Spain 1936: Democracy Assassinated.

"The Cause of the Children" by Célia Keren:

During the Spanish Civil War, nearly 15,000 children were evacuated from the Republican zone to France. This book focuses on this little-known phenomenon, studying the evacuation of these children as the result of mobilization and re-situating it within the history of commitments to the Spanish Civil War and social movements.

During the Spanish Civil War, nearly 15,000 children from the Republican zone were sent to France. Boys and girls aged approximately 5 to 15, they were generally enrolled by their parents to be placed in French host families or in children's homes created for them. Far from being centralized, this humanitarian operation involved a constellation of very diverse and often rival actors.
The challenge of the book is to understand the enthusiasm around this cause, from the Popular Front left to Catholic intellectuals, from the Vatican to feminist activists. Child aid offered a way to take action while dodging the dilemmas posed by this war, non-intervention, and the European politics of the time: pacifism or anti-fascism? security or solidarity? freedom or submission to the Pope? Faced with these often dichotomous questions, groups took a different path: child aid allowed them to play on the ambivalences of a "refuge cause," not really political, without being entirely neutral—because only children from Republican Spain were welcomed in France…
Following these actors step by step in their diversity and placing this mobilization in a transnational context and in the history of the social movements of the 1930s, Célia Keren sheds light on a little-known phenomenon of the Spanish Civil War.

"The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Democracy Assassinated" by Pierre Salmon and Mercedes Yusta:

Spain, July 1936. A coup attempts to overthrow the Republic. The assassination of democracy by the military, monarchists, and fascists was premeditated long in advance. The intensity of the popular reaction and the resistance of the regime, less expected, transformed this conflict into a bloody war of nearly three years. A war that was simultaneously political and social, civil and international: Mussolini and Hitler supported General Franco's troops, the USSR sided with the Republicans while liberal democracies abstained. The world watched Spain and mobilized for this war which caused more than 500,000 deaths and as many exiles.

Today, numerous studies and archives, as well as testimonies, allow for the writing of a new history of the Spanish Civil War. This history reveals the long work of undermining democracy by reactionary forces and the Spanish extreme right, well before 1936. It shows the deep mechanisms of the Francoist dictatorship and finally examines the day-to-day experience of the actors of this major episode of the 20th century in Europe.