Key Figures of the Spanish Civil War and Second Republic

General José Sanjurjo

General José Sanjurjo (Pamplona, 1872 – Portugal, 1936) was the commanding general of Melilla and the senior army commissar of Morocco. In 1932, he led a failed coup d'état, for which he was prosecuted and sentenced to death; however, the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1934, he was pardoned on the condition of exile. In July 1936, he died in a plane crash in Portugal while traveling to Spain to take charge of the military uprising.

José Calvo Sotelo

José Calvo Sotelo (Pontevedra, 1893 – Madrid, 1936) was a professor of law who entered politics in 1919 under the tutelage of Antonio Maura. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he launched the provincial and municipal statutes and held the position of Finance Minister. He went into exile during the early years of the Republic. He later attempted to join the Falange Española, but was blocked by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. As the leader of the National Bloc in the 1936 elections, he won a seat and held extremist positions, leading to clashes with members of the Popular Front and the Head of Government, Casares Quiroga. He was assassinated in July 1936.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera

José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903–1936) was the eldest son of the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Following the fall of the dictatorship in 1930, he assumed the defense and justification of his father's politics. In 1933, he founded the Falange Española, a movement with fascist tendencies that merged the following year with the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (JONS), an organization of a similar nature. In the 1936 elections, the FE de las JONS failed to secure any seats and was subsequently outlawed due to the violence of its gunmen. He was imprisoned, sentenced to death by a kangaroo court, and executed in November 1936.

Juan Negrín

Juan Negrín served as the Finance Minister during the war and later became the President of the Government following the resignation of Largo Caballero. He was a supporter of a stronger state and advocated for resisting at all costs until the foreseeable outbreak of World War II. He agreed with these theses alongside the Communists, from whom he found strong support, which was increasingly necessary due to the Republic's dependence on Soviet aid. However, he still attempted to negotiate an honorable peace with Francisco Franco on two occasions (May 1938 and February 1939).

Diego Martínez Barrio

Diego Martínez Barrio (Seville, 1883 – Paris, 1962) was a member of Alejandro Lerroux's Radical Party and served as the Minister of Communications in the Provisional Government. He chaired the cabinet that called the 1933 elections and held the portfolios of War and Interior in the Lerroux government. He eventually resigned, left the party, and founded his own group, the Republican Union, which became part of the Popular Front. He chaired the Cortes in 1936 and, following the dismissal of Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, served as the interim Head of State until the election of Manuel Azaña. After the Civil War, he presided over the Republic in exile following Azaña's resignation.