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The Rebellion of the Eighteenth ofJuly The Spanish crisis ofthe spring and summer of1936 was in key respects the Spanish variant of the revolutionary or protorevolutionary crises that afflicted various eastern and central European countries between 1917 and 1923. The Spanish case was unique in that it occurred half a generation later and was not triggered by world war or the breakdown of defeat. In Spain, mass mobilization and polarization were triggered instead by the intersection ofthe growth of major new political and social forces in a time of generalized depression, innovative but weak domestic institutionalization , and increasingly unstable international conditions whose vicarious influence became rapidly more pronounced. The emergence of the only major violent twentieth-century revolution in a west European country was due first of all to the convergence of a remarkable and unique complex of conflictive factors. By the early 1930s Spain had become a free, open, and democratic country-something which up to that date had never existed in eastern or parts of central Europe-permitting maximal expression and mobilization in a society that at the same time remained backward and undeveloped economically compared with northwestern Europe. The contradictions between a sophisticated and progressive northwest-European type of culture and politico-civic framework on the one hand with an underdeveloped southern European social and economic structure on the other resulted in proportionately the broadest and most varied mobilization of competing mass revolutionary movements seen in any land before or since. Yet this revolutionary upsurge had also to face a sizable moderate and conservative middle-class society and a large Catholic rural sector in the north, parts of which were increasingly influenced by new nationalist and au87 88 II. The Civil War, 1936-1939 thoritarian doctrines. Serious horizontal regional splits then further complicated and reinforced these major vertical sociopolitical divisions. Though. all major revolutions have responded opportunistically to uniquely favorable opportunities, the Spanish revolution was also unusual in that it finally exploded directly only in response to the counterrevolution attempted by the preemptive strike of the military. One of its most important characteristics was that the Spanish revolution was the only pluralistic, genuinely multiparty and multiideological violent revolution among the significant conflicts of the century, for the revolutionary left reflected the extreme diversity of Spanish society itself. The protagonists of revolution thus sputtered and agitated through the spring of 1936 without producing revolutionary unity or a dominant, hegemonic force, and for the moment lacked either the plan, means, or will to carry the process of protorevolutionary subversion to a direct climax. Strikes and disorders hit a high point during the first three weeks of June and then declined somewhat by the beginning of July. The middle-class Left Republican government ofAzafia and Casares Quiroga gambled on the revolutionaries burning themselves out and then returning to Republican reformism or being abandoned by their supporters. Indeed, there existed no clear indication that the protorevolutionary process was about to come to any immediate climax or that it was yet capable of directly overturning the government . What was clear by the late spring of 1936, however, was that the Spanish system was ceasing to govern effectively and that the country's institutional and economic structures were being directly undermined by a peculiar process of protorevolutionary stalemate, a process that no society can long withstand. This fact was publicly recognized by the Socialist leader Prieto as early as May 2. So pluralistic and indeterminate a process, however, also retarded the multiple military conspiracies against the left. Plotting against the government was simultaneously being carried on by (a) the Junta Central and local groups of the UME; (b) the nominal Generals' Junta in Madrid; (c) various individual commanders and officers in the provinces; (d) the almost acephalous Falangists; (e) the Carlists; and (f) various other provincial rightist groups. Coordination developed only slowly, incompletely, and with considerable difficulty. The chief organizer was General Emilio Mola, known for his leading role in Morocco and service as the last national police chief under the monarchy. Relegated to the provincial garrison of Pamplona by the Azafia government, he found Carlist Navarre a congenial environment for conspiracy. Mola's own views were in some respects moderate, and he had never joined the UME. Though in contact with the Madrid Junta, he had written an official letter to government leaders in mid-April to protest the abuse to which the Army was subjected by revolutionaries. This drew no response other than an inspection visit to check his own command...

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