Paul Preston

The politics of revenge : fascism and the military in twentieth-century Spain

Authors Note Preface Chronology Part I: Defending the Past: Resisting modernity: fascism and the military in twentieth- century Spain The Politics of Revenge: Francoism, the Civil War and collective memory Part II: Surviving the Present: Franco and the Axis temptation Franco and his generals, 1939-45 Part III: Instruments of Dictatorship: Populism and parasitism: the Falange and the Spanish establishment, 1939-75 Destiny and dictatorship: the Spanish army and the Franco regime, 1939-75 Part IV: Resurrecting the Past: Into the bunker: the extreme right and the struggle against democracy, 1967-77 Francoisms last stand: the military campaign against democracy, 1973-82 Further reading Index

The coming of the Spanish Civil War: reform, reaction and revolution in the Second Republic

The origins of the socialist schism - 1917-31 building barricades against reform - the legalist right, 1931-33 social democracy and social conflict - the PSOE in power, 1931-1933 the politics of reprisal - the CEDA, the PSOE and the polarization of 1934 a bluff called - the insurrection of 1934 the legal road to the corporate state - the CEDA in power, 1934-35 socialism under stress - repression, radicalization and the popular front the abandonment of legalism - the PSOE, the CEDA and the coming of war in 1936.

Franco and Hitler: The Myth of Hendaye 1940

The Hitler/Franco encounter at Hendaye in October 1940 was a central myth of Francoist propaganda. Allegedly, faced with threats and blandishments to force Spain into war on the Axis side, Franco coolly stood his ground and thereby secured Spanish neutrality. However, there is little evidence that Hitler did threaten Franco. His purpose in travelling to Hendaye, and to Montoire where he met Laval and Petain, was to compare the relative cost of closer relationships with Spain and Vichy France. Far from cleverly holding off Hitler, Franco was disappointed that the meeting foundered. Germanys need to maintain good relations with Vichy ensured that Hitler could not meet Francos price for belligerence, the dismemberment of the French North African empire.

Anarchism, the republic and civil war in Spain : 1931-1939

Note to the English Edition Part One: Power in the Street 1. History Accelerates 2. The Seeds of Confrontation 3. The Symbols of Identity 4. On the Road to Insurrection 5. Correcting the Route Part Two: The People in Arms 6. The Summer of 1936 7. War and Revolution. 8. Decline and Fall. Epilogue: The Uprooting. Appendix: Anarchism in Spanish Contemporary History

General Franco as a military leader

BOTH during his lifetime, and after his death, General Franco was reviled by his enemies on the left and subjected to the most absurd adulation by his admirers on the right. As the victor in a bloody civil war which inflamed passions throughout the world, that is hardly surprising. Leaving aside his personal political success in remaining in power for nearly four decades, his victory in the Spanish Civil War was his greatest and most glorious achievement, something reflected in the judgements of detractors and hagiographers alike. For the left, Franco the general was a slow-witted mediocrity whose battlefield triumphs were owed entirely to the unstinting military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini. For the right, Franco the general was the twentieth-century incarnation of Alexander the Great, of Napoleon and of the great warrior hero of Spanish legend, El Cid.

The Popular Front in Europe

Notes on the Contributors - The Popular Front and the Struggle against Fascism H.Graham and P.Preston - The Object Lesson: the Division of the German Left and the Triumph of National Socialism S.Salter - The Austrian Left and the Popular Front M.Kitchen - The French Popular Front, 1936-37 D.A.L.Levy - The Creation of the Popular Front in Spain P.Preston - The Spanish Popular Front and the Civil War H.Graham - Togliatti, Italian Communism and the Popular Front D.Sassoon - The Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front, 1936-39 J.Haslam - Index

The Creation of the Popular Front in Spain

The adoption of the Popular Front strategy at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in July and August 1935 ensured that popular frontism would be thereafter inevitably and inextricably associated with the international communist movement. Of the two countries where the strategy had greatest success, the more dramatic and long-lived experiment was indisputably that of Spain. In consequence, the war against the Spanish Popular Front, launched in 1936 by a right wing infuriated that it could not defend its material interests by legal electoral means, was widely assumed at the time and 7ince to be a war against communism. It is true that the abandonment of the Spanish Republic by the Western democracies threw it into the arms of the Soviet Union and thus gave substance to the association of the republican cause with communism. However, at the time of the formation of what came to be known only belatedly as the Popular Front, the Communist Party played merely a peripheral role. It served the purposes of anti-republicans, and of the communists themselves, to argue otherwise. None the less, the truth is that the victorious left-wing electoral coalition of February 1936 was a revival of an earlier Republican—Socialist alliance and its formation was well under way when popular frontism was invented. It was the work, not of the communists, but of the moderate socialist Indalecio Prieto and, above all, of the republican ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azana, both of whom wished to keep communist participation to the barest minimum simply because it could bring few votes to the coalition and would frighten many potential supporters.1

The Origins of the Socialist Schism in Spain, 1917-31

In the continuing debate on the origins of the Spanish Civil War it has become commonplace for major responsibility to be attributed to the Socialist Party, the PSOE. Whether or not the PSOE was responsible for the breakdown of the Second Republic, it certainly had a crucial role to play therein. As the biggest party of the left, the PSOE provided three ministers in the reforming governments of 1931-3 3 and the backbone of their parliamentary support. During the period of centre-right dominance from 193 3-3 5, the Socialists were the only major opposition force, both in parliament and in the street, and even took part in a major insurrection in 1934. From the so-called Popular Front elections of February 1936 until the outbreak of war in July of that year, the Socialists, yet again the biggest party, were the arbiters of Republican politics. Referring to the 1934 insurrection, one scholar has gone so far as to state that

The Popular Front and the Struggle Against Fascism

One of the more bizarre consequences of the Bolshevik revolution was that the years from 1918 to 1939 were an era of virtually uninterrupted working-class defeat. There were innumerable heroic episodes but the overall trend was catastrophic. The crushing of revolution in Germany and Hungary after the First World War was followed by the destruction of the Italian Left by Mussolini, the establishment of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal and the defeat of the General Strike in Britain. The rise of Hitler saw the annihilation of the most powerful working-class movement in Western Europe, and within a year the Austrian Left suffered a similar fate. Austria stands out because there, for the first time, workers took up arms against fascism, in 1934. Tragically, it was too late and the domino effect continued across central Europe.

Spain's October Revolution and the Rightist Grasp for Power

In October 1934 a general strike broke out in Madrid, the bourgeois left-liberal government in Barcelona declared the independence of Spains four Catalan provinces and, for two weeks, revolutionary miners in Asturias fought a desperate battle against the Spanish army. These events were the response of various left-wing elements to the proposed entry into the cabinet of three ministers from the authoritarian Catholic party, the CEDA.1 Since, in the last elections in November 1933, the CEDA had emerged as the largest single grouping in the Cortes, these actions have been widely interpreted as a deliberate rejection by the left of the rules of democratic co-existence. In this view, the lefts egoistic extremism in attempting to take by violence what had been denied them by the vote made the right despair of the possibilities of legality.2 Accordingly, they were driven to defend their interests by other means.