Spanish Civil War

The Galician nationalist movement and efforts to revive the Galician language benefitted from the relative political stability of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939). However, the Spanish Civil War changed all that. Progress towards Galician autonomy and improving the status of the Galician language was halted and then completely reversed. The rise of Franco followed a historical pattern of Spanish generals announcing their discontent with the then-current Republican regime, and then execute a planned coup [Phillips, W.D. & Phillips, C.R., 2010: 250-253; Byers, 2016: 26-27, 32-33]. However, a week after the coup, the generals were unable to exert control over the whole of Spain, and the country had fractured. The popular resistance and divisions within the army transformed a military coup into a years-long war between the Republican government in Madrid and Franco’s Nationalist coalition [Seidman, 2015: 125; Byers, 2016: 33-34]. As most of Galicia was controlled by the Nationalist forces from the outset, the region suffered greatly under Falangist oppression. By 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended, with the Nationalists emerging victorious. Subsequently, the government, under Franco’s control, suppressed regional languages such as Galician, in favor of Castilian, and crushed autonomy movements throughout the country. Thus, the fall of the Second Spanish Republic stalled for some 35 years, the revival of Galician that had begun in the Rexurdimento.