"This engaging and well-researched book offers a fascinating and pathbreaking account of one of the most important—and frequently feared—institutions in modern Spanish history. Foster Chamberlin shows how and why the Civil Guard clung to an outdated sense of honor even as it led to increasingly violent behavior." - Geoffrey Jensen, author of Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Franco's Spain
"Chamberlin's detailed archival work illuminates how both the Spanish Civil Guard's nineteenth-century organizational structure and its cultural milieu, which syncretized police and military values, were maladaptive when faced with the rise of mass politics and increasing democratization in twentieth-century Spain." - Sandie Holguín, author of Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity
"This remarkable book focuses on the violence used by the Civil Guard in the Spanish Civil War not as simply a product of that conflict, but as the result of a militarized, conservative political culture that grew over the long history of the institution." - David A. Messenger, author of Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain
