justified their July 1936 rising on precisely these
grounds. Attacked by those who should have sup-
ported the Republic, the government was too
weak to suppress the generals’ rising as easily as
in 1932. But the right, on its own, was unable to
wrest power from the government, either elec-
torally or by force. It called on the army to restore
conservative order and to uphold the values and
position of the Church. And the army assumed
this task in an action that had more in common
with nineteenth-century Spanish tradition and the
military seizure of power by Primo de Rivera in
1923, than with Nazi or fascist takeovers which
were backed by their own paramilitary supporters,
the army standing aside.
The government of the left in 1931–2 had
offended army feeling by attempting its reform,
replacing many officers with those whose loyalty
to the Republic seemed certain. A large number
of such promotions after the victory of the
Popular Front in 1936 offended the traditionalist
officers, and General Francisco Franco, ‘banished’
to the military governorship of the remote Canary
Islands, protested that such unfair practices
offended the dignity of the army. The leader of
the officers’ conspiracy was not Franco, however,
but General José Sanjurjo, and General Emilio
Mola was its chief organiser. The army itself
was divided between those ready to overthrow
the Republic and those still prepared to serve
it. Franco himself hesitated almost to the last
moment. The increasing disorder in Spain – the
lawlessness and violence of demonstrations of
the left, which the government seemed unable to
control – finally decided the army conspirators in
July 1936 to carry out a military coup, ‘planned’
since the previous April, to take over Spain.
Franco had finally thrown in his lot with the
conspirators and secretly, on 18 July, left the
Canary Islands to take charge of the army in216 THE CONTINUING WORLD CRISIS, 1929–39
The fascist salute greets General Franco from the smiling nursing staff of a nationalist hospital. © Hulton-
Deutsch Collection/Corbis