Even in areas where there was no resistance to the coup, the new military authorities presided over an extermination, mainly perpetrated by civilian death squads and vigilantes, of those sectors associated with Republican change. Preston's book tells the harrowing story of this "cleansing" war of terror as it unfolded across the entirety of Spain's territory. The military rebels now unleashed the mass slaughter of civilians. This gifted the rebels the brutal force which effectively rescued the failing coup. But resistance to the rebels in much of urban Spain created such logistical challenges that the coup would likely have failed, had it not been for the provision by Hitler and Mussolini of the aircraft that transported Franco's colonial Army of Africa to mainland Spain. Their aim was to reverse both the Republic's redistributive policies of land and social reform, and the cultural shift implied in its extension of literacy, co-education and women's rights. The conspirators' determination to deploy terror from the start was made clear in the prior orders of the coup's director, General Mola, to "eliminate without scruples or hesitation all who do not think as we do". He builds on a lifetime's research into the destruction of democracy in 1930s Spain to show how a military-led coalition against political and social reform triumphed, against the divided and inexperienced centre-left government of the Second Republic. It is this military responsibility, which Garzó* sought unsuccessfully to confront, that lies at the heart of Preston's study. Franco's dictatorship has never been delegitimised since his death in 1975, notwithstanding the symbolic measures of recent years. Recognising that the initial massive violence was generated by the military rebels themselves remains the biggest taboo of all in democratic Spain's public sphere. He acknowledges his debt to those historians inside Spain who over the past three decades, despite huge social and political obstacles, have opened up the facts of this violence through painstaking research in local archives.
Preston is Britain's foremost historian of modern Spain. Although Garzó* was acquitted this week, the fact both that he was put on trial at all and that judicial investigation into the violence is now blocked leaves unresolved the vehement memory polemics of Spain's civil society, and so renders Paul Preston's monumental, rigorous and unflinching study important and opportune in ways that reach far beyond the purely academic. When a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, internationally renowned for his championing of human rights, opened an investigation into the conflict's core of extreme extrajudicial violence (in which more than 200,000 people were killed), he was charged with abuse of power. In Spain today, the civil war triggered three quarters of a century ago is still "the past that has not passed away".
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