The Spanish Popular Front, 1934-7
1970; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/002200947000500302
ISSN1461-7250
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Culture and Identity
ResumoThe Frente Popular which won the Spanish parliamentary elections of February I936 was a loose coalition of parties ranging in character from the liberal Republicans through the Socialist party to the communists (both Stalinist and anti-Stalinist) on the far left. From an international standpoint, the term 'Popular Front' was created and publicized by the Moscow convention of the world communist parties (the Third International) in the summer of I935. The policy aimed at grouping all democratic and left forces, both bourgeois and Marxist, in an alliance to stop the spread of fascism; and the German disaster of I933, in which Hitler had triumphed easily over a disunited left, was in the minds of all those who embraced the idea of the Popular Front in western Europe. But if the phrase, and the formal policy, date properly from the year 1935, the actual development of the component alliances began, in Spain, early in the year 1934; and an understanding of the forces at work requires a brief glance at liberal and working-class politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Most middle-class liberals had hoped for the progressive evolution of the parliamentary monarchy. Until 1923 the greater freedom won by the press, increasing representation of left liberals and socialists in the Cortes, heavier pressure for school building and for a measure of land reform, and a gradually rising standard of living, had given substance to those hopes. But the establishment in 1923 of the quasi-fascist dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera profoundly disillusioned the liberals, especially as the General had come to power with the direct connivance of the King. Between I923 and 1931 a high proportion of professional men, and most notably of university intellectuals, became republicans; not out of great enthusiasm for the republican form of government, but out of disgust with the monarchy and outrage
Referência(s)