The war fought in Spain from 1936 to 1939 between the elected Republican government and a Nationalist military rebellion — drawing in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on one side and the Soviet Union and international volunteers on the other, ending in Franco's dictatorship and functioning as the defining ideological conflict of the 1930s for a generation of European and American writers, intellectuals, and political actors.
The Spanish Civil War was fought by Spaniards about Spain — a coup against an elected government, a civil war with roots in Spanish land reform, anarchism, and regional nationalism. It was also treated, from almost the moment it began, as a proxy battle for the future of Europe. Fascism or communism, democracy or authoritarianism, the Popular Front or the international right — the war became a screen onto which every political tendency of the 1930s projected its deepest fears and hopes. The gap between what the war was and what it was made to mean is where understanding it begins.