The Republican era, by Vicenç Navarro

In an article published in Público newspaper on 14th April of this year Vicenç Navarro, director of the Master in Public and Social Policies, commented on the reasons why there is a lack of knowledge on the great part of society about the Republican era the country lived through during the periods 1931 – 1933 and 1936-1939.

For the first time Televisión Española has shown a series about the Republic. Professor Navarro comments that ignorance about what happened during that period on the part of the majority of the population is due to the enormous domination of conservative forces during the transition process from dictatorship to democracy and its attempts not to look back into the past.

He states that no other period in Spanish history intorduced so many reforms in so little time. The Republic introduced Social Security, tried to universalise teaching, introduced abortion and divorce (the first project proposed by Federica Montseny), elements of agricultural reform and laicism. There were also errors and shortcomings.

The European elite feared that the reforms taking place among the popular classes in Spain would catch on, and so they clearly sympathised with nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy. History would have been very different if the Republic had won out in Europe and Spain and if fascism had been defeated in Spain.

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