The Spanish statesman and author Manuel Azaña Diaz (1880-1940) was prime minister of the republic from 1931 to 1933 and briefly in 1936. He became president in 1936, a position he held until the republic fell in March 1939 to the Nationalists.

Manuel Azaña was born on Jan. 10, 1880, in Alcalá de Henares to middle-class parents. He attended the Colegio de Maria Cristina at the Escorial. In 1898 Azaña entered the University of Madrid to study law, after which he spent several terms at the Sorbonne. The experience in Paris gave him an introduction to the kind of Europeanism that was the theme of the literary and cultural movement called the Generation of 1898 in Spain. After practicing law in Paris, Azaña returned to Spain with anticlerical views and a taste for radical politics.

During the 1920s Azaña was secretary general of the Ateneo de...