In Europe

weekend.
    Spain was unlucky enough to start a civil war at the same moment that the tension between left and right had come to boiling point everywhere else in Europe. All parties saw Spain as a touchstone for good and evil, as an experimental plot for new tactics and weapons systems, as a dress rehearsal for what was about to happen.
    Yet still, the civil war remained a Spanish affair above all. It was an unprecedentedly cruel and apocalyptic war, a struggle seen by both sides as a battle between good and evil. The anarchists fought with almost religious abandon for their New Jerusalem, the communists, socialists andliberals fought tooth and nail for the achievements of the Enlightenment, Francisco Franco's rebels felt like crusaders defending the sacred values of old Spain. Never before had ‘the enemy’ been demonised as he was in the Spanish Civil War.
    General Franco's coup, which triggered the conflict on 17 July, 1936, had been on its way for a long time. During the chaotic 1920s the army had already seized power once, in September 1923, when it installed General Miguel Primo de Rivera as dictator, to rule alongside the king. ‘My Mussolini’ was how King Alfons XIII once introduced him to a foreign guest, an accurate representation of the new situation.
    The only thing was, Primo de Rivera was not a Fascist, and definitely not a Mussolini. He was an aristocrat from a prominent family, a father figure who had made a cautious start modernising the country. He dealt with anarchists and liberals with an iron fist, but was not, like Hitler and Mussolini, out to destroy them physically. His personality was both sympathetic and bizarre: a widower, he sometimes withdrew into his work for weeks on end, then lost himself for days in bouts of drinking and dancing as he drifted from one Madrid café to the next.
    Primo de Rivera never succeeded in gathering around himself a major popular movement. He governed in the same way he was accustomed to live, as an old-fashioned landowner, an enlightened despot who had nothing but contempt for the law and the subtleties of the establishment. Once he had accumulated enough enemies, his fall came of its own accord: in an attempt to defend an Andalusian courtesan known as ‘La Caoba’ (literally, ‘the Mahogany Girl’), he ordered the judge to dismiss the case against her – a narcotics charge. When the judge kicked up a fuss, Primo de Rivera had him transferred, then he sacked the supreme justice of the Spanish court for supporting the judge, and finally had two journalists who were pursuing the story sent into exile on the Canary Islands. On 28 January, 1930, the king ordered his dismissal. His final communiqué read: ‘And now, now a bit of peace of quiet after 2,326 days of continuous malaise, responsibility and effort.’ He left Spain. Less than seven weeks later he died, alone, at the Hotel Pont-Royal in Paris.
    King Alfons decided to test the mood of his country. He saw the municipal elections of Sunday, 12 April, 1931 as a litmus test for his own popularity.The results were ambiguous. All over the countryside his supporters maintained their majority, but in the cities the republicans won resoundingly. Rumour also had it that many villagers had been pressured by their landlords into voting for the royalists.
    The next day, in a number of provincial capitals, the republic was proclaimed. The day after that the streets of Madrid filled with demonstrators. In the end, Alfons bowed to their demand that he ‘leave the city before sunset’. It was the only way, he said, to prevent a civil war: ‘Last Sunday's elections showed that I am no longer loved by my people.’
    Power, from that moment on, lay for the first time in the hands of the reformers, in the hands of a ‘young and eager Spain’. All over the country, construction began on new schools, hospitals, playgrounds, residential districts and holiday centres. But Spain soon became unmanageable. The Archbishop of Toledo refused to recognise the new republic – and was promptly forced into exile. New laws on education and divorce were not enforced. Rather than enact a single agricultural reform, the landowners preferred to chase the small farmers from their land. A general strike, and a miners’ strike in Asturias, were violently crushed.
    Five years later, during the parliamentary elections of February 1936, the right tried to regain power by legal means. The right-wing parties, monarchists and Carlists