Decision of the Commission on the Illegitimacy of the Powers Exercising Authority in 18 July 1936

The document reproduced here was commissioned by Franco’s government on 21 December 1938. Its preparation was entrusted to a commission made up of two dozen legal and political figures from the Francoist camp, among them former ministers of both the monarchy and the Republic. The conclusions were made public on 15 February 1939, when the end of the war was in sight. Until then, the Francoists had presented their rebellion of 18 July as an urgent necessity, a national uprising or crusade, in the face of the imminent danger of the destruction of the fatherland by a Marxist revolution. Now they sought to demonstrate that the Republican government at that time—which was certainly not Marxist—was illegal.

The mastermind behind the report was Ramón Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and, at the time, his right-hand man. His power went far beyond his post as minister of the interior; in fact, he was the second figure in the regime. The report he commissioned reflected two of Serrano’s concerns. On the one hand, it sought to lend a veneer of legality to the emerging regime. The minister had studied law at the prestigious Spanish College in Bologna and was by profession a state lawyer. On the other, it sought to counter Republican propaganda that portrayed the Francoist camp as rebellious or factious.

The conclusions of the report were already present in its terms of reference: to “demonstrate to the world, in an incontrovertible and documented manner, our accusations against the so-called legitimate authorities—namely, that the institutions and individuals who held power on 18 July 1936 suffered from such defects of illegitimacy […] that, in rising up against them, the Army and the people committed no act of rebellion against Authority or against the Law.”

To confirm this thesis, the authors of the report put forward an interpretation of the history of the Republic which, in their view, demonstrated the Republicans’ continuous manipulation and abuse of laws and institutions. This process, they claimed, culminated in the fraudulent victory of the Popular Front in the elections of February 1936 and in the murder of José Calvo Sotelo, “ordered and planned from the offices of a ministry.” All of this meant that, as Serrano predicted, the task entrusted to the Commission would not be “difficult.” This was borne out by the swift and foreseeable outcome of its work.