Las milicias antifascistas

The failure of the civic-military uprising of July 1936 in Catalonia triggered a revolutionary process that shook the republican legality. The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, the new body that emerged from the barricades, had to respond to the needs of the rearguard and to the military threat of the reactionary forces. The war-revolution binomial materialized in the columns of combatants created during the first weeks of the conflict. Far from interested stories, Gonzalo Berger rigorously approaches this army of volunteers and presents us with the organization, the ideological composition, the financing, the role of the military, the leading role of women, the number of troops and the quality of the troops involved. Through unpublished primary sources, he describes the evolution of the three main battle fronts: the Balearic Islands, Madrid and Aragon, the political environment in the rear and the relationship between the governments of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Second Spanish Republic.