From pronunciamiento to Civil War
These preliminary observations about pronunciamientos will help us to demystify the origins of the Spanish Civil War. Franco revealed a mentality characteristic of a military officer who has just 'pronounced' when, a week after the uprising and possessing a curious idea of what civilized countries are, protested, without embarrassment, to a journalist that it was the Republic that, by refusing to surrender, was obliging him to wage war:
In all civilized countries, when the army has risen against a government as overweening and dictatorial as this present one, and by so doing proves that right is on our side, the rulers have surrendered for reasons of patriotism and in order to save the country from the horrors of war.8
The army in Morocco rose almost en bloc on 17 July and rapidly took over the territory, but the military who rose in Spain itself on 18 and 19 July were defeated in the principal capitals and nearly all the regions. The pronunciamiento as such had failed. The rebels could count only on two solid nuclei: Morocco, which had the Legion, the Regulares (the Moorish regiments) and some units of the Spanish army, and Navarra, where Mola could depend on the wide popular support that still continued in the tradition of the Carlist wars of the previous century. But these two nuclei could scarcely cherish serious hopes of imposing themselves on the whole country. It was foreign intervention that converted the failed pronunciamiento into a Civil War a thousand-days-long, which, for reasons we shall see in a moment, soon took on the character of a war of religion - according to Guy Hermet, the last war of religion.
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