Manuel Azaña Días was the second President of the Second Republic between the years 1936 – 1939. He was born on January 10, 1880 in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid). He studied Law in Madrid and Paris. His activity was divided between politics and letters. Between 1913 and 1920, he was secretary of the Ateneo de Madrid, of which he became President in 1930. Around that same date, he entered the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation as a permanent academic, where, in 1933, he was promoted to the group of academics professors (academic professor it was just a rank; but he had nothing to do with being a teacher).
All this is also in accordance with article 80 of the Regulations of said Academy. Around those same dates, Azaña was also head of administration in the Faculty of the General Directorate of Registries and Notaries; as well as general secretary of the Institute of Comparative Law. On the other hand, he was director of the magazines La Pluma, Spain, and a collaborator in other national and foreign publications; he also published several works and received, in 1926, the National Prize for Literature. At the advent of the Second Republic, he was part of the Provisional Government, as Minister of War; without abandoning this portfolio, he also became president of the Government on October 14, 1931 (When Alcalá Zamora resigned that position, to be proclaimed President of the Republic), a position that he resigned on September 8, 1933.
In the general elections of November 19 of that same year, the CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights) won, while Azaña's party, Republican Action, only obtained five deputies; so, a few months later, on April 2, 1934, he founded the Republican Left party, under his presidency. Around this party, the Popular Front (electoral coalition made up of several left-wing parties) was formed, which won the elections on February 16, 1936, with which Azaña became head of government on February 19. that same month. After the dismissal of Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic on April 7, 1936, Azaña was elected on the following May 10 to replace him .
Government
Then the reform program of the Popular Front began to be applied quickly:the prisoners of October 1934 were released through an amnesty; the Catalan Parliament was opened, which again elected Companys as president, and Catalan autonomy returned to function; the Cortes began to prepare the Basque Statute of Autonomy. It was decreed that the use and enjoyment of the lands that they had used years before be handed over to the yunteros. The Agrarian Reform Institute was authorized to occupy any farm (provisionally) that was considered to be of social utility. Labor relations became rarefied in the face of the attitude of the unions and of the workers themselves; many small employers began to close their businesses. The extreme right resorted to street violence. The agrarian conflict was great and was growing.
In the province of Badajoz, as the lands had not yet been handed over to the yunteros, more than 60,000 of them occupied them; the Government accelerated the procedures for the expropriation of these lands:the land for those who work it, it was said; there were clashes with deaths between the Civil Guard and the peasants. The violence increased with murders on both sides. The Congress approved a program of organization of the society, with the week of thirty six hours of work; the expropriation without compensation of farms larger than fifty hectares, etc. The Statute of Autonomy of the Basque Country was almost completely approved by Parliament, when Galicia, in a referendum on June 28, 1936, also decided on its autonomy. Finally, on October 31, 1936 (already in the middle of the civil war), the Cortes approved the Statute of Autonomy of the Basque Country, whose first article began as follows:“In accordance with the Constitution of the Republic and the present statute Álava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya constitute an autonomous region within the Spanish State, adopting the denomination of the Basque Country. Its territory will be made up of what is currently made up of the aforementioned provinces» .
Supporter Kills
The violence continued to increase; an extreme right-wing commando killed assault lieutenant José del Castillo when he left his house on July 12, 1936; aftershock took place the next day; At three in the morning of this day, a group of about twenty Assault Guards commanded by the captain of the Guard showed up at the home of José Calvo Sotelo (political leader of the Right), Calle Velásquez, number 89, Madrid. Civilian, Condé, dressed in civilian clothes, and they took him in a truck belonging to the General Directorate of Security directly to the Eastern Cemetery. When they got there, Calvo Sotelo was already murdered. Two accomplice gravediggers must have been waiting to bury the body clandestinely in the common grave, so that no trace of the crime would remain; but something fortuitous meant that those two accomplices did not appear, so Captain Condé delivered the body to the gravediggers on duty (who knew nothing of what had happened) telling them that it was a night watchman who had been murdered in a Madrid street. The relatives and friends of the deceased could not find the body until twelve o'clock in the morning of that day, July 13, 1936. At the funeral, the following day, before the remains of the murdered person, Antonio Goicoechea, surrounded by a large crowd, He said with great emphasis these words:“We do not offer you that we will pray to God for you. We ask you to pray to God for us. And now, before this flag placed like a relic on your chest, before God who hears us and sees us, we pledge a solemn oath to consecrate our lives to the fulfillment of this triple task:imitate your example, avenge your death, save Spain. That everything is one and the same because saving Spain will mean avenging your death, and imitating your example will be the best way to save Spain.»
Start of the Civil War
The fuse was lit. The military conspiracy of several generals, which had been brewing for some time, was ready to act, and began the civil war in Melilla on Friday, July 17, 1936 . The following day, the President of the Government, Casares Quiroga, resigned (from April 14, 1931 to July 18, 1936, there were sixteen Governments in the Second Republic); then, at the request of Azaña, José Giral formed another government to face this war that had just begun, which ended on April 1, 1939. Azaña, who, on April 15, 1936, said in Congress :“We have not come to preside over a civil war; rather we have come with the intention of avoiding it;[…]» , he was the President of the Republic almost all the time that it was immersed in said war, so he did not avoid it and he did preside over it. In September 1936, the representative of the Government of Madrid in Moscow gave "instructions to the communists of his country [...] to carry out the establishment of a Soviet Socialist Republic." Azaña went to France on January 4, 1939 and, on February 27 of that same year, sent his resignation as President of the Second Republic to Martínez Barrio, President of the Cortes. Azaña died on November 3, 1940 in Montuban (France).