It will be argued that there was really no danger in Spain of a Soviet-style revolution. But the once staid secretary general of the socialist trade union Large Caballero promised such a thing in early 1936 and approved the merger of his own socialist youth movement with the Communists. How were people to know that he was being rhetorical?

In Spain there was also a cult of violence in the anarchist movement which had captured the imaginations of landless labourers in Andalusia and industrial workers in Catalonia. That movement was brilliantly analysed by Gerald Brenan in his admirable book, The Spanish Labyrinth. The anarchists talked of "the propaganda of the deed" and many genuinely believed that paradise would be on its way  when "the last king was strangled with the guts of the last priest". The world could be remade "with a pistol and an encylopaedia". Half the working class of Spain in, say, 1920 believed in this idea. The consequent murders in Catalonia in particular were all the same atrocious and unpardonable. 

A second national eccentricity was the anarchists' rejection of everything to do with the state, an evil institution with which one should have nothing to do, certainly nothing like casting a vote. This meant that the Restoration  parliamentary system of 1875-1923 and the Republic of 1931-36 would have to do without any participation by half the labour force. The anarchists of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) thought, as Professor Preston reminds us, that "the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie". The FAI wanted an insurrecction against the Republic by "revolutionary gymnastics" and the latter's replacement by libertarian Communism. That meant the abolition of the state and of private property, with communes established in the cities and villages.

The larger and slightly less doctrinaire CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo)was also anarchist in its outlook. It expected the Republic to change nothing and so also aspired in 1931 to "propagate its revolutionary objectives". The political system was thus flawed from the start. There was no anarchist vote in 1931, 1933 and 1936 though, eventually, once the war had begun the anarchists provided four ministers to the socialist government of Largo Caballero.