Talk:Spanish Civil War

for reference as to RfC

The below is published for easy reference to facilitate a would-be discussion resulting from RfC

Interpretations; civil war in perspective

There have been numerous attempts to define the Spanish Civil War in terms of its key mechanism, prevailing logic and dominant conflict line; many of these interpretations strove also to identify the conflict in terms of major threads of continental or even global history. These attempts might not differ much from propaganda, advanced by both warring parties or their sympathizers; they might form part of broad public discourse, either in Spain or abroad; they might also belong to professional academic historiographic debate. Major theories are listed in the below table.

Spanish Civil War as:	Related concepts or variants	Proponents (examples)	Related quotation
Clash of European nationalisms	Basque-Spanish war, Catalan struggle for independence, climax of imperialist nationalisms	Basque propaganda, Julen Madariaga, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas	"[gudaris] de la guerra 36–37, víctimas de la última y más incivilizada agresión extranjera perpetrada contra Euskal Herria", "la guerra ha sido y es un factor intrínsicamente unido, y a menudo deseñado, en el desarollo histórico de las identidades nacionales y los nacionalismos europeos"
Clash of totalitarian systems	Violent conflict of radicalised and polarised masses, communism vs fascism/Nazism, totalitarian regimes fighting by proxies	Antony Beevor, George Orwell	"I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War"
Democracy vs dictatorship	Liberty vs fascist oppression, freedom vs communist tyranny, peoples against tyrants	Komintern propaganda, Francoist propaganda	[Republican] "defeat by the forces of International Fascism would be a major disaster for Europe", "the fight in Spain is between the forces of freedom, democracy, justice, and the forces of reaction, tyranny, obscurantism, admits no doubt", "el pueblo con su propio esfuerzo en la lucha contra la tiranía comunista"
Episode of European civil war	Melting pot of universal battles, Spaniards vs Spaniards, Irish vs Irish, Italians vs Italians, Russians vs Russians, "European cockpit"	Julian Casanova	"[P]rologue to the European civil war of a few years later", "it evolved into an episode of a European civil war that ended in 1945", "melting pot of universal battles between bosses and workers, Church and State, obscurantism and modernism"
Episode of long internal Spanish conflict	Fourth Carlist War, modernity vs traditionalism, typically Spanish fanatic sectarian violence	Mark Lawrence, Carlist propaganda, Spanish Black Legend propagandists	"[C]ivil war dominates modern Spain more than any other Western European country", "the rebellion that began in 1936 was the climax to a long and tortuous period of political experiment"
Epilogue to World War I	Breakdown of old-style society, rapid mobilisation of the masses, convulsive post-monarchic period	Stanley G. Payne	Resembled more "a post-World War I crisis than a crisis of the era of World War II", "the Spanish crisis of the spring and summer of 1936 was in key respects the Spanish version of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary crises that affected various central and eastern European countries between 1917 and 1923"
Left vs right	Local and exceptionally violent outbreak of long-standing universal political conflict, whites vs reds	Harold Nicolson, Sandra Halperin	"A military struggle between left- and right-wing elements in Spain", "traditional explanation of the Civil War in terms of the left vs right political confrontation", "polarization between left and right in Western Europe escalated into armed conflict with the outbreak of the civil war in Spain", "Spanish version of the left-right divide"
Paradigm of a civil war	Benchmark for civil war categorizations, laboratory of civil war, the most typical case of civil war, point of reference	Laia Balcells	"The Spanish, along with the American Civil War, is a paradigmatic case of conventional civil war"
Prologue to Cold War	Confronting and containing communism, free world vs Soviet imperialism, civilized West vs barbaric East	Luis de Galinsoga, Francoist propaganda	Franco as "Centinela de Occidente"
Prologue to World War II	Fight against fascism, democratic Europe against the Axis, pre-configuration of WWII alliances	Patricia van der Esch, many others	"prelude to war", "I think in many ways it was the first battle of World War II", "in this context, the Spanish civil war can be regarded as the prologue and preface to the Second World War", "microcosmic prologue to the battle between fascism and democracy that was the Second World War"
Revolution vs counter-revolution	Class struggle, proletariat vs bourgeoisie, Spanish peoples in national-revolutionary struggle	Eric Hobsbawm, Stanley G. Payne, later (not wartime) Soviet propaganda	"[O]nly occasionally has the war been analyzed in terms of its most accurate definition, as a revolutionary/counterrevolutionary struggle", "национально-революционная война испанского народа"
Religious war	Crusade, Catholicism vs barbaric atheism, war of cultures, civic society vs Catholic fanaticism	Francoist propaganda (e.g. Juan Tusquets), José Sánchez, Mary Vincent	"To many, religion became the most divisive issue of the war, the single problem that distinguished one fraction from another", "consideraté soldado de una cruzada que pone Dios como fin y en El confía el triunfo"
Spanish war of independence	Spaniards vs foreign Judeo-Bolshevik aggression, Spaniards vs foreign fascist invasion, guerra de liberación, Spain vs anti-Spain	Communist propaganda, Francoist propaganda	"nuestra guerra de independencia nacional contra el invasor y el fascismo tiene muchos puntos semejantes con la lucha heroica y victoriosa del pueblo soviético", "Está en litigio la existencia misma de España como entidad y como unidad", "guerra de liberación que se vivía en España"

Notes

How reliable is the biography of Franco by Payne and Palacios?

It was already asked in January 2024 (not by me), and the response was that a possible disagreement with the book may come only from one's political stance. However, the reviews written by historians that Google showed up to me when I googled this book are negative of it as a historical work; the ones in English which I added to Payne's article along with other criticisms of him don't cover the flaws of the book in much detail, however, there is also a detailed review of this book in Spanish by Ángel Viñas, which claims that even the methodology of this biography is poor, and as I've got it, the issue of the journal this review was published in is dedicated to criticizing this biography in detail. That's why I feel the need to put this question again

(I'm asking only about only this one book, not the other works by Payne) Opostylov (talk) 03:56, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm still of the opinion that we shouldn't be using this book. Not only is it poorly-reviewed as a methodologically flawed hagiography, but as it's a biography of Franco rather than a broad history of the civil war, it could lead to undue weight towards certain perspectives. Payne has plenty of works about the civil war for us to cite, so I'd say we should use those rather than this one. --Grnrchst (talk) 10:50, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

And it's rather a secondary source in the article. RN I'm thinking of (re)doing or expanding the "Background" section, so I'll just write new stuff over the text based on P&P instead of bothering to add neww stuff while keeping P&P and not breaking coherence of the text

If there won't be any objections, one can just remove P&P from the article, like it was done with the book by C. J. H. Hayes Opostylov (talk) 09:29, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Proposed cleanup and restructuring

I am considering a substantial cleanup of this article focused on:

• improving structure and chronology
• standardizing citation style
• trimming or summarizing overlong sections in line with summary style
• strengthening the use of high-quality secondary sources
• rewriting unclear prose for neutrality and readability

Because this is a major and heavily used article, I do not plan to replace the live text all at once. Instead, I plan to draft proposed changes in my sandbox and then bring section-by-section revisions here for discussion and review.

Comments on scope, article structure, sourcing priorities, and preferred sequencing would be very welcome. Escuadro (talk) 17:13, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

I’ve started a sandbox draft at User:Escuadro/Spanish Civil War draft and added a preliminary source base and opening draft material. Comments on structure and sourcing priorities would be welcome. Escuadro (talk) 17:38, 6 March 2026 (UTC)