Spanish Civil War labourers, and parts of the middle class. The conservative, strongly Catholic Basque country, along with Catholic Galicia and the more left-leaning Catalonia, sought autonomy or independence from the central government of Madrid. The Republican government allowed for the possibility of self-government for the two regions, whose forces were gathered under the People's Republican Army ("Ejército Popular Republicano", or EPR), which was reorganized into mixed brigades after October 1936. A few well-known people fought on the Republican side, such as English novelist George Orwell (who wrote "Homage to Catalonia" (1938), an account of his experiences in the war) and Canadian thoracic
Foreign involvement in the Spanish Civil War countries selling arms to republican side included Czechoslovakia and Estonia. $2,000,000 came from the United States for humanitarian purposes. Volunteers from many countries fought in Spain, most of them on the Republican side. About 32,000 men and women fought in the International Brigades, including the American Lincoln Battalion and the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion, organized in close conjunction with the Comintern to aid the Spanish Republicans. Perhaps another 3,000 fought as members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militias. Those fighting with POUM most famously included George Orwell and the small ILP