With extensive bombings, especially of Barcelona, Franco’s Nationalists slowly broke the Republicans’ fighting spirit. Barcelona fell in January 1939, and Madrid did so in March 1939. The war was over
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Explanation:
The Spanish Civil War was a conflict in which the Second Spanish Republic and leftist groups fought a revolt of right-wing fascists and nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, who succeeded in overthrowing the republican government and establishing a dictatorship.
Republicans were made up of a range of left-wing groups ranging from centrists who supported electoral democracy to proponents of communist or anarchist revolutionary change; their strength was primarily urban (although landless peasants were among them) and secular, and they were particularly strong in Catalonia and the relatively conservative Basque Country - two regions to which the republican government gave great autonomy. The fascist rebels who eventually won the war had primarily the support of large and wealthy landowners and the church, who supported the centralization of power.
Although the war lasted only three years, the political situation was already tense and full of violence in the previous few years. The number of victims is disputed; estimates most often speak of a figure between 500,000 and 1,000,000 dead. Many of these victims, however, were not the result of hostilities, but the result of brutal mass executions by both sides. The war began with military uprisings throughout Spain and its colonies, which were followed by republican reprisals against those considered allies of the rebels: the church. Massacres were committed against the Catholic clergy, churches and monasteries were burned. At the dawn of the war, the Franco regime initiated a thorough cleansing of Spanish society from everything that had anything to do with left-wing parties and everything connected with the Second Republic in general, including trade unions and political parties. Archives were confiscated, houses were searched, and undesirable individuals were often imprisoned, exiled, or killed.
The political consequences of the war resonated outside the borders of Spain and fueled passions in international intellectual and political circles. Republican sympathizers declared this war a struggle between "tyranny and democracy", or "fascism and freedom", and many young idealists joined international brigades in the 1930s, believing that saving the Spanish Republic was the idealistic goal of that era. Franco's supporters, however, saw the war as a battle between the "red hordes" (communism and anarchism) and "Christian civilization." But these two opposing views were inevitably oversimplifications: both sides had different, and often conflicting, ideologies within their ranks.
