The Red Terror in Spain () is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups. News of the rightist military uprising in July 1936 unleashed a politicidal response, and no Republican controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country. The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 priests, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military coup), attacks on the Spanish nobility, business owners, industrialists, and politicians and supporters of the conservative parties, as well as the desecration and burning of monasteries, convents, and churches. A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered and whether an individual continued practicing Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the left. The failed coup of July 1936 set loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial". Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to ~72,344 lives. Paul Preston put the figure at a little under 50,000. Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution", the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists". Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution". Other historians have found evidence of systematic persecution and violence predating the military uprising and have found what they term a "radical and antidemocratic" anti-clericalism among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution. In recent years, the Catholic Church has