Ancient history

Militiamen or soldiers

At the beginning of September, two new foreign centuries were set up:a French one, called the Commune of Paris and to which a few Poles were incorporated; an Italian, who takes the name of Gastone Sozzi. These two new centuries joined a Catalan column of 2,000 men, the Libertad column, which took the road to the capital, seriously threatened by the rebel advance whose advanced point was at Talavera de la Reina.
The eyes of the world are on Spain. The international political stakes of the drama unfolding on the peninsula are becoming more evident every day. On paper, totalitarian countries, Western democracies and the U.S.S.R. pledged not to intervene in the civil war. In fact, Mussolini and Hitler violated this commitment even before the ink was dry, the first to widen its zone of influence in the Mediterranean, the second to test its command and its equipment for the world war which it prepared; both to promote, in Spain, the establishment of a regime similar to theirs.
The Duce sends planes, tanks and men; the Führer, the airmen of the "Condor" legion and excellent military advisers. Despite the resulting imbalance of forces, Great Britain intends to continue counting the blows; in order not to upset her, Léon Blum, in France, continued to cling to non-intervention. The U.S.S.R. of Stalin, she could not afford to squander, by remaining entirely neutral, the capital of prestige which she enjoyed with the world left:at the beginning of October 1936, she therefore denounced non-intervention and began to deliver to the Spanish Armaments Republic and a few military specialists, without however committing themselves fully.
Several communist parties had already made aid to republican Spain a requirement. The first, the underground German Communist Party had called on its emigrant compatriots to leave to fight. In Paris, within the confines of the Vél’ d’Hiv’, resounded the cry:“Planes, cannons for Spain! »
In Spain itself, the Communists, unlike other left-wing organizations, very quickly came out in favor of replacing the militias with a new type of regular army. Leading by example, they had incorporated their own militiamen into a regiment - the 5' - called to become the nucleus of this army. Within the Comintern, it was the Spanish Communist Party which first defended and adopted the idea of ​​organizing the sending to Spain of an international brigade within which the first foreign volunteers and those who would come from rejoin. The leader of the Italian CP, Palmiro Togliatti, who, under the pseudonym of Ercoli, was also the head of the Comintern secretariat for the Latin countries, ardently supported this idea, in the realization of which he found himself involved, by the force of the geography, first and foremost, the French Communist Party.
In Spain, however, the idea came up against a double reluctance:that of the Republican government (which began by proposing the simple reconstitution of the foreign legion) and that of the anarchists, hostile both to any initiative of communist origin and to any regular army (their watchword at that time was:"Militians, yes! Soldiers, never!"). But events were pressing and the government allowed itself to be convinced:it should not regret it.