ABSTRACT
The military coup launched on 17—18 July 1936 against the Second Spanish Republic failed in its own terms. But although it did not achieve complete political and territorial control of Spain, the coup was remarkably successful in precipitating a state crisis of unprecedented proportions. The Front’s proponents saw it as offering the best basis for the Republican war effort (and for national reconstruction beyond that) precisely because Popular Front was about reconstructing state power. The weakness of the Popular Front strategy (as of its predecessor, the Republican project of 1931–6) lay in its privileging state construction virtually to the exclusion of building the Republican nation. The republicans lacked an overall fiscal strategy in the 1930s, yet this was the essential precondition of viable social reform. ‘By the time the Socialists had joined the republicans in the Conjuncin Republicano-Socialista of 1909 there was already a predominant current supportive of a reformist republican vision.
