Niccolo Soldo offers an introduction to the context in which the Spanish Civil War took place, with emphasis on one side’s uneasy coalition of interests:

Picasso’s “Guernica” in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.

At a crossroads in his life, [Ernest Hemingway] decided to go to Spain to cover the conflict for a newspaper chain. Out of his experiences in that war came For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), one of his most celebrated novels. In this excerpt, he uses the female character “Pilar” to relate the story of how Republican forces massacred a group of people in a small town who were opposed to the government and supported the Spanish Generals seeking to overthrow it. Derided as “fascists”, each of the men were forced to pass a line of pro-government peasants who would beat them with flails before throwing them off of a cliff. Civil wars are indeed the most vicious, even in fictional depictions like this one.

The Spanish Civil War is odd for two reasons, the first one being that more than any other war that I can think of, historians have placed a much stronger focus on the politics of the conflict to the detriment of its military aspects. The second reason is much more important overall, and particularly germane to the subject of this essay: it is the only war that I can think of where the histories have been overwhelmingly written by the losers.¹

If you ask a random, somewhat educated person in the West about the Spanish Civil War, they will generally say that “Franco was a fascist who allied himself to Hitler and Mussolini and won the civil war in the most brutal fashion possible. He was a dictator who hated democracy and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people.” Beyond that, they might make mention of Hemingway and his novel, or even Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica”², that depicts the victims of the German Luftwaffe bombardment of that small Basque town in the north of Spain. Others still will relay the fact that the term “Fifth Column” came out of the Spanish Civil War.³ Added up all together, the most simplified take becomes “Franco bad, Republicans good”.

Of course this take is wrong, as this conflict was too complex to arrive at such a ridiculous reductionist conclusion no matter which side you sympathize(d) with. To give you a quick illustration of just how complex this conflict was, here is a list of the major domestic factions that took part in it:

Spanish Republican Side:

• People’s Army (the armed forces of the Spanish Republic)
• Popular Front (left-wing electoral alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists)
• UGT (very large trade union affiliated with the Spanish Socialists)
• CNT-FAI (massive trade union of anarchist militants)
• POUM (anti-Stalinist communists, including some Trotskyites)⁴
• Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Autonomists)
• Euzko Gudarostea (Army of the Basque Nationalists)

Spanish Nationalist Side:

• Spanish Renovation (monarchists supporting the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Alfonso XIII, who abdicated in 1931)
• CEDA (the main conservative party, Catholic conservatives)
• Requetés (traditionalist Catholic monarchist militants who supported the Carlist Dynasty, mainly from the region of Navarre)
• Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Fascists)
• The Army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion (Spanish Army in Spain’s then-colony of Morocco, with many Moroccans serving in it)

Add to this mix the International Brigades⁵ that fought on the side of the government, and the German and Italian forces who backed the rebels. To list off all the political groupings that participated in the war is a mouthful, but necessary to hammer home the point of the complexity of this conflict. So here goes: nationalists, monarchists (from two competing royal houses), fascists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists (from two competing camps), anarchists, and regional autonomists. In short, this war had something for everyone, which is why it caught the attention of so many foreigners (especially famous ones) at the time. But before we dive into the run up to the civil war, we need to understand some of the history of Spain that lead up to this “world war in miniature”.

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1. “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” – falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, but it makes for a good quote to illustrate the point. From the International Churchill Society: “‘Alas poor Baldwin. History will be unkind to him. For I will write that history.’ And another version often repeated is ‘History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.’

What Churchill actually said, in the House of Commons in January 1948, was in response to a speech by Herbert Morrison, the Labour Lord Privy Seal, which attacked the Conservatives’ foreign policy before the war:

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

2. In January of 1937, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a work of art to display at the upcoming World’s Fair in Paris in order to draw international attention to their cause. At the time, Picasso was living in the French capital. It wasn’t until he read reports of the bombing of Guernica on April 26 of that same year that he felt inspired enough to create something that he felt was worthwhile for audiences to see.

3. In September 1936, General Francisco Franco supposedly claimed that there were “four nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column inside of it ready to attack”.

4. Leon Trotsky did not support POUM and went on to disassociate himself from them and their actions. George Orwell joined POUM when he went to Spain to volunteer to fight against the Spanish nationalists.

5. Formed by volunteers from outside of Spain and almost entirely Stalinist in leadership and political orientation.