William Collins
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First published in Great Britain by Harper Perennial in 2006
This book is a revised and updated version of A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, first published by Fontana Press in 1996, revised and updated from The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1986
First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2016
Copyright © Paul Preston 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016
Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Keystone/Getty Images
Map © Hardlines
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Source ISBN: 9780007232079
Ebook Edition © July 2012 ISBN: 9780007370061
Version: 2017-05-04
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Marshall and to the other men and women of the International Brigades who fought and died fighting fascism in Spain.
Contents
Introduction: The Civil War Eighty Years On
1 A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931
2 The Leftist Challenge, 1931–1933
3 Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934–1936
4 ‘The Map of Spain Bleeds’: From Coup d’État to Civil War
5 ‘Behind the Gentleman’s Agreement’: The Great Powers Betray Spain
6 ‘Madrid is the Heart’: The Central Epic
7 Politics behind the Lines: Reaction and Terror in the City of God
8 Politics behind the Lines: Revolution and Terror in the City of the Devil
I wrote the first version of this book thirty years ago. My intention then was to provide the new reader with a manageable guide to the bibliographical labyrinth constituted by the fact that the Spanish Civil War has continued to be fought on paper. Even then there had been several thousand books on the Spanish Civil War and many of them were extremely long. Because the flow did not stop, I rewrote the book in 1996 in order to take account of what had been published in the ten years following its first appearance. At that point, I could not have imagined how much more was still to come. Accordingly, in 2006 I wrote a much expanded version in an attempt to come to terms with the very considerable body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, English and other European languages since 1996. It also drew on my own ongoing research on Franco, the Francoist repression and Mussolini’s role in the Spanish Civil War. Over the following years, the flood has not abated, and in this new edition I take account of the most important advances in knowledge about the war as well as drawing on my recent research on the role of Franco, on the murders of civilians behind the lines on both sides, on anti-clerical persecution, on the bombing of Guernica, and on way in which the war ended.
Inevitably, the 2006 edition of