After the Wall Street crash of 1929, Spain was hit hard by an agricultural crisis which directly affected the 70% of the population who lived on the land, mainly on large estates. The social and political convulsions that epitomised Spain in the first half of the 1930s were shaped by the country’s earlier history, in particular a decadent and parasitic aristocracy, a powerful Roman Catholic church, and a backward economy. Today, when democratic rights are under attack and authoritarian rule once again threatens, it is important to revisit the experiences made in the cauldron of the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republic was on the front line of the fight against European fascism and its defeat made another international war inevitable. But this is not a Spanish question alone.
What really happened to their parents and grandparents has become a burning issue, especially as mass graves of Civil War victims are being exhumed and identified for the first time. His proposal for a Law for the Recovery of the Historical Memory has aroused fierce controversy. In July this year, on the 70th anniversary of the military rebellion which sparked off the civil war, Spain’s Socialist Party prime minister, José Luis Zapatero broke the 30-year-silence over the history of the civil war, a compromise on which Spain’s constitutional monarchy is based. A new generation is awakening from the long slumber of el pacto de olvido - “the pact of forgetting” which was imposed following the death of Franco in 1975. And he succeeds especially well in unravelling the complex political and regional forces that played such an important part in the origins and history of the war.Antony Beevor’s account of the Spanish Civil War was No.1 on the country’s best-seller list for 23 weeks, even though it ran to 900 pages. Antony Beevor's account narrates the origins of the Civil War and its violent and dramatic course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939. The civil war that tore Spain apart between 19 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military testing ground before WWII for the Russians, Italians and Germans, whose Condor Legion so notoriously destroyed Guernica. The bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL on the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of newly discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives.
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