The Roots of the July 1936 Coup: The Rebirth of Military Interventionism in the Spanish Infantry Academy, 1893–19271

Abstract

The coup attempt of July 1936 that began the Spanish Civil War differed from its predecessors in that the rebel officers sought to remake both the Spanish state and society. The roots of this new brand of military interventionism have been traced to Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco, but this article argues that they extended further back to the rebel officers’ training at Spain’s Infantry Academy, where, in the wake of defeat in the Spanish-American War, Regenerationist reformers within the academy recast the moral training that cadets received so that they felt it was the army’s duty to lead a transformation of Spanish society to return it to the imagined glories of Spain’s past.1