Getting it Wrong in Spain

From Civil War to Uncivil Peace (1936-1975)

Susana Belenguer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138059818
• eBook ISBN: 9781317525363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together different and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of republican ideals, contributors range over many diverse historical and cultural topics — discussing, for instance, the attitudes of both Left and Right to the poet Federico García Lorca and to his assassination, examining the documentary evidence offered in surviving memoirs of the Civil War, and assessing the major characteristics of the new order in Spain under Franco.

Cinematic and literary depictions of the Civil War and its consequences are also studied. Other topics investigated include: contemporary French reactions to the Spanish conflict, Stalinist policies towards Spain, the activities and motives of the anarcho-syndicalists and the role of the International Brigades. This collection of essays published on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, not only places the events and experiences studied within the context of the 'new state' of Franco's Spain, but also offers timely fresh insights into wider European and international issues during what was a period of seismic change in world history.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Introduction

SUSANA BAYÓ BELENGUER

Trinity College, Dublin University

La Historia es biplana y en ella no caben los ruidos, sean gemidos o gritos de rabia y terror.¹

It is always tempting to be partisan and, especially in this time of memory recovery, to see all the repression on one side and all the suffering on the other. But, particularly now in an era of uncovering the horrors of the Civil War and the terrors of the civil peace, justice to the victims on all sides, and most of all, of course, to that ‘third Spain’ as it has been called, to those who were on no side, demand an understanding from a range of perspectives of the factors that led to the agonía.

Notwithstanding that Spain was again a republic in the 1930s, the Civil War was as little to do with republic as it was with monarchy, and nothing at all to do with ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’, the latter having become slogans more useful as means than as ends. It is possible to maintain that the Civil War began when overt hostilities were commenced by the forces of the military rebellion and to look little further than the story of a legitimately established republic abandoned by the western powers and betrayed to fascist dictators. It is possible because that is part of the truth, but the greater truth is that ‘the’ Civil War was the last round in a fight which while it began with monarchy and military had by the 1930s evolved much more into a clash of ideologies that, although the confrontation took place within a national boundary, were of truly international dimensions. Spain was to be where, above all, ‘isms’ met ‘isms’ head on.

While it is not helpful to recite simplistic pairings of religion and anti-religion, of haves and have-nots, of rural and urban, or even of top-down and bottom-up hegemonic philosophies, all these were at the root of the Civil War, fundamental oppositions that no government had succeeded in reconciling. For any with an eye to see, that struggle had been long in the making, and under a military which saw itself as the guardian of both public morality and its own privilege, and with the eager promptings of falangist, socialist, communist and anarchist militants, its coming was as predictable as it was inevitable.² What remains shocking is not so much that both the right and the left (which should of course be pluralized) fought for their beliefs (this is not the place to debate that point) but that both committed crimes against the very humanity they were pledged to protect. In this present volume, as elsewhere, others will take up particular issues but here we attempt to outline briefly some of the reasons why this became so, to try to understand how a nation of the modern west, whose members were of the same family, with a shared history, and a shared need to live together peacefully, could, with the past bloodiness and brutality as warning, again give it all to violence and destruction, for motives which were as many as the numbers of those involved, and for reasons that had been long in the making.

The Iberian Peninsula, divided, conquered, divided again, less than a continent, more than a country, had for centuries been fought over by factions loyal to this king or that, to this oligarchy or the other, each region virtually a nation within the nation. But this almost feudal disharmony was to be disrupted with the arrival of Giuseppi Fanelli on Spanish soil in 1868 as emissary of the revolutionary international workers’ movements. The country would no longer be a battleground where old privilege fought with new; within two years the general indifference of the power elites to the condition of the Spanish poor was to add an entirely new dimension to the conflict between Carlists and liberals, secularists and religious. Powerful elites would be broken by different inquisitions, by new hegemonies, to be replaced by others no less cruel.

The later nineteenth century saw brands of royalists fight breeds of republicans, and both fight an anarchism that owed more to Bakunin than to Proudhon. The repeated civil wars over monarchy were a background to a general social unrest, with unarmed crowds fired on by government forces, with failed rebellions, even mutiny. When the king, declaring Spain ‘ungovernable’, abdicated in 1873 and the first Spanish Republic was declared, those who wanted a united country were in dispute with those who preferred a federation, and when cantons declared themselves independent there were several attempted coups, and total disagreement between the leaders on nearly everything as conservative political evolutionists opposed radical political revolutionists. The liberals knew how to cure the ills of society, rightist socialists knew better, leftist socialists knew best of all, and anarchists knew better than the others.

With the closing by force of the Cortes in 1874 and another military coup, a unitary republic was attempted, and with the canton revolution finally suppressed and the Bourbon monarchy again proposed, some sort of peace and quiet was finally achieved with artificially alternating governments. But issues remained, socially divisive and corroding, and with the Spanish Civil War less than seventy years away, the First Republic offered a rough blueprint for the Second; although not every controversy would re-emerge, the violence would be reproduced, the seeds of issues and alliances already sown.³

To the general consensus of the powerful that the bodies of the peoples of the world were theirs for the taking had now been added, with religion as its most dangerous precedent, that so were their minds. This was no new thing, of course; human beings had always been preying on their neighbours. But one distinguishing feature of the new century was to be the ferocity with which nations waged war on their own,⁴ not, as in the past, so much for gain and glory or in the name of a nameless god but for the sake of earthly paradise, with the call to sweep away all temples of every kind. With the same savagery that characterized clashes between believers, these new political religionists, holding variously that an oligarchy of the enlightened should guide the people and that the individual had the right to be un-ruled, would find respectively that the unenlightened would be the enemy and that every questioner would be, by definition, unenlightened, and that the un-ruled very often choose to be unruly. Spain would see played out on a national scale the international battle between left and right, left and left, authoritarian and libertarian, socialist and liberal, socialist and communist, socialist and anarchist, anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist, and as many sub-confusions again. They were united at least by the conviction that the world could be a better place for all, and especially for the have-nots.

One outcome of that unity, the 1930 Pact of San Sebastián, resulted in a revolutionary committee and plans for a coup which with the overwhelming republican and socialist victory in the municipal elections of 1931 was made unnecessary. Almost by public acclamation the committee segued into provisional government and the formation of the Spanish Second Republic. But for all its potential for a more just society, the evidence was soon to emerge that this government, no less than any predecessor, was not able to rule in the interests of all; in addressing the aspirations of one or other section of the public it would inevitably alienate the others. And there were so very many others.⁵

Although some Catholics were liberals and republicans, a significant proportion were not, and both were alienated from the new constitution when in a grim echo of 1909, around one hundred churches and church properties were destroyed. The move away was encouraged by overt anti-Catholic legislation which, in full accord with a liberal and socialist secular agenda, did nothing to endear it to the vast bulk of conservatives for whom, while they might not have attended mass in any great numbers, a Catholic ethos was the heart of Spain.

Although the Constituent Cortes elected in June and July 1931 gave republicans a comfortable majority, with so many Catholics firmly opposed to republican secularism, with monarchists of both persuasions opposed to any form of republic as well as to one another, large landowners opposed to republican reforms, liberal capitalist republicans opposed to radical socialist republicans, and anarchist/anarcho-syndicalist republicans opposed to any form of authoritarianism, republican or not, components were in place for chaos and violence reminiscent of the First Republic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, January 1932 introduced small local anarchist uprisings against the republic and August saw General Sanjurjo attempting a right-wing coup. With Catholic support for the republic already gravely weakened, another anarchist uprising in January 1933 was ruthlessly put down in Casas Viejas, and the reprisal shooting of prisoners now even further alienated anarchist support. When at new elections in November, further divisions between moderate republicans/socialists and hard-line socialists opened the door to a more right-wing republican coalition, it might have been expected that this would go a considerable way to reassuring the moderate conservative electorate into giving greater support to the republic, even if the Radical Republican party rather than the larger CEDA was to provide the prime minister.

But higher rents, reduced wages, and callous evictions simply encouraged much of the conservative population further to the left, and moves by the new centre-right government to reverse liberal legislation were met by calls from the socialist PSOE/UGT in October 1934 for a general strike. However, without the enthusiastic backing of the CNT, a Catalan breakaway ‘republic’ was short-lived and strikes in Madrid and elsewhere failed to get off the ground. Irreconcilable enmities were to surface in Asturias when armed miners and revolutionary committees took over several towns. In the massive military assault by land, sea, and air in which, ominously, Moorish troops were set on Spanish civilians, soldiers were brought up to Asturias on railways controlled by the anarchist CNT; a refusal by the Oviedo socialist committee to provide arms to seaports controlled by anarchists brought the rising to an end. Other enmities were revealed in this dress rehearsal for the Civil War and the agonía that was to come, with the killing of some 30 priests, the deaths of an estimated 1,500 miners, the imprisonment of some 30,000 more. The vileness of the military against the workers, the torture and summary executions, sixteen months of prison brutality, would show workers, many of whom might just have been caught up in events, that they could expect no mercy from a military of the right, a lesson that would be well remembered when the generals rose in 1936.

The Popular Front coalition which won the elections in February 1936 left industrialists, landowners, officer corps and churchmen facing the loss of gains they had made under the right-dominated government. More strikes, peasant takeovers, and demonstrations in industry were matched by landowners claiming they could not meet the unreasonable demands of workers earning a pittance. Some two hundred political assassinations in six months, culminating in the murder of the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo, were to be enough to allow the military rebels to claim they were saving the country from the reds when on 17 July they launched the uprising which had been in preparation since the previous February. With comparatively fewer officers willing to stand by their oaths, a republican government virtually powerless to control the public outrage or placate the rebels, with no way out, with the workers now armed, the funeral pyre of the living republic would be well and truly lit and the death agonía would truly begin.

As things stood in 1936, the prospects for the Second democratic republic were as grim as any faced by the First, and as events were to prove, its death had been foretold. That foretelling was not just in the uprisings, the strikes, the rebellions, the pronunciamientos, nor in the tortures and atrocities, nor assassinations and murders, nor even only in the unspeakable indifference of the haves for the have-nots (although this was at the root of it all). It was in the fact that in a war which was to determine whether a form of fascism or a version of communism would prevail, evolutionary socialists opposed revolutionary socialists, and evolutionary anarchists opposed revolutionary anarchists, and all were opposed to anyone who wanted no revolutions at all. And even those of the right as much as of the left who most desired a better world for their fellow human beings, whose hearts were truly at their most generous and sacrificing, could forget—and in the Civil War some did forget—what Emma Goldman said as well as it needs to be said:

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that means cannot be separated from the ultimate aims. The means employed become […] part and parcel of the final purpose; they modify it, and presently the aims and means, become identical […] The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one’s methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.⁶

In the present volume the contributors remind us that there were those who remembered the ideals in the midst of horror, who stood for what they believed in and never lost their faith in a better world. Drawing on multiple accounts from diaries, memoirs, and interviews, Harry Owens examines the impact on many lives of the closing acts of the Spanish Civil War. He exemplifies from eye-witness accounts the privations and sufferings of those Spaniards and internationals alike who fought for the ideals of the doomed republic. He shows the bad that emerged from those final days but also attempts a better understanding of why even today those ideals are still alive.

Richard Baxell offers an enlightening and balanced view of the International Brigades in an essay which nicely complements the perspective of contributors to the previous BSS (November–December 2012) volume on the Agonía republicana.⁷ This fraternity still arouses controversy, not least because of suggestions that they were no more egalitarian than the Russian units on which they were modelled. The truth, as always, lies somewhere between, as the author amply demonstrates. Robert S. Coale, bringing together firsthand accounts of the ‘Retirada’, presents a disturbing picture of the experiences of American brigaders and other refugees retreating into France. To the agonía of defeat was added the further humiliation of their treatment at the hands of the French authorities. Illustrated are the fortitude and pride of those who stood firm under conditions that led many to prefer a return to Franco’s Spain.

Fresh light is thrown on French treatment of the refugees by David Wingeate Pike’s essay, which opens up a stimulating perspective on French attitudes to the Republic. Drawing on editorials of the left and right in Toulouse it moves through the certainties of the early 1930s to the later doubts, both sides labouring to keep abreast of the shifting international politics of the time to which they were both largely subordinated. Each in its own way was awaiting a bitter defeat. Interesting parallels between the situations of France and Spain are complemented by sharply observed quotations that bring to life the forces that were about to overwhelm major portions of the world in terror. Focus on Toulouse as the central co-ordinating hub of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists also ena...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Getting it Wrong in Spain
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preliminary Note
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Myths of the International Brigades
• 3. Argentina y el exilio republicano de 1939: las fronteras y el movimiento de solidaridad
• 4. El Auxilio Social de Falange (1936–1940): entre la guerra total y el ‘nuevo estado’ franquista
• 5. Lincoln Brigaders: Firsthand Accounts of French Camps, 1939
• 6. The Impact of the Civil War on the Life and Work of Antonio Buero Vallejo
• 7. Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists in Toulouse: The Red-and-Black Counter- City in Exile
• 8. The Persistence of Politics: The Impact of the Cold War on Anglo-American Writings on the Spanish Civil War
• 9. Swiss Consular Influence in the Aftermath of Franco’s Victory: The Case of Carlos Brunner
• 10. Operation X: Soviet Russia and the Spanish Civil War
• 11. Subsistencia y actitudes populares durante el primer franquismo
• 12. Memories of Defeat and Exile
• 13. The View from Next Door: The French Third Republic
• 14. ¿Una agonía esperpéntica? Shifting Memory Horizons and Carnivalesque Representations of the Spanish Civil War and Franco Dictatorship
• 15. Winners and Losers in Cinema and Memoirs: Emilio Martínez Lázaro’s Las 13 rosas and Esther Tusquets’ Habíamos ganado la guerra
• 16. Lorca’s Agonía republicana and Its Aftermath
• 17. Playing with History and Hiding Treason: Colonel Casado’s Untrustworthy Memoirs and the End of the Spanish Civil War
• Index