Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
The Spanish army and the Popular Front
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Summary
The simplest thing to say might be that Spanish officers disliked the Popular Front and so they rebelled against it. But the lapidary style fails to answer the question that must be posed: what was the provocation of the Popular Front government of February 1936, to use Carolyn Boyd's paradigm of disposition, provocation and opportunity, that incited the Spanish army to rebel? Indeed, is the question posed at all properly? Was it the government, or its deeds, or what it was feared it might do, or perhaps what it would not do, which led to the army's decision to overthrow it? Were these fears and hatreds justified in any sense that we can appreciate, or was the army acting for no other purpose than to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for a selfish oligarchy, which headed an unjust and reactionary economic system, legitimized by a Church unable or unwilling to accept challenge?
Again, was there something in the disposition of the Spanish officer corps which inclined it to act as a tool of political and economic interests? Were such interests identical with the army's own? What was the inner structure and self-perception which allowed the army to rise in rebellion against a constitutional regime?
This is a large number of questions to be answered. One path to answering them, which will lead to others, is an examination of the peculiar status of the Spanish army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal state, or perhaps the relation of the Spanish state with its army.
The army was a conscript force, with some professional units stationed in Morocco.
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- The French and Spanish Popular FrontsComparative Perspectives, pp. 50 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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