S tanley G. P ayne . Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic, 1931–1936

Political biography is firmly back in fashion in Spain. Historians have largely abandoned the rigid Marxist schemas of their forebears in their attempts to explain the tumultuous political events of the 1930s. Individuals matter. There are major biographies of most of the major political figures of the Second Republic, including Santos Juliá’s life of Republican premier and second president Manuel Azaña (Vida y tiempo de Manuel Azaña [2008]), Julio Aróstegui’s mammoth biography of Socialist leader and wartime premier Francisco Largo Caballero (Largo Caballero: El tesón y la quimera [2013]), and most recently Manuel Álvarez Tardío’s excellent study of Catholic politician José María Gil-Robles (Gil-Robles: Un conservador en la república [2016]). Curiously, and with the important exception of Francisco Franco, Anglo-American historiography on modern Spain has not shown a similar degree of interest in political biography. As Nigel Townson, the series editor, notes in his preface to Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic, Stanley G. Payne’s work on Niceto Alcalá Zamora, the Second Republic’s first president, is the first biography in the long-running series Sussex Studies in Spanish History.

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