The simplest thing to say might be that Spanish officers disliked the Popular Front and so they rebelled against it. But the lapidary style fails to answer the question that must be posed: what was the provocation of the Popular Front government of February 1936, to use Carolyn Boyd's paradigm of disposition, provocation and opportunity, that incited the Spanish army to rebel? Indeed, is the question posed at all properly? Was it the government, or its deeds, or what it was feared it might do, or perhaps what it would not do, which led to the army's decision to overthrow it? Were these fears and hatreds justified in any sense that we can appreciate, or was the army acting for no other purpose than to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for a selfish oligarchy, which headed an unjust and reactionary economic system, legitimized by a Church unable or unwilling to accept challenge?

Again, was there something in the disposition of the Spanish officer corps which inclined it to act as a tool of political and economic interests? Were such interests identical with the army's own? What was the inner structure and self-perception which allowed the army to rise in rebellion against a constitutional regime?

This is a large number of questions to be answered. One path to answering them, which will lead to others, is an examination of the peculiar status of the Spanish army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal state, or perhaps the relation of the Spanish state with its army.

The army was a conscript force, with some professional units stationed in Morocco.