Memories of the Spanish Civil War

Conflict and Community in Rural Spain

Ruth Sanz Sabido

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783483709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Spanish Civil War left a legacy of destruction, resentment and deep ideological divisions in a country that was attempting to recover from economic stagnation and social inequality. After Franco’s victory, the repression and purge that ensued immersed Spain in a spiral of fear and silence which continued long after the dictator’s death, through ‘the pact of oblivion’ that was observed during the transition to democracy. Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain attempts to break this silence by recovering the local memories of survivors of the Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship. Combining oral testimony gathered in one Andalusian village, with archival research, this ethnographic study approaches the expression of memory as an important site of socio-political struggle.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Memory, Conflict and the Rural Context

On 24 August 1944, General Leclerc’s command, the Ninth Company of the Second Armoured Division (commonly known as la Nueve, or ‘the Ninth’), was the first military formation to enter Paris after the Nazis had vacated the city. Newly liberated Parisians watched as armoured columns passed through their streets, led by a vehicle that carried the Spanish Republican flag. The tanks that followed were marked with the names of famous battles from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), like Madrid, Brunete, Guadalajara and Teruel (Mesquida 2014; Pons Prades 1975; Pons Prades 1985).

This landmark event has not, however, passed unaltered into the History books. According to accounts that have prevailed until very recently, Paris was not liberated by the Ninth as such, but simply by the Second Armoured Division. Of course, the Ninth was just one component of a much larger army, but its near disappearance from the narrative can be explained by two inconvenient realities. The first is that the Ninth, led by Captain Raymond Dronne, was composed for the most part of Spanish rather than French combatants. These men – almost exclusively members of the CNT and FAI1 – were just some of the thousands of Republicans (anarchists, communists and socialists) who had fled their homeland in 1939. The Second Armoured Division as a whole, however, contained a majority of French soldiers: therefore, any reference to the Division would inevitably reinforce the notion that the liberation was an exclusively French affair. The second reason for this neglect relates to a shameful episode in the history of France itself. Having suffered for three years at the hands of a right-wing military insurgency, thousands of displaced Spanish men, women and children made the arduous climb across the Pyrenees to escape persecution (Matthews 1939). Edouard Daladier, the French premier, closed his country’s borders to avoid the avalanche of refugees, but had to reopen them when Franco, the victorious Nationalist dictator, refused to countenance the creation of neutral zones. Although masses of refugees continued to arrive in France, they were not received with compassion. Most of them ended up in concentration camps, where they were imprisoned and forced to live and work in horrific conditions (Caamaño 2015; Macciuci 2006; Mesquida 2014; Rafaneau-Boj 1995; Riera 2016; Vilanova 2003).2 The testimonies of the survivors help to illustrate the situation. For example, Fermín Pujol, who would later become part of la Nueve, recalls his experience:

When we arrived, they disarmed us. They took everything away from us, rings, jackets, wallets, everything, and they sent us to a beach, in the open air, with no protection, surrounded by a wire fence and guarded by armed soldiers. Scabies and lice soon became our companions. If anyone escaped, the Senegalese colonial troops would shoot to kill. (in Mesquida 2014, my translation)

More than 15,000 refugees died within the first few weeks, and many more would never be able to return home. Despite the treatment they received, many of the adult males volunteered to continue the struggle against fascism by joining the French army, taking part in numerous battles and fighting alongside other foreigners during World War II. The Ninth, with its contingent of 146 Spaniards from a total of 160 men, were for the most part barely out of their teens when they first took up arms in Spain in 1936 (Mesquida 2014). Such was the preponderance of Spaniards in the company that all commands were given in Spanish. Their character was depicted by Captain Dronne, who described this group of fighters as

individualists, idealists, courageous, showing an almost foolish bravery. They did not have a military spirit, they were even anti-militarists, but they were magnificent soldiers, brave and experienced fighters. … If they embraced our cause voluntarily, it was because it was the cause of freedom. They really were fighters for freedom. (Dronne 1984, 262–63, my translation)

As Mesquida (2014) points out, had la Nueve been comprised of Americans, dozens of films would have been made about them, because they exhibited extraordinary dignity, courage and solidarity. Yet, the significance of their struggles and achievements was not only underplayed, but also progressively forgotten, starting from the very day after the liberation of Paris, when Charles de Gaulle, speaking at the Hôtel de Ville, announced that Paris was

liberated by herself, liberated by her people with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, that is to say of combatant France, the only France, the true France, eternal France. (de Gaulle 1944, my translation)

From this moment, the version that prevailed was that Leclerc’s Division had freed the French capital. De Gaulle’s statement sought to foster a patriotic sentiment among the French population, one that would serve to unite France, which was characterised at this critical time by division and instability.3 The problem was that, in doing so, the contribution that non-French fighters made to History was obscured. As Beevor and Cooper note,

There was not the slightest mention of American or British help in the Liberation. In the eyes of the Allies, this was a churlish and grotesque rewriting of history; nevertheless, it was an inspired message, creating an image of national unity where none existed and binding the sorely wounded pride of the country. (Beevor and Cooper 2004, x)

The attempts of the French to nationalise the victory, Mesquida points out, meant that the foreigners were marginalised and made to disappear from History and from Memory (with the capital ‘H’ and ‘M’ denoting that these are official, state-sanctioned versions of the past). In this respect, Beevor and Cooper’s assessment, by focusing on American and British aid alone, also fails to acknowledge the active contribution of Spanish men to the liberation of Paris and, more broadly, to the fight against fascism. This process of forgetting was exacerbated further by the campaign of repression and ‘memory management’ within Spain itself, through which the dictator, Franco, attempted to erase all traces of his enemies’ existence. Yet, the worst form of insult inflicted upon these Spanish soldiers was not the fact that their efforts had become invisible: it was the fact that France and the other Allies would not assist them in their fight against Franco’s regime, even though the Spaniards had been instrumental in the Allies’ struggle against the Nazis. After World War II, Spanish ex-combatants, unable to return to their country, had to remain in France, while fascism in Spain became more entrenched.

Local, National and International Contexts

This book, though it begins with a reference to World War II, focuses on the terrible event that preceded it: the Spanish Civil War. Of course, the fact that both wars involved some of the same people and, in some cases at least, a shared consciousness of the evil they opposed, is arguably a good indicator of the continued importance of the earlier conflict. Numerous scholars have discussed the historical and ideological meaning of the Civil War, its impact on European political and military developments in the 1930s and 1940s, and the military interventions made by several external governments (see, e.g., Beevor 2006; Graham 2012; Preston 2012). Between 1936 and 1939, Spain became a battlefield where fascists and anti-fascists fought what has been described as a ‘rehearsal’ for World War II, in which the former had the opportunity to test their new weapons (Bowers 1954). The pact of non-intervention that was agreed in August 1936 by twenty-four countries (including Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy) was effectively broken when Franco’s forces gained the support of the German and Italian war machines. Meanwhile, the Second Republic, an elected and therefore legitimate government, did not obtain the same amount of support from those nations that were supposedly in sympathy with democratic principles. In addition to the assistance of the Soviet Union and Mexico, the Republican government counted upon the volunteers who filled the ranks of the International Brigades.

Notwithstanding the international character of the Civil War, it is not my intention to dwell upon this aspect of the struggle. Any discussion of the war requires some knowledge of the broader effects and consequences of foreign intervention. Nonetheless, a central purpose of this book is to reclaim the conflict as one that was eminently Spanish, for the majority of the lives lost and ruined – not just at the battlefronts but also in the repression that followed – were those of Spanish civilians. This book thus reflects on what the conflict meant to ordinary people whose lives were disrupted by the military coup of 1936 and the subsequent waves of violence that lasted for decades after the Republic’s defeat. The purpose of my narrative is to redirect the broad international and theoretical perspectives towards a more localised and ‘lived’ approach, focusing on the ‘civil’ aspect of the war, while attempting to demonstrate that the local, regional, national and international dimensions are interrelated and should therefore be considered alongside one another.

History and Truth

The experience of the men who composed la Nueve illustrates a number of issues in the conceptualisation of, and relationship between, History and Memory, as well as other notions such as truth, consciousness and justice (some of the key concepts with which this book engages). In the first instance, the ‘historisation’ of significant events includes not only the straightforward recounting of what happened, but also a certain degree of calculated organisation and even strategic ‘management’ of information that defines what is and is not presented. The way in which the Ninth was ‘historicised’ is one example of this process. It may be argued that covering up the achievements of a particular group of men was a necessary political manoeuvre in order to achieve a ‘greater good’, but historians’ complicity with the perspective adopted by de Gaulle (supposedly on behalf of the French state) seems to indicate that the apparent factuality and reliability of (official) History is, in fact, littered with state-sponsored inaccuracies.

This is not, therefore, an attack on the work of historians, but a critique of the History that is promoted (and imposed) by powerful agents at particular historical moments. In Spain, after the end of the war in 1939, and even from the very moment when they began to seize Republican territory, the Nationalist propaganda machine went to great lengths to manage the information that was released to the general public. Meanwhile, anyone who was suspected of sympathising with the Left was persecuted, with the ultimate purpose of purging any dissenting ideologies. For the defeated, Franco’s mechanisms of information management, and the creation of his own approved History, marginalised their voices and diminished their chances of writing their own narratives.

More recently, the work of a number of historians has helped to challenge Franco’s version of the past. For example, Spanish historian Francisco Espinosa Maestre, who has authored a number of in-depth historical analyses of the Spanish Civil War (in particular, work on the south-western provinces of Seville, Huelva and Badajoz), has analysed the figures that pro-Franco historians published when estimating the numbers of victims of fascist violence (Espinosa Maestre 2005; Espinosa Maestre 2011; Espinosa Maestre 2012a). In order to illustrate his approach, Espinosa points out the inaccuracies in General Ramón Salas Larrazábal’s book Pérdidas de la Guerra (1977), which was an attempt to deal with issues such as the use of repressive practices during and after the war. According to Salas’ supposedly ‘exact’ enumeration of victims, 176 people lost their lives in the province of Badajoz between 1936 and 1940, including those who lost their lives in ‘irregular executions’ (139 people) and ‘judiciary executions’ (37 people). Espinosa’s view is that this type of historicising relies on numbers to make bigger fictions seem credible:

Salas’ work reminds us of those tall tales that Goebbels liked so much: the scientific tall tale, in which lies appear so wrapped in numbers, charts, equations and details that they seem to be true. All in all, this reveals a fascination for numbers [Goebbels 1998, 35]. Salas’ figures were, in addition, accompanied by an allusion to the ‘harsh reprisals that, according to all testimonies, were carried out by the occupants of Badajoz in 1936’ and by the remark that ‘there is no doubt that the reach of these [reprisals] has been greatly exaggerated, but it seems that the 91 civil executions recorded in 1936 and the 26 executions of 1937 may be too few’. This is evidence of how reality can be distorted and history falsified. It is hardly surprising that before his ‘final rectifications’ Salas asserted that in the whole province of Badajoz the gubernamentales [the government representatives] killed 1,466 people and their opponents 989. Had he analysed the data in the civil registry properly, he would have known that more people were killed in the city of Badajoz alone, than the number he ascribes to the entire province. (Espinosa Maestre 2011, 357–58, my translation and emphasis)

When Espinosa discovered that the number of assassinations in the west of the province was twice the figure given by Salas for the entire province, he noted that this did not include the names of individuals that had not been officially recorded. He also pointed out that the research that had been conducted in other provinces had consistently invalidated Salas’ figures, although half the country had yet to be fully investigated. Nevertheless, Salas’ study is still being used by various authors as though it is a valid source (Espinosa Maestre 2011, 358).

Reig Tapia (1986), for instance, presents an ambivalent assessment of Salas’ figures. Despite his argument that only some privileged individuals (such as Salas) were allowed to consult the archives (on the basis of their affinity to the ‘right’ type of ideology), Reig Tapia states, nonetheless, that there is no reason why, in principle, Salas’ evidence should be doubted. He even agrees with Salas’ claim that there were not as many death penalties as commonly assumed, and that the number of executions was even lower than that (Reig Tapia 1986, 23; see also Salas Larrazábal 1977, 128). The problem with Salas’ data is that it only takes into account the ‘official’ figures, based on information gathered by analysing legal documents. This approach tends to ignore both the realities behind each case and the vast amount of people who became the victims of repression through ‘unofficial’ channels. Reig Tapia argues, quite rightly, that the only way to achieve the required precision in the quantification of victims would involve an exhaustive analysis, going from village to village and studying every type of archive, including hospital, war, prison and cemetery registers. The addition of all the local analyses would then provide a more reliable picture of the repression. Yet, at the same time, Reig Tapia seems prepared to accept Salas’ skewed figures as believable and to present them as the only systematic study, one which represented the ‘greatest individual effort’ that had been developed up to that moment (Reig Tapia 1986, 29).

Memory and History

The focus on quantitative precision sometimes leaves the ‘histories’ (in plural and with a lower-case ‘h’, to indicate their multiplicity and heterogeneity) that are gathered from other sources (such as oral reports) seem somehow inferior to official documents. It is in this context that scholarly debates have developed about the ability of the separate but interconnected disciplines of History and Memory, to make the past accessible to contemporary audiences. In this respect, Phillips notes that one of the conditions that have led to the development of Memory Studies is, precisely, the increasing mistrust of ‘official History’ (Phillips 2008, 2). From this perspective, memory is understood as a way of valuing those histories that have not entered the ‘annals’ of History. These memories can be described as alternative versions of the past that have not received the sa...