Whilst there may not seem to be a great deal of point in attempting to oppose a well-established convention, I should like to propose in this essay that before the Civil War there existed in Spain no political entity which can properly be called a Popular Front. It was only after the war had started that there emerged in many places committees, denominated ‘popular front’, whose function was to negotiate with the anarchist trade union, the CNT, for control of executive positions on the various defence committees. But as regards a formal agreement between political parties to create a government coalition complete with a programme for the defence of parliamentary democracy, I think that the use of the term Popular Front is entirely misplaced until the emergence of the aforementioned committees constituted by Socialists, Communists and Republicans. The supreme expression of these, of course, would be the May 1937 Negrín government itself, the origins of which one must seek in the process which led Communists and Socialists to agree a unity of action initiative in April 1937. With this in mind, rather than clarifying the origins of the front, or the manner of its constitution, I will be attempting to explain the reasons why a Popular Front did not exist in Spain before the outbreak of the Civil War.

The reasons for this failure reside in the fact that within the Spanish left as a whole during the 1930s the most important group was the trade unions.