The Spanish Civil War

"This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco's counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars"--

"The Spanish Civil War was the most important political and military struggle in Europe during the decade prior to World War II. It not only polarized Spain, but produced an intense reaction among millions all over Europe and the Americas. The war was given many names. Leftists, as well as many liberals, termed it varyingly "fascism versus democracy," "the people versus the oligarchy" (or "against the army"), "revolution versus counterrevolution," and even "the future versus the past." Rightists and conservatives at different times called it a struggle of "Christianity versus atheism," "Western civilization against communism," "Spain versus anti-Spain," and "law and order against subversion." These labels were antithetical, but nonetheless not always mutually exclusive, for the war was extremely complicated and contradictory, and there were greater or lesser amounts of truth in most of these appellations, though some were more accurate than others. The war began over internal i