Spanish Civil War Analysis

Second, France and its response to the Spanish Civil War had a noninterventionist policy by the French government. To start, Jose M. Sanchez’s main argument in the international Catholic response to the war was that, “No event of political or social significance since the beginning of the nineteenth century engendered such heated religious debate among Christians worldwide as did the Spanish Civil War.” The war signified a Catholic united condemnation for or against the war but the politics involved with the war led to an ideological push to support one side over the other. As Sanchez argued, “In France, a majority Catholic nation with a strong tradition of anticlericalism and a powerful intellectual community, there was a loud and prestigious

He argued, “The war mattered for the French more than any other European state. Spain filled the front pages of the Parisian and regional press for days at a time. The largest national contingent to the International Brigades- about 10,000 (26%) came from France. It would be hard to exaggerate Spain’s impact on France’s grand strategy…” “…A Franco victory had nightmarish implications for French security - a stranglehold by a Fascist triple alliance of Germany, Italy and Spain.” France feared that they would be in between Fascist dictatorships and because of that fear the French had a significant number of volunteers that fought in Spain. Throughout the historiography of French involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the question asked is why did France not intervene? Initially, the French government seemed sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans. Jackson argues,

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the Popular Front’s springtime of innocence had come to an end. Blum’s instinctive desire was to send aid to the beleaguered Spanish Republic where a Popular Front government had been elected in February. After three weeks he succumbed to diplomatic and political pressures and applied a policy of nonintervention. This decision was bitterly attacked by the Communists; the first breaches appeared in the

Raguer argued, “…non-intervention appeared to be a democratic principle. In the counter-revolutionary context of the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance, intervention was an expression of solidarity between the great absolute monarchs…who was threatened by revolution. Pius IX, in the Syllabus, thus condemned the doctrine of non-intervention.” For the Spanish and French Catholics called for a humanitarian intervention to the Spanish Civil War. For example, the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu stated that nonintervention “…is the equivalent of denying the solidarity of the whole of the human brotherhood.” From this reaction, the French Catholics denounced the policy of nonintervention by the Popular Front government. For them, it was a humanitarian crisis that superseded the political