Jump to content

User:Msrainynight/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Leonese Emergency (Spanish: La Emergencia Leonesa), also known as the Righteous Rebellion in León (Spanish: La Rebelión de los Justos en León, Portuguese: A Rebelião Justa em Leão), was an attempted counter-revolution against the government of the Spanish Socialist Republic that took place in the region of León from 4 April 1936 to 23 April 1936. The emergency took place against the background of ongoing purges against Bordigists and other "revisionist elements" being carried out by the government of Andreu Nin i Pérez, which had inspired significant public unrest in Catalonia and across the nation at large. The right-wing uprising in rural León was both armed and directed by the Royal Spanish government-in-exile of former king Alfonso XIII and lieutenant general José Sanjurjo, who had hoped to exploit the instability of the socialist government to launch a coup d'état or even a civil war. Such hopes were shared by the Portuguese government of Óscar Carmona, who supported the rebellion.

Although initially successful in securing control of various villages and towns near the Portuguese border, the royalist forces proved militarily inferior to the spontaneously organized Leonese socialist militias and faced catastrophic defeat during two separate attempts to conquer the city of León itself. The Nin government responded to the situation through a partial mobilization of the Spanish People's Army and a limited military campaign for the reconquest of royalist strongholds. The excessive violence of this campaign has been well documented, with the massacres at Calabor and Nuez in particular becoming widely known for their anticlerical bloodletting and atrocities against innocent bystanders, including women and children.

The emergency is widely considered to have put a temporary end to the doctrinal struggles of the Spanish political left, as it united socialist and anarchist forces against the threat of a reactionary counter-revolution backed by the Republic of Portugal and its allies in the United Kingdom. The events of the emergency also reinvigorated a larger debate on the need for ideological unity within the Communist International, which had become deeply divided between the Paris-Moscow axis of Boris Souvarine and Leon Trotsky and the Roman Bolshevik tendency of Amadeo Bordiga.

Many Portuguese and Spanish historians alike consider the events of April 1936 a prelude to the Iberian front of World War II.