[20][21] The Republic was marred with political instability and conflicts and was quickly overthrown by a coup d'état by General Arsenio Martínez Campos in December 1874, after which the Bourbons were restored to the throne in the figure of Alfonso XII, Isabella's son.

Following the war, wide swathes of Spanish society, including the armed forces, united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government of the country in Madrid, but these circles were ultimately unsuccessful.

[43] At this point, once the constituent assembly had fulfilled its mandate of approving a new constitution, but fearing an increasing popular opposition, the Radical and Socialist majority postponed the regular elections, prolonging their time in power for two more years.

[51] Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party (RRP) formed a government, reversing changes made by the previous administration[52] and granting amnesty to the collaborators of the unsuccessful uprising by General José Sanjurjo in August 1932.

Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo.

[64] The Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga, an Azaña supporter and an exiled vocal opponent of Francisco Franco, wrote a sharp criticism of the left's participation in the revolt: "The uprising of 1934 is unforgivable.

"[65] Reversals of land reform resulted in expulsions, firings and arbitrary changes to working conditions in the central and southern countryside in 1935, with landowners' behaviour at times reaching "genuine cruelty", which included violence against farmworkers and socialists, causing several deaths.

Convinced that the left was no longer willing to follow the rule of law and that its vision of Spain was under threat, the right abandoned the parliamentary option and began planning to overthrow the republic, rather than to control it.

[74] Within the first month of the Popular Front's government, nearly a quarter of the provincial governors had been removed due to their failure to prevent or control strikes, illegal land occupation, political violence and arson.

[114] The rebels failed to take any major cities with the critical exception of the July 1936 military uprising in Seville, which provided a landing point for Franco's African troops, and the primarily conservative and Catholic areas of Old Castile, León and Galicia, which fell quickly.

Payne argues that Republican Spain was not a democracy but also not a strict dictatorship, with the four different major left-wing factions remaining relatively autonomous from one another and operating within a semi-pluralist political framework and limited rule of law.

[155] A few well-known people fought on the Republican side, such as English writer George Orwell (who wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the war)[156] and Canadian thoracic surgeon Norman Bethune, who developed a mobile blood-transfusion service for front-line operations.

Catholic confession cleared the soldiers of moral doubt and increased fighting ability; Republican newspapers described Nationalist priests as ferocious in battle and Indalecio Prieto remarked that the enemy he feared most was "the requeté who has just received communion".

[182] Despite the German signing of a non-intervention agreement in September 1936, Nazi Germany gave various aid and military support for the Nationalists,[183] including the formation of the Condor Legion as a land and air force.

[206][207] Soviet Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin broke the Non-Intervention Agreement and League of Nations embargo by providing material assistance to the Republican forces, becoming their only source of major weapons.

[212] From August 1936 onward, over one ship per day arrived at Spain's Mediterranean ports with Russian aid: munitions, rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, artillery, trucks, Soviet agents, technicians, instructors, and propagandists.

[226] French Prime Minister Léon Blum was sympathetic to the republic,[227] fearing that the success of Nationalist forces in Spain would create an alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, encircling France.

[249] Two days after relieving the siege, Franco proclaimed himself Caudillo ("chieftain", the Spanish equivalent of the Italian Duce and the German Führer—meaning: 'director') while forcibly unifying the various and diverse Falangist, Royalist and other elements within the Nationalist cause.

On 5 March 1939 the Republican army, led by the Colonel Segismundo Casado and the politician Julián Besteiro, rose against the prime minister Juan Negrín and formed the National Defence Council (Consejo Nacional de Defensa or CND) to negotiate a peace deal.

In the Nationalist zone money creation was responsible for some 69% of domestic resources, while in the Republican one the corresponding figure stood at 60%; it was accomplished mostly by means of advances, credits, loans and debit balances from respective central banks.

[note 8] Instead, they claim that the Republicans failed to translate their resources into military victory largely because of constraints of the international non-intervention agreement; they were forced to spend in excess of market prices and accept goods of lower quality.

[311] While this was happening, Prime Minister Negrín treated President Companys with notable disloyalty, to the final point of abandoning him at the French border, after appropriating the Generalitat's reserve funds for exile.

[346] Historians such as Helen Graham,[347] Paul Preston,[348] Antony Beevor,[17] Gabriel Jackson[349] and Hugh Thomas[350] argue that the mass executions behind the Nationalist lines were organised and approved by the Nationalist rebel authorities, while the executions behind the Republican lines were the result of the breakdown of the Republican state and chaos: Though there was much wanton killing in rebel Spain, the idea of the limpieza, the "cleaning up", of the country from the evils which had overtaken it, was a disciplined policy of the new authorities and a part of their programme of regeneration.

In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state, although some political parties in some cities abetted the enormities, and some of those responsible ultimately rose to positions of authority.Conversely, historians such as Stanley Payne, Julius Ruiz[352] and José Sánchez[353] argue that the political violence in the Republican zone was in fact organized by the left: In general, this was not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred, by the man in the street for his "oppressors", as it has sometimes been painted, but a semi-organized activity carried out by sections of nearly all the leftist groups.

[370] Michael Seidman argues that the Nationalists' greater death toll may be partially attributable to their military success resulting in territorial gains and thus more opportunities to enact violence against their enemies.

[403] Some members of the latter were executed by Soviet-advised communist functionaries in Catalonia,[409] as recounted by George Orwell's description of the purges in Barcelona in 1937 in which followed a period of increasing tension between competing elements of the Catalan political scene.

[426] The leadership of the Falange suffered 60 percent casualties in the early days of the civil war, and the party was transformed by new members and rising new leaders, called camisas nuevas ("new shirts"), who were less interested in the revolutionary aspects of National Syndicalism.

Leading works of sculpture include Alberto Sánchez Pérez's El pueblo español tiene un camino que conduce a una estrella ("The Spanish People Have a Path that Leads to a Star"), a 12.5 m monolith constructed out of plaster representing the struggle for a socialist utopia;[429] Julio González's La Montserrat, an anti-war work which shares its title with a mountain near Barcelona, is created from a sheet of iron which has been hammered and welded to create a peasant mother carrying a small child in one arm and a sickle in the other.

[430] Salvador Dalí responded to the conflict in his homeland with two powerful oil paintings in 1936: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: A Premonition of Civil War (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Autumnal Cannibalism (Tate Modern, London).

Historian Stanley Payne suggests that this view is an incorrect summary of the geopolitic position of the interwar period, arguing that the international alliance that was created in December 1941, once the United States entered the Second World War, was politically much broader than the Spanish Popular Front.