Spanish Civil War

VI

Civil War, 1939

With the Republican army struggling, the Nationalists quickly reached Barcelona. On January 23 Negrín and his government fled Barcelona for the castle of Figueras, near the French border. Two days later, Nationalists troops occupied Barcelona. The collapse of the Catalan capital sparked a mass exodus of refugees. As the Nationalist army advanced, thousands of Republican refugees slowly made their way to the French border.

The move to Figueras allowed the crumbling Republican leadership a little time, but in February, Negrín, his cabinet, the PCE leadership, and the remaining deputies of the Cortes fled to safety across the Pyrenees Mountains into France. Early that month all of Catalonia fell to the Nationalists. With the fall of Catalonia, Madrid remained the last Republican stronghold, but it was surrounded by Nationalists. In addition, Madrid’s Republicans were short on ammunition, weapons, and food supplies.

A

The Casado Coup

It was under these deteriorating conditions that Colonel Segismundo Casado led a group of socialists, anarchists, and republican military officers in opposition to the PCE. Just before midnight on March 6, the conspirators took over the chief government ministries and set up a provisional government called the National Council of Defense. The council was eager to put an end to what they saw as the senseless sacrifice of lives, and they believed that Franco would negotiate with them rather than with Negrín’s pro-Communist government.

News of the mutiny reached Negrín and his advisors in the small town of Elda, where the official government had been taking refuge since the fall of Catalonia. Stunned by the recent turn of events, the prime minister decided to leave Spain for good. He and his entourage went to Toulouse, France, later that day. Back in Madrid, PCE members were locked in fierce street battles with Council of Defense forces. The fighting continued until the 12th, when the council’s forces defeated the Communist resistance.

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Although securing Republican control moved the council closer to negotiating a settlement with the Nationalists, Franco soon made it clear that he had no interest in accepting their conditions. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender and total victory. On March 27 Nationalist troops began to occupy Madrid’s desolate streets. Nationalist supporters and war-weary citizens of Madrid cheered the Nationalists’ entry, relieved the war was coming to an end. A few days later, on April 1, Franco proclaimed that his troops had 'achieved their objectives.' Spain's civil war was finally over.

VII

Legacy of Civil War

In the aftermath of war, Spaniards on both the winning and losing sides faced an uncertain future. First, they needed to recover from the traumas brought on by a conflict that had claimed the lives of over 500,000 people and had caused the flight of up to one half-million more citizens. In addition, nearly everyone had to endure the many hardships in day-to-day living. Food shortages, inadequate housing (especially in the urban areas that had been subjected to continuous bombings), and widespread unemployment were major obstacles to be overcome.

Spain’s recovery from the destruction of the war was hampered by the outbreak of World War II. Just five months after the civil war ended, Europe was plunged into this large international war that lasted for the next six years. As a result, Spain could not expect any form of material assistance from abroad, since it was the fate of Europe as a whole and not Spain itself that became the overriding concern of most countries.

At home, Spain's recovery was placed in the hands of Generalísimo Franco, who was to rule his country as a dictator for the next 36 years. Franco and his Nationalist allies brought peace and stability to Spain, but those conditions came at a high price. The fighting on the battlefields had ended, but Franco continued to repress those who resisted his rule. Reprisals against his former enemies on the left were exceedingly harsh, particularly in the decade after the war, when thousands of Republicans were imprisoned and between 10,000 and 28,000 were executed.

The authoritarian state that Franco controlled between 1939 and 1975 passed through several stages. In the first, the fascist model of government, like that established in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, was greatly admired. While his rule depended to a large extent on the support of nonfascist institutions—for example, the Catholic Church—Franco nonetheless worked to transform the social, political, and economic structures of Spain so that they conformed to a fascist model.

The victory of anti-fascist forces that ended World War II in 1945, however, forced Franco to downplay many of the fascist features of his dictatorship. Even so, Franco steadfastly refused to bring Spain into political alignment with post-war Western Europe. By doing so he effectively consigned Spain to a state of isolation for many years.

By the time Franco died in November 1975, the vast majority of Spaniards no longer wanted a regime that had for nearly 40 years looked more to the past rather than to the future. In the course of the next two years, Spaniards laid the foundations for a democratic government, which was legalized under the Constitution of 1978. Since then Spain has become one of Europe's most dynamic countries, demonstrating, among other things, that the deep wounds inflicted by the Spanish Civil War are finally healing.

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