigating judge Baltasar Garzón opened an inquiry into Francoist crimes, citing about 114,000 people who had disappeared, but the courts ruled that the Amnesty Law and the passage of time prevented prosecution. United Nations human rights bodies repeatedly urged Spain to investigate.

On 24 October 2019, after a long legal battle with Franco’s family, the Sánchez government exhumed Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen and reburied it in a family tomb. The Democratic Memory Law of October 2022 later went further, but the issue remained divided along party lines: for much of the left, memory was a matter of justice for victims; for much of the right, it threatened the reconciliation of the transition.

The memory debate shows how the perspectives of different groups, the families of victims on both sides, parties of left and right, Catalan and Basque nationalists, and historians, continue to shape how the period 1936–1975 is understood. It is also a judgement on the transition itself: was the Pacto del Olvido the wisdom that made democracy possible, or a silence that left democracy incomplete?

Perspectives and debates

Each phase of the study has its own historical debate. The main positions are summarised in the table of interpretations and then weighed.

Weighing the perspectives

On the failure of the Republic, the debate between Preston and Payne is partly about evidence and partly about which period is examined. Preston focuses on the obstruction of reform by landowners and the turn of the right to conspiracy; Payne focuses on the left’s rejection of electoral defeat in 1934 and on the disorder of 1936. Both agree that the Republic tried to do a great deal at once in a depression, and that by 1936 the political centre had collapsed. Brenan’s structural approach explains why the divisions were so deep, but not why they led to war in 1936 and not earlier.

On the outcome of the war, most historians now combine the explanations. Foreign aid and non-intervention gave the Nationalists a material advantage; Nationalist unity and Republican division determined how each side used its resources. Viñas’s archival work has weakened the older Cold War argument that the Republic was a Soviet puppet, while Graham shows that the Republic’s divisions were real but also a product of its isolation.

On the nature of Francoism, Linz’s model is still widely used, especially for the regime after 1945. Critics argue that it underplays the terror of the 1940s and the regime’s fascist character in 1936–1945. Many historians therefore describe a regime that changed: semi-fascist in its first phase, then a Catholic, bureaucratic and technocratic dictatorship.

On the transition, elite and "from below" accounts are less opposed than they seem. The king and Suárez chose reform because pressure from below and a changed society made continuity impossible; the opposition accepted the monarchy because it lacked the strength to impose a ruptura. Since the 15-M movement of 2011, critics of the "regime of 1978" have argued that the transition left too much of Francoism untouched, including impunity for its crimes, a monarchy chosen by Franco and an influential economic elite; defenders reply that the consensus produced the longest period of democracy in Spanish history.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the challenges to democracy before 1936

Paper 3: the causes of the Civil War

Paper 3: the Nationalist victory

Paper 3: the transition to democracy

The next worked example gives a full essay plan, as a model of how to organise a 60-minute answer.

Paper 3: democratic Spain

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the Restoration system worked and why it collapsed between 1917 and 1923, including the Annual disaster.

• To do:

  I can assess the achievements and failures of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and explain why it fell in 1930.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Second Republic was established in 1931 and what the 1931 constitution changed.

• To do:

  I can describe Azaña’s reforms of 1931–1933 and the opposition they provoked from right and left.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims and methods of Gil-Robles and the CEDA and why the left feared them.

• To do:

  I can explain the significance of the Asturias rising of 1934 and the polarisation of 1933–1936.

• To do:

  I can explain the results of the February 1936 election and the policies and weaknesses of the Popular Front government.

• To do:

  I can explain why the coup of July 1936 led to a civil war and how Franco emerged as leader.

• To do:

  I can outline the course of the war from 1936 to 1939.

• To do:

  I can weigh economic, individual, foreign and military reasons for the Nationalist victory.

• To do:

  I can give ranges for the death toll of the war and the repression and explain why the figures are contested.

• To do:

  I can explain how Franco consolidated and maintained power, including the families of the regime and the Fundamental Laws.