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| ==Background== | | {{Infobox officeholder |
| ===Spain in the 19th century=== | | |honorific-prefix = |
| Since the 16th century, Spain's history was characterized by its resistance to the ideals of the {{W|Enlightenment}} and the {{W|French Revolution}} that profoundly influenced many of its neighbors to the north, and as late as the {{W|Victorian era}} Spanish society opposed modern secularism, democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism. Spain found itself in very different conditions from the rest of {{W|western Europe}}, and was falling behind the other world powers technologically, economically, and militarily — including the [[United Kingdom]], [[France]], [[Germany]], and the [[Anglo-America]]n countries. Moreover, Spain found itself in this condition at a time when the other powers that did embrace modernism had undergone political change and became less confident in their own status, which meant that the effort of modernizing Spain brought with it the influx of new radical and totalitarian ideologies, such as [[Marxism–Landonism|communism]] and [[derzhavism]], making the country all the more volatile in the early years of the 20th century. Spain's monarchy was able to suppress the westernizing forces in Spanish society until the {{W|Napoleonic Wars}} in the early 1800s destabilized the country, setting it on a long course for the rest of that century that culminated with the Civil War in 1926.
| | |name = Jacques Castex |
| | |honorific-suffix = |
| | |image = Mads Mikkelsen Cannes 2013 2.jpg |
| | |imagesize = 200px |
| | |smallimage = |
| | |caption = |
| | |order = [[Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (France)|Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs]] |
| | |term_start = 24 April 2019 |
| | |term_end = |
| | |monarch = [[Jean IV of France|Jean IV]] |
| | |primeminister = [[Oscar de Saint-Just]] |
| | |predecessor = |
| | |successor = |
| | |birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1964|06|28}} |
| | |birth_place = {{W|Foix}}, {{W|County of Foix|Province of Foix}}, France |
| | |death_date = |
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| | |nationality = |
| | |constituency = |
| | |party = [[French Action]] |
| | |spouse = |
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| | |residence = |
| | |education = {{W|University of Bordeaux}} |
| | |profession = |
| | |religion = [[Catholic Church – Avignon|Catholic]] |
| | }} |
| | '''Jacques Castex''' (born 28 June 1964) is a French politician who has been the [[Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (France)|Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs]] since 2019. He was previously the secretary-general of the [[French Action]] party from 2014 to 2019, and since the [[2019 French general election|2019 election]] has been considered to be one of the most influential politicians in France. As the French foreign minister, he arranged the creation of the [[Weimar Triangle]], an alliance of right-wing governments of France, [[Germany]], and [[Poland]], and revived the [[Normandy Format]], which is a similar organization of France, Germany, [[Russia]], and [[Ukraine]]. |
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| The upheavals of the Napoleonic era led to the independence of {{W|South America}}, [[Central America]], and [[Mexico]], and this, combined with the defeat in the [[Spanish–American War]] of 1898, reduced the formerly great {{W|Spanish Empire}} to a few small bits in Africa. Significant portions of the territory awarded to Spain by the {{W|Berlin Conference}} in 1884 was outside of direct Spanish control at that time. Meanwhile the [[Spanish Army]], which had become oversized over the centuries, took up a massive portion of the national budget while being left with little to do after the loss of the empire. Much of the Army was sent to defend Spanish holdings in [[Morocco]], where its leaders quickly decided to take on a {{W|Africanist (Spain)|mission of expanding further}} beyond the coast into the Moroccan interior. This gave the officers to opportunity to gain promotions through merit and justify the fortune being spent on the Army as living conditions in the country declined. The growing discontent among the Spanish working class in the large cities was opposed by the ruling elite of wealthy land owners, the [[Catholic Church]], the monarchist factions (divided between the [[Legitimists (Spain)|Legitimists]] and the [[Carlists]]), and increasingly the officer corps. There was a disproportionately high number of officers, and money was constantly being wasted, with the Spanish Army becoming the most inefficient in western Europe.
| | Castex graduated from the {{W|University of Bordeaux}} and worked as a correspondent for French newspapers in [[Spain]], [[Italy]], and [[Algeria]] during the [[Cold War]]. He also became an informant for the French intelligence agency [[DGSE]]. |
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| In this situation, the Army launched its [[Rif War|conquest]] of Morocco in 1909 with support from King {{W|Alfonso XIII of Spain|Alfonso XIII}}, who had risen to the throne in 1874 as part of the military's response to revolutionary agitation. The defeat in the war of 1898 widened the disagreements between the progressive and reactionary factions of Spanish society, and the Rif War would increase this even further. A string of Spanish defeats, leading up to the {{W|Disaster of Annual}}, which became one of the worst defeats in Spanish military history, caused a public outcry and demands for an investigation into the Army. Alfonso XIII tried to block these efforts and made himself unpopular. The scandal led to the majority of seats in the [[Congress of Deputies (Spain)|Congress of Deputies]] going to the Left in the [[1923 Spanish general election]], which resulted in Alfonso XIII abdicating under pressure and going into exile in [[France]]. A new government was formed by a coalition of parties from the Left, with some representing the liberal bourgeois intellectuals while others stood for proletarian socialism.
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| ===The Second Republic===
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| The [[Liberal Party (Spain)|Liberal Party]] initially led the government of the [[Second Spanish Republic]] that emerged in April 1923. Although it was dominated by the liberal bourgeois, which made efforts to enact constitutionalist, laissez-faire, anti-militarist, social, and parliamentary reforms, the new government was immediately put into a difficult position between the Right and the far Left. Unlike in other western countries, Spain had not by then developed a tradition of parliamentary democracy or political liberalism, and half of the population was illiterate, so the prerequisites for developing a non-totalitarian, liberal, and democratic state did not exist. The liberal group faced increasing pressure from the proletarian Left in the middle of the 1920s, which opposed their laws defending private property, and began making an alliance with the Right, abandoning their original anti-militarist and anti-Catholic position. There was a divide among the socialists as well, with a small faction that believed Spain had to go through the process of liberalization and industrialization before it would be ready for socialism, and a more radical majority that called for revolution, led by [[Luis Guido]]. These dynamics were made more complex by the tension between [[Castile and León|Castilian]] centralism, which was associated with the monarchy and the Army, and regional separatism in [[Catalonia]], the [[Basque Country]], [[Galicia (Spain)|Galicia]], and elsewhere. What industry Spain had was concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, so separatism also became connected with revolutionary socialism.
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| ===Outbreak of war===
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