Spain’s Social Revolution Against Fascism

The Spanish Civil War is often portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism. But such an approach clashes with the sociopolitical reality of Spain in the 1930s. Social, economic, and political polarization in Spain in the years leading up to the civil war, along with the resulting failure of a bourgeois-democratic republic (1931–36), led to the outbreak of both the war and the revolution. The Popular Front’s electoral triumph in February 1936, rather than ushering in a new era of…