Uncivil Guard

Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War

Series: New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies

by Foster Chamberlin

Series edited by Anne J. Cruz

280 Pages / 6.00 × 9.00 × 0.75 in / 2 maps

Hardcover

9780807184684

Published: 2025-11-04

$50.00

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eBook

9780807185759

Published: 2025-11-04

(Requires the Leaf e-Reader app)

$19.95

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In Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War, Foster Chamberlin evaluates the role of militarized police forces in the political violence of interwar Europe by tracing the evolution of one such group, Spain’s Civil Guard, culminating in the country’s turbulent Second Republic period of 1931–1936. As Chamberlin’s analysis shows, political violence provided the main justification for the military coup attempt that began the Spanish Civil War, and the Civil Guard was the most violent institution in the country at that time. Discovering how this police force, which was supposed to maintain order, became a principal contributor to the violence of the republic proves key to understanding the origins of the Civil War. By tracing the institution’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century, and moving through case studies of episodes of political violence involving the group, Chamberlin concludes that the Civil Guard had an organizational culture that made it prone to violent actions because of its cult of honor, its distance from the people it policed, and its almost entirely military training.

Foster Chamberlin is an assistant teaching professor of modern European history at Northern Arizona University.

“This engaging and well-researched book offers a fascinating and pathbreaking account of one of the most important—and frequently feared—institutions in modern Spanish history. Foster Chamberlin shows how and why the Civil Guard clung to an outdated sense of honor even as it led to increasingly violent behavior.” ~Geoffrey Jensen, author of Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Franco’s Spain

“Chamberlin’s detailed archival work illuminates how both the Spanish Civil Guard’s nineteenth-century organizational structure and its cultural milieu, which syncretized police and military values, were maladaptive when faced with the rise of mass politics and increasing democratization in twentieth-century Spain.” ~Sandie Holguín, author of Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity

“This remarkable book focuses on the violence used by the Civil Guard in the Spanish Civil War not as simply a product of that conflict, but as the result of a militarized, conservative political culture that grew over the long history of the institution.” ~David A. Messenger, author of Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain

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