What happened in the Spanish Civil War?
The king was deposed by a left-wing government in a bloodless revolution. This inaugurated the “second republic”, dominated by socialists and trade-union blocs. Various groups, broadly socialist and anarchist (at that time they were not in open rivalry, since they shared a common enemy in the established order) imposed reforms throughout Spain, wherever they were locally strong enough. These groups were strongly anticlerical, and here and there churches were burned and looted and priests murdered or driven into hiding. Elsewhere, the new situation was calmer. In 1936 a group of army officers did what these people have always done in Spain when things seem to be going wrong: issued a “pronunciamiento” (proclamation) that they were taking over to restore orderly life. At first they seemed a bunch of incompetent comics. One of them crashed the light aircraft in which he was going to Madrid, because he overloaded it with heavy cases with his dress uniforms: he couldn’t take over power with
