Manuel Azaña

Manuel Azaña (1932)

Manuel Azaña y Díaz (born January 10, 1880 in Alcalá de Henares , † November 3, 1940 in Montauban , France ) was the second and last President of the Second Spanish Republic from May 1936 to April 1939 . Before that, from April to June 1931 he held the post of Minister of War in the provisional government after the proclamation of the republic. From June 1931 to September 1933 and from February to May 1936 he was Prime Minister of the government .

Life

Presidential standard by Manuel Azaña

Azañas grave in Montauban

Azaña, who came from a rich family, was an orphan at an early age . In the course of his strictly Augustinian upbringing at the college in the Escorial , he later lost evidence of his Christian faith. He turned to jurisprudence, graduating from the University of Zaragoza in 1897 , becoming a lawyer and graduating from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1900 . As a civil servant he reached a higher post in the central registry office in 1909.

The single Azaña was considered a bourgeois intellectual. In his spare time he wrote, translated Stendhal and Bertrand Russell , and published in newspapers such as El Imparcial and El Sol . To this end - as the historian Hugh Thomas explains - because of his unfavorable appearance, shyness may have brought him to this, which led him to incessant self-reflection, but also created intellectual reserves that ultimately brought him to the head of the state. In another country Azaña would probably have become a writer; in Spain, one of the most politically unstable countries in Europe, he was driven to politics.

After two unsuccessful candidacies for the post of governor of the province of Toledo , he founded the Acción Republicana party in 1926 with José Giral , which was banned by dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera . Later he took part in the Pact of San Sebastián , which in April 1931 after the abdication of Alfonso XIII. was to become the nucleus of the later Second Republic.

Azaña was appointed Minister of War in the Provisional Government. In October 1931, he took the place of Prime Minister, where he implemented reforms in his center-left coalition. These included the army reform, which on the one hand made the bloated army smaller and required the officers to swear allegiance to the republic; a land reform that should improve the situation of over-indebted small tenants in Andalusia ; a school reform that abolished religious schools in favor of state schools and the ban on all religious orders that required their members to take more than two vows; this amounted to the prohibition of the Society of Jesus , the only order to which this applied.

The reforms brought Azaña into conflict with traditionally influential circles in Spain, above all the Catholic Church and the Spanish army, who conspired against him and the Second Republic. Azaña, however, did little to calm the minds; rather, he polarized the mood further with rash remarks - such as the one that Spain had stopped being Catholic or that the abolition of religious schools was an act of political hygiene. His refusal to use the Guardia Civil against the arsonists during the church fires in 1931 goes in the same direction.

After the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition of the Partido Republicano Radical under Alejandro Lerroux and the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) under José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones , he was replaced as Prime Minister in 1933, whereupon he temporarily withdrew from politics, not without first Calling on presidents to annul the elections. In 1934, however, he founded the Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left, IR), which arose from the merger of his Acción Republicana with the radical socialist party Marcelino Domingos and the Organización Republicana Gallega Autónoma (ORGA) under Santiago Casares Quiroga. When the Asturian miners rose in the same year , he was accused of instigating the uprising and was temporarily detained on a destroyer in the port of Barcelona.

When new elections were called at the end of 1935, the IR participated in the Frente Popular , a broad left alliance ( Popular Front ). After this had won the elections on February 16, 1936, Azaña was charged with forming a government. The government was ultimately formed from the ranks of the two republican Popular Front parties, IR and UR , and was able to rely on the tolerance of the other Popular Front parties. On May 10, 1936, Azaña was instead elected President of the Republic, an office he held throughout the Spanish Civil War that broke out shortly afterwards . After the fall of Catalonia in February 1939, Azaña fled to France and later officially resigned from his office as president. Azaña died on November 3, 1940 in exile in Montauban.

Web links

• Literature by and about Manuel Azaña in the catalog of the German National Library
• L'Association Présence de Manuel Azaña (French / Spanish)
• Arkheia, revue d'histoire: Azana 1 ; Booklet 19 hors série (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hugh Thomas: The Spanish Civil War. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1961, p. 38 f.

predecessor	Office	successor
Dámaso Berenguer Fusté	Minister of War of Spain April 14, 1931-12. September 1933	Juan José Rocha García
Niceto Alcalá Zamora	Prime Minister of Spain December 16, 1931-12. September 1933	Alejandro Lerroux
Manuel Portela Valladares	Prime Minister of Spain February 19, 1936-10. March 1936	Augusto Barcia Trelles
Niceto Alcalá Zamora	President of Spain May 11, 1936–3. March 1939	Francisco Franco ( Spanish Civil War )