The spring of 1936 was one of the most violent periods of the Second Republic. In Spain, in five months there were a thousand violent episodes with more than two thousand victims. Of half the inciters are known. In 80% of the cases it was the left. Of the nearly 1,500 victims whose affiliation is known, the left, with 51%, were also the ones who had the most, compared to 35% of the right. And with the exception of the Falangists, the right led only 28% of the violent actions.
The governments of Manuel Azaña and Santiago Casares Quiroga, both from the Republican Left, failed to control the violence after the Popular Front’s electoral victory in February. And they were incapable of condemning the violence of the left, which diminished their credibility. The fact of pointing out the right as disruptors and initiators of it radicalized the moderates and gave prominence to Falangists and monarchists. This prevented the consolidation of democracy. This is the thesis of the book Fire crossed, by the professor of History of Thought at the Rey Juan Carlos University, Manuel Álvarez Tardío (Madrid, 1972), and by the professor of Political History at the Complutense University of Madrid, Fernando del Rey (La Solana , 1960). The essay is destined to generate controversy because it starts from the same premise that Álvarez used –then together with Roberto Villa– in 1936. Fraud and violence in the Popular Front elections (Espasa, 2017): show raw data, and propose that no There is no political interpretation, nor a retrospective look at the Republic since the Civil War.
The data shown in half a thousand pages, bibliography aside, comes from an important work, the consultation of twenty files and a hundred newspapers. The result is the same as in the previous work: the leftists who controlled the government of the Republic are reprimanded because they found it difficult to accept a pluralistic society and a liberal regime. His dogmatic sectarianism would have conditioned his democratic credentials and made it impossible for all Spaniards to govern.
This violence was taken advantage of by the radical right and the Falangists, with financial and military support, for their coup plans with an anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist and nationalist discourse and gaining moderate support that previously could not wait. The thesis is suggestive and, as the authors present it, plausible. Precisely for this reason, the reader is left wanting more interpretation of the research results.
In the work there is a huge elephant that barely appears: Catalunya. Lluís Companys is mentioned only once, but the authors say that allying himself with the protagonists of the 1934 insurrection had a moral cost for Azaña. On the other hand, according to the data, sixty percent of the victims of political violence occurred in fifteen provinces – with Madrid at the forefront –, among which there is no Catalan one.
In Barcelona, ??the most populated in the state with 1.8 million people, there were relatively few violent episodes in the period. Among other reasons, because, as historians point out, the Generalitat – and, above all, the ERC Labor Minister, Martí Barrera – mediated a good part of the labor and social conflicts.
Álvarez and Del Rey do not say it, but their data show that to justify the anti-Catalanist charge of the July coup d’état, the rebels relied on propaganda and their ideological sectarianism, and not on the violence that existed in Catalonia that spring. With a percentage of violence similar to that of Lugo and Tenerife, the Catalan provinces were in those months almost the oasis that Manuel Brunet talked about in La Veu de Catalunya and Antoni Rovira i Virgili in La Humanitat. It’s no small thing.
