Los años republicanos (1931-1936)

The Second Republic has been for years one of the favorite topics for historians of contemporary Spain. However, there are not many works dedicated to this period in a comprehensive, systematic and orderly manner. This book by Julio Gil Pecharromán, published in a first version, in 2002, under the title Historia de la Segunda República española, is an admirable exception. The Second Republic, with its bold projects for social change and the democratization of political life, constitutes a sad paradigm of the capacity of the forces of traditional society to hinder and frustrate, to a great extent, the steps towards modernity. The republican experience, resolved in a bloody civil war and a long dictatorship, was, however, a stage of enormous importance for our present, since it laid the foundations for many of the processes of change and progress that culminated in the current Spanish democracy. For this reason, in the last two decades a debate on the nature, evolution and crisis of the Second Republic has gained strength. This indispensable book helps to mitigate the controversy by presenting a broad, clear and non-ideologized panorama of the political regime, of the reformist projects and the echo they found in society, of the difficult economic situation, of the enormous resistance to the modernizing project... The fascinating story, in short, of a period whose understanding is essential to understand the present.