the constitution totally unacceptable, Historian Stanley G. Payne believes, "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset", and it has been posited that such a "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and in the onset of the civil war. One legal commentator has stated plainly "the gravest mistake of the Constitution of 1931—Spain's last democratic Constitution prior to 1978—was its hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church". The historian Mary Vincent, in her study of the Church in Salamanca in the 1930s, believes the Republican legislation, in affecting the devotional lives of ordinary Catholics, "greatly eased the task of its opponents". Following the general election of February 16, 1936, political bitterness grew in Spain. Violence between the government and its supporters, the Popular Front, whose leadership was clearly moving towards the far left (abandoning constitutional Republicanism for violent revolution), and the opposition accelerated, culminating in the coup of right-wing generals in July. As the year progressed Nationalist and Republican persecution grew, and Republicans began attacking churches, occupying land for redistribution and attacking nationalist politicians in a process of tit-for-tat violence. 1933 election and aftermath Leading up to the Civil War, the state of the political establishment had been brutal and violent for some time. In the 1933 elections to the Cortes Generales, the CEDA won a plurality of seats, but President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora declined to invite the leader of the CEDA to form a government. Instead he invited the Radical Republican Party and its leader, Alejandro Lerroux, to do so. CEDA supported the Lerroux government in exchange for three ministerial positions. Hostility between the left and the right increased after the formation of the government. Spain experienced general strikes and street conflicts. Noted among the strikes was the miners' revolt in northern Spain and riots in Madrid. Nearly all rebellions were crushed by the government, and political arrests followed. Lerroux's alliance with the right, his harsh suppression of the revolt in 1934 and the Stra-Perlo scandal combined to leave him and his party with little support going into the 1936 election. (Lerroux himself lost his seat in parliament.) 1934 murder of priests and religious in Asturias The murder of 37 priests, brothers and seminarians by leftists in Asturias marks what some see as the beginning of the Red Terror. In October 1934, the Asturian Revolution