Abstract
The attempted military coup of 17–18 July 1936 in Spain provoked the very thing it had ostensibly been intended to forestall: revolution. While the Republican government stood by paralysed and helpless, in many towns and cities the working class rose up against the army and after fierce fighting put the insurgency down. What had been envisaged as a straightforward seizure of power, almost as a technical exercise, ended with the army defeated in two-thirds of Spain’s national territory and the country plunged into revolution and civil war. A popular uprising had dealt the generals an unprecedented blow that makes the failure of the July coup one of the most heartening events in modern working-class history. Only the assistance forthcoming from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany prevented Franco’s cause from speedily collapsing in total disarray. Meanwhile, in many Republican areas a social revolution had been unleashed.1
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Notes
For a good account of developments in Spain, see Pierre Broue and Emile Jemime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain (London: 1972);
Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London: 1996);
George Esenwein and Adrian Shubert, Spain at War (London: 1995).
Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: 1997).
For Largo Caballero and the socialist left, see Andy Durgan, ‘Largo Caballero and Spanish Socialism’, International Socialism 18 (Winter 1983).
Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (London: 1986), pp. 70–1.
Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (New York: 1973), p. 322.
For the POUM, see, in particular, Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism (New Brunswick: 1988).
Andy Durgan, ‘The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM’, in Al Richardson (ed.) The Spanish Civil War: the View from the Left (London: 1992)
Robert Alexander, International Trotskyism (Durham, New Jersey: 1992).
Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: the Heroic Years (New York: 1977);
Juan Gomez Casas, Anarchist Organisation (Montreal: 1986);
José Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (Toronto: 1977).
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: 1985), pp. 7–8.
Daphne Patai, The Orwell Mystique (Amherst: 1984), pp. 15, 158.
For the International Brigades, see, in particular, Bill Alexander, British Volunteers For Liberty: Spain 1936–1939 (London: 1982)
R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army (Lexington: 1982)
Victor Alba, Catalonia (New York: 1975), p. 140.
Robert Alexander, The Right Opposition (Westport, Connecticut: 1981), p. 223.
Michael Shelden, Onvell: the Authorised Biography (London: 1991), p. 295.
Richard Rees, A Theory of My Time (London: 1956), p. 96
Richard Rees, For Love or Money (London: 1960), p. 153.
John McGovern, Terror In Spain (London: 1937), pp. 9–10, 13–14.
Frank Jellinek, The Civil War in Spain (London: 1938), pp. 339, 555.
J.R. Campbell, Soviet Policy and Its Critics (London: 1939), pp. 315, 370.
Reuben Osborn, The Psychology of Reaction (London: 1938), p. 279.
Peter Davison, George Orwell: a Literary Life (London: 1996), p. 15.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (London: 1939)
Malcolm Smith, ‘George Orwell, War and Politics in the 1930s’, Literature and History 6, 2 (Autumn 1980).
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© 1999 John Newsinger
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Newsinger, J. (1999). Spilling the Spanish Beans. In: Orwell’s Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983607_3
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