The last president of the Republic who embodied the republican cause but crossed into France and resigned when Catalonia fell
'Peace, pity, and pardon.' On 18 July 1938, the second anniversary of the rising, Azaña spoke for seventy-four minutes from Barcelona's city hall, pleading for an end to the bloodshed and reconciliation. Neither Franco's camp nor the hardliners in his own Republic would listen.
The last President of the Second Spanish Republic and the symbolic centre of the Republican cause throughout the Civil War. As war minister and prime minister from 1931 he drove military reform, anti-clerical legislation and land redistribution; in 1934 he built the Popular Front and won the 1936 election, becoming president, but once the war began real power passed to his prime ministers. In July 1938 he appealed for 'Peace, Pity, Pardon' from the Barcelona city hall, but Franco would accept only unconditional surrender, and after Catalonia fell in February 1939 Azaña walked the Pyrenees into France and resigned. Condemned as desertion even inside republican ranks, his act stripped the remaining Republic of legitimacy, and he died in occupied France a year later.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1913–1920Secretary of the Ateneo de Madrid
- 1926Founded Acción Republicana
- 1931.04–10Minister of War
- 1931.10–1933.09Prime Minister and Minister of War
- 1936.02–05Prime Minister
- 1936.05–1939.02President of the Republic
Related historical events
The 1934 arrest and the making of the Popular Front
When the general left-wing rebellion launched by the Socialists and Communists on 5 October 1934 briefly succeeded in Asturias and Barcelona before being crushed within two weeks, the Lerroux-CEDA government moved to implicate and remove Azaña, who was in Barcelona that day. Military authorities detained him on 8 October and held him aboard naval vessels, including the Ciudad de Cádiz and the destroyers Alcalá Galiano and Sánchez Barcáiztegui, where he was questioned repeatedly about the Barcelona rising, an arms shipment and alleged contacts with Portuguese republicans. No evidence sustaining the charges emerged, and on 28 December the Supreme Court dismissed the proceedings and released him. The imprisonment in fact gave him a political asset: the standing of a symbol of republican defence. His detention produced an outpouring of support and, in equal measure, attacks from the monarchist and Catholic right, hardening a division between 'azañistas' and his detractors that prefigured the coming civil conflict.\n\nAfter his release Azaña made the rallying of the republican left the centre of his politics. From a rally at the Mestalla ground in Valencia in May 1935 he continued a series of mass meetings reaffirming the validity of the Republic and the Constitution; his personal draw was so great that the Comillas ground rally near Madrid was reported to have gathered some half a million people. Initially the Socialist Largo Caballero refused any coalition with the republicans, but as a government crisis threatened to bring the CEDA to power he reversed his position in November 1935 and accepted an electoral-only alliance, joined by the Radical Socialists and the Communists, and the left coalition took the name Popular Front. In the election of 16 February 1936 the Front won by a narrow margin in votes but overwhelmingly in seats, and Azaña returned as prime minister on 19 February. He immediately amnestied prisoners from the 1934 rebellion, lifted the suspension of the Catalan statute of autonomy, and had the leadership of the Falange imprisoned. Yet with killings and reprisals mounting he appealed for calm in the Cortes on 3 April, and he himself failed to hold the Socialists and Communists to a durable understanding. In these years his course narrowed between street radicalisation and parliamentary compromise, and after he moved to the presidency the political space for holding the Republic together contracted further.