Politically-motivated murders on the right and left signaled to conservatives a need to restore “order” in Spain, and a kind of order that could only be achieved through violence. The war started in July 1936, in the stultifying heat of Spanish Morocco and in the hills of Navarre, northern Spain.

They saw in left wing acts of violence, and a government that seemed to permit them without threat of punishment, a movement that needed to be squashed. They saw in the Front’s dismissiveness of the Catholic Church a threat to the heart of Spain they saw in the Front’s openness to communist sects the specter of the Soviet Union they saw in the Front's granting of regional autonomy a danger to the very existence of Spain as a nation-state. Nevertheless, the intended or achieved reforms of these leftist and left-leaning parties - which coalesced in the 1936 elections as the Popular Front - deeply troubled Spain’s pro-Church, pro-monarchy, pro-military conservatives. While these coalitions successfully convened to call for social and economic reform, increased regional autonomy, religious freedom and the separation of church and state, among other things, the multiplicity of actors - socialists, communists, and anarchists, just to name a few - and competing interests made it such that by 1933 the Second Republic did not achieve much of what it promised in its 1931 Constitution. The Spanish Civil War officially began in July 1936, when the 43-year-old Franco led a military coup against the leadership of the Second Spanish Republic, proclaimed in 1931 by a coalition of antimonarchist parties. The approximately 500,000 men and women who abandoned their homes that winter left a country where the pursuit and exercise of power saw the deaths of around 500,000 people radical plans for economic redistribution of wealth sullied, and the installation of Europe’s longest-lasting dictatorship, spearheaded by General Francisco Franco. Many of those who composed its short-lived reality - Republican men and women, and elected officials of the democratically-elected Republican government - headed for the Pyrenees mountains and the French border, blanketed in cold and perhaps the sobering knowledge that blunt force, not competing ideas or democratic procedures, wields the most power to transform a given locality and govern its future. By January of 1939, the dream of a true Spanish Republic had shattered.

Map of spanish civil war