The Nationalist victory in the Civil War (1936–39) inaugurated a new order founded on the union of authoritarian politics and reactionary Catholic values. The years preceding the war were marked by significant political and socio-economic changes for Spain, which at the turn of the century was still undergoing the parallel processes of industrialization and urbanization. The rise of anarchist, socialist, and communist currents made evident the increasing fissures in the existing order, laying bare the insufficiencies surrounding the growing sectors of wage laborers and the landless population. The Church's failure to take an active initiative in response to these demands, advocating piety and conformity instead of reforming policies, betrayed its own interests in the swelling class conflict. However, the sources of local tensions were not confined to the national borders, as the effects of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the rising Fascist regimes reverberated throughout Europe. Spain's response to the mounting pressures from within and without were two brief and ideologically disparate tenures, represented by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and a liberal rule of the Second Republic.

After the two-party Restoration system had been replaced by a series of coalition governments, the nation received its first “iron surgeon” as a result of the military coup staged by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The ensuing dictatorship (1923–30) was an authoritarian response to the preceding period of political instability and the increasing fear of those whose stakes lay in the preservation of the existing order. While intent on protecting the conservative status quo, the regime sought credibility in the Regenerationist discourse of middle-class liberal intellectuals who, in the aftermath of the Disaster of 1898, attempted national revival through a series of modernizing agrarian and educational reforms. One of the most prominent figures of the group, Joaquín Costa, disillusioned by the movement's failure to implement the desired changes, had claimed the need for an “iron surgeon” who could single-handedly change the course of the nation through a revolution from above.