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The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge
Paul Preston
No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did.The Spanish Civil War is burned into European consciousness, not simply because it prefigured the much larger world war that followed it, but because the intense manner of its prosecution was a harbinger of a new and horrific form of warfare that was universally dreaded. At the same time, the hopes awakened by the attempted social revolution in republican Spain chimed with the aspirations of many in Europe and the United States during the grim years of the great Depression.On the 80th Anniversary of the conflict, this is a full-blooded account of this pivotal period in twentieth-century European history. Paul Preston vividly recounts the struggles of the war, analyzes the wider implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, tracks the emergence of Francisco Franco’s brutal (and, ultimately, extraordinarily durable) fascist dictatorship and assesses the ways in which the Spanish Civil War was a portent of the Second World War that ensued so rapidly after it.
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Copyright (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by Harper Perennial in 2006
This book is a revised and updated version of A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, first published by Fontana Press in 1996, revised and updated from The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1986
First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2016
Copyright © Paul Preston 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016
Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Keystone/Getty Images
Map © Hardlines
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Source ISBN: 9780007232079
Ebook Edition © July 2012 ISBN: 9780007370061
Version: 2017-05-04
Dedication (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Marshall and to the other men and women of the International Brigades who fought and died fighting fascism in Spain.
Contents
Cover (#u9fff73a7-e62c-5303-8acd-57d16ee0c0e5)
Title Page (#u1a3ba310-0525-5ac1-af51-a3bbb700a22d)
Copyright (#ulink_d9e35651-75ef-538a-a867-1ee3cb95d9c8)
Dedication (#ulink_517fcef0-5f65-527b-8c0b-61dc8c71a47d)
Map of Spain (#ulink_08141ec9-dd82-58cb-b4d6-e7d84a5ceef7)
Preface (#ulink_51133890-401a-5815-97e5-936d2387fd8a)
Introduction: The Civil War Eighty Years On (#ulink_e78eef2f-7174-5e2b-bf98-4376ca1c86cb)
1 A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931 (#ulink_cb17025a-d6ee-5c8e-9b76-d29497ead532)
2 The Leftist Challenge, 1931–1933 (#ulink_77e43bb3-1d55-5b37-a2e7-feabdf8b3d77)
3 Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934–1936 (#ulink_e94c34a5-6169-5f0b-8916-8fb16c154366)
4 ‘The Map of Spain Bleeds’: From Coup d’État to Civil War (#litres_trial_promo)
5 ‘Behind the Gentleman’s Agreement’: The Great Powers Betray Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
6 ‘Madrid is the Heart’: The Central Epic (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Politics behind the Lines: Reaction and Terror in the City of God (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Politics behind the Lines: Revolution and Terror in the City of the Devil (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Defeat by Instalments (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Franco’s Peace (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Principal Characters (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Abbreviations (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Essay (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Paul Preston (#litres_trial_promo)
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Preface (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
I wrote the first version of this book thirty years ago. My intention then was to provide the new reader with a manageable guide to the bibliographical labyrinth constituted by the fact that the Spanish Civil War has continued to be fought on paper. Even then there had been several thousand books on the Spanish Civil War and many of them were extremely long. Because the flow did not stop, I rewrote the book in 1996 in order to take account of what had been published in the ten years following its first appearance. At that point, I could not have imagined how much more was still to come. Accordingly, in 2006 I wrote a much expanded version in an attempt to come to terms with the very considerable body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, English and other European languages since 1996. It also drew on my own ongoing research on Franco, the Francoist repression and Mussolini’s role in the Spanish Civil War. Over the following years, the flood has not abated, and in this new edition I take account of the most important advances in knowledge about the war as well as drawing on my recent research on the role of Franco, on the murders of civilians behind the lines on both sides, on anti-clerical persecution, on the bombing of Guernica, and on way in which the war ended.
Inevitably, the 2006 edition of the book was much longer – the text 50 per cent longer – than in 1996, and this one adds further material in the light of recent research. Like the three earlier versions, it is interpretative rather than descriptive although even more ample use has been made of contemporary quotation to give a flavour of the period. It remains a book that does not set out to find a perfect balance between both sides. I lived for several years under Franco’s dictatorship. It was impossible not to be aware of the repression of workers and students, the censorship and the prisons. As late as 1975 political prisoners were still being executed. Despite what Franco supporters claim, I do not believe that Spain derived any benefit from the military rising of 1936 and the Nationalist victory of 1939. Many years devoted to the study of Spain of before, during and after the 1930s have convinced me that, while many mistakes were made, the Spanish Republic was an attempt to provide a better way of life for the humbler members of a repressive society. Against such temerity, the revenge taken by Franco and his followers was brutal and pitiless. Accordingly, there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding.
My early interest in Spain was stimulated by the postgraduate seminar run at the University of Reading by Hugh Thomas and by Joaquín Romero Maura in Oxford. Over many years, I learned an enormous amount during my friendship with Herbert Southworth who was always prodigal with his hospitality and his knowledge. When I wrote the 1996 version, I was aware of how much I had derived from conversations over many years with Raymond Carr, Norman Cooper, Denis Smyth, Angel Viñas, Julián Casanova, Jerónimo Gonzalo and Martin Blinkhorn. Throughout the 1990s, the historiography of the Spanish Civil War was profoundly changed by the research of Ángela Cenarro, Helen Graham, Gerald Howson, Enrique Moradiellos, Alberto Reig Tapia, Francisco Espinosa Maestre and Ismael Saz. I continue to gain greatly from reading their work and many hours of conversation with them.
My friends Paul Heywood and Sheelagh Ellwood gave me marvellous support during the writing of the first edition. Their role in the second version was assumed by Helen Graham, supplemented by constant interchanges of ideas and information with Hilari Raguer and Francisco Espinosa Maestre. I was also grateful to Francisco Moreno Gómez, Isabelo Herreros and Luis Miguel Sánchez Tostado for help with particular issues. Over subsequent years, I have benefited further from my ongoing interchanges with Linda Palfreeman, Boris Volodarsky, Carmen Negrín, Ángel Viñas, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Fernando Hernández Sánchez, Javier Cervera Gil, Enrique Líster López, Aurelio Martín Nájera of the Fundación Pablo Iglesias and Sergio Millares of the Fundación Juan Negrín.
My wife Gabrielle is, as ever, my shrewdest critic. With such a team of friends to help, it seems astonishing that any book could still have shortcomings. Unfortunately it does and they are mine.
INTRODUCTION
The Civil War Eighty Years On (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
On 19 October 2005 the ninety-year-old Santiago Carrillo was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Carrillo was Secretary General of the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) for three decades from 1956 to 1985. He was a crucial, if not uncontroversial, figure in the resistance against Franco’s dictatorship. The granting of the degree (título de doctor) was largely in recognition of his role in the struggle for democracy and his ‘extraordinary merits, and particularly his contribution to the policy of national reconciliation, and his decisive contribution the process of democratic transition in Spain’. Carrillo had come to be widely revered for his moderate and moderating role at a crucial stage in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. However, during the Civil War, at the age of twenty-one, he had been security chief in the Madrid defence junta when large numbers of rightist prisoners were murdered at Paracuellos. Accordingly, the degree ceremony was disrupted by militants chanting ‘¡Paracuellos Carrillo asesino!’ (‘Paracuellos – Carrillo murderer’). It was not the first time that Carrillo had been the target of violent ultra right-wing attacks. Ever since his return to Spain in 1976, he had been the object of abuse for his alleged role in the killings at Paracuellos. On 16 April 2005, at the launch of a book called The Two Spains, by the historian Santos Juliá, where Carrillo was scheduled to speak, the event was interrupted when the bookshop was ransacked by extreme rightists. Barely a week later, a wall adjacent to his apartment block was scrawled with the words ‘this is how the war began and we won’, ‘Carrillo, murderer, we know where you live’ and ‘where is the Spanish gold?’.
These incidents were symptomatic of the way in which the Spanish Civil War retains a burning relevance in contemporary Spain. In geographical and human scale, never mind technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts. Nonetheless, it has generated around thirty thousand books, a literary epitaph which puts it on a par with the Second World War. In part, that reflects the extent to which, even after 1939, the war continued to be fought between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and the defeated and exiled Republicans. Even more, certainly as far as foreigners were concerned, the survival of interest in the Spanish tragedy was closely connected with the sheer longevity of its victor. General Franco’s uninterrupted enjoyment of a dictatorial power seized with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini was an infuriating affront to opponents of fascism the world over. Moreover, the destruction of democracy in Spain was not allowed to become just another fading remnant of the humiliations of the period of appeasement. Far from trying to heal the wounds of civil strife, Franco worked harder than anyone to keep the war a live and burning issue both inside and outside Spain.
Reminders of Francoism’s victory over international communism were frequently used to curry favour with the outside world. This was most dramatically the case immediately after the Second World War when frantic efforts were made to dissociate Franco from his erstwhile Axis allies. This was done by stressing his enmity to communism and playing down his equally vehement opposition to liberal democracy and socialism. Throughout the Cold War, the irrefutable anti-communism of the Nationalist side in the Civil War was used to build a picture of Franco as the bulwark of the Western system, the ‘Sentinel of the West’ in the phrase coined by his propagandists. Within Spain itself, memories of the war and of the bloody repression which followed it were carefully nurtured in order to maintain what has been called ‘the pact of blood’. The dictator was supported by an uneasy coalition of the highly privileged, landowners, industrialists and bankers; of what might be called the ‘service classes’ of Francoism, those members of the middle and working classes who, for whatever reasons – opportunism, conviction or wartime geographical loyalty – threw in their lot with the regime; and finally of those ordinary Spanish Catholics who supported the Nationalists as the defenders of religion and law and order. Reminders of the war were useful to rally the wavering loyalty of any or all of these groups.
The privileged usually remained aloof from the dictatorship and disdainful of its propaganda. However, those who were implicated in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, the beneficiaries of the killings and the pillage, were especially susceptible to hints that only Franco stood between them and the revenge of their victims. In any case, for many who worked for the dictator, as policemen, Civil Guards, as humble serenos (night-watchmen) or porteros (doormen), in the giant bureaucracy of Franco’s single party, the Movimiento, in its trade union organization, or in its huge press network, the Civil War was a crucial part of their curriculum vitae and of their value system. They were to make up what in the 1970s came to be known as the bunker, the die-hard Francoists who were prepared to fight for the values of the Civil War from the rubble of the Chancellery. A similar, and more dangerous, commitment came from the praetorian defenders of the legacy of what Spanish rightists refer to broadly as el 18 de julio (from the date of the military rising of 1936). Army officers had been educated since 1939 in academies where they were taught that the military existed to defend Spain from communism, anarchism, socialism, parliamentary democracy and regionalists who wanted to destroy Spain’s unity. Accordingly, after Franco’s death, the bunker and its military supporters were to attempt once more to destroy democracy in Spain in the name of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War.
For these ultra-rightists, Nationalist propaganda efforts to maintain the hatreds of the Civil War were perhaps gratuitous. However, the regime clearly thought it essential for the less partisan Spaniards who rendered Franco a passive support ranging from the grudging to the enthusiastic. Catholics and members of the middle classes who had been appalled by the view of Republican disorder and anti-clericalism generated by the rightist press were induced to turn a blind eye to the more distasteful aspects of a bloody dictatorship by constant and exaggerated reminders of the war. Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow, as either squalidly self-interested or the blood-crazed perpetrators of sadistic atrocities. Until well into the 1960s, a stream of publications, many aimed at children, presented the war as a religious crusade against Communist barbarism.
Beyond the hermetically sealed frontiers of Franco’s Spain, the defeated Republicans and their foreign sympathizers rejected the Francoist interpretation that the Civil War had been a battle of the forces of order and true religion against a Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic conspiracy. Instead, they maintained consistently that the war was the struggle of an oppressed people seeking a decent way of life against the opposition of Spain’s backward landed and industrial oligarchies and their Nazi and Fascist allies. Unfortunately, bitterly divided over the reasons for their defeat, they could not present as monolithically coherent a view of the war as did their Francoist opponents. In a way which weakened their collective voice, but immeasurably enriched the literature of the Spanish Civil War, they were sidetracked into vociferous debate about whether they might have beaten the Nationalists if only they had unleashed the popular revolutionary war advocated by anarchists and Trotskyists as opposed to mounting the conventional war effort favoured by the Republicans, the Socialists and the increasingly powerful Communists.
Thereafter, the debate over ‘war or revolution’ engaged Republican sympathizers unable to come to terms with the leftist defeat. During the Cold War, it was used successfully to disseminate the idea that it was the Stalinist suffocation of the revolution in Spain which led to Franco’s victory. Several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to propagate this idea. The success of an unholy alliance of anarchists, Trotskyists and Cold Warriors has obscured the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory, not Stalin. Nevertheless, new generations have continued to discover the Spanish Civil War, sometimes scouring for parallels, in the light of national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua, sometimes just seeking in the Spanish experience the idealism and sacrifice so singularly absent from modern politics.
The relevance of the Civil War to Franco’s supporters and to left-wingers throughout the world does not fully explain the much wider fascination which the Spanish conflict still exercises today. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, it can only seem like small beer. As Raymond Carr has pointed out, compared to Hiroshima or Dresden the bombing of Guernica seems ‘a minor act of vandalism’. Yet it has provoked more savage polemic than virtually any incident in the Second World War. That is not, as some would have it, because of the power of Picasso’s painting but because Guernica was the first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is burned into the European consciousness not simply as a rehearsal for the bigger world war to come, but because it presaged the opening of the floodgates to a new and horrific form of modern warfare that was universally dreaded.
It was because they shared the collective fear of what defeat for the Spanish Republic might mean that men and women, workers and intellectuals, went to join the International Brigades. The left saw clearly in 1936 what for another three years even the democratic right chose to ignore – that Spain was the last bulwark against the horrors of Hitlerism. In a Europe still unaware of the crimes of Stalin, the Communist-organized brigades seemed to be fighting for much that was worth saving in terms of democratic rights and trade union freedoms. The volunteers believed that by fighting fascism in Spain they were also fighting it in their own countries. Hindsight about the sordid power struggles inside the Republican zone between the Communists on the one hand and the Socialists, the anarchists and the quasi-Trotskyist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) on the other cannot diminish the idealism of the individuals concerned. There remains something intensely tragic about Italian and German refugees from Mussolini and Hitler finally being able to take up arms against their persecutors only to be defeated again.
To dwell on the impact of the horrors of the Spanish war and on the importance of the defence against fascism is to miss one of the most positive factors of the Republican experience – the attempt to drag Spain into the twentieth century. In the drab Europe of the Depression years, what was happening in Republican Spain seemed to be an exciting experiment. Orwell’s celebrated comment acknowledged this: ‘I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ The cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic were only the best-known aspects of a social revolution that had an impact on the contemporary world which Cuba in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s never quite attained. Spain was not only nearby, but its social experiments were taking place in a context of widespread disillusion with the failures of capitalism. By 1945, the fight against the Axis had become linked with the preservation of the old world. During the Spanish Civil War, however, the struggle against fascism was still seen as merely the first step to building a new egalitarian world out of the Depression. In the event, the exigencies of the war effort and internecine conflict stood in the way of the full flowering of the industrial and agrarian collectives of the Republican zone. Nevertheless, there was, and is, something inspiring about the way in which the Spanish working class faced the dual tasks of war against the old order and of construction of the new. The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti best expressed this spirit when he told the Canadian reporter Pierre Van Paassen, ‘We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’
All of this is perhaps to suggest that interest in the Spanish Civil War is made up of nostalgia on the part of contemporaries of right and left and political romanticism on the part of the young. After all, there is a strong case to be made for presenting the Spanish Civil War as ‘the last great cause’. It was not for nothing that the Civil War inspired the greatest writers of its day in a manner not repeated in any subsequent war. However, nostalgia and romanticism aside, it is impossible to exaggerate the sheer historical importance of the Spanish war. Beyond its climactic impact on Spain itself, the war was very much the nodal point of the 1930s. Baldwin and Blum, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Trotsky all had substantial parts in the Spanish drama. The Rome–Berlin Axis was clinched in Spain at the same time as the inadequacies of appeasement were ruthlessly exposed. It was above all a Spanish war – or rather a series of Spanish wars – yet it was also the great international battleground of fascism and communism. And while Colonel von Richthofen practised in the Basque Country the Blitzkrieg techniques he was later to perfect in Poland, agents of the NKVD endeavoured to re-enact the Moscow trials on the leaders of the POUM because it was made up of dissident anti-Stalinist Marxists and one of its founders, along with Joaquín Maurín, was Andreu Nin, who had once been Trotsky’s secretary in Moscow. The Russians were thwarted by the Spanish Republicans’ insistence on proper judicial procedure.
Nor is the Spanish conflict without its contemporary relevance. The war arose in part out of the violent opposition of the privileged and their foreign allies to the reformist attempts of liberal Republican–Socialist governments to ameliorate the daily living conditions of the most wretched members of society. The parallels with Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s hardly need emphasizing. Equally, the ease with which the Spanish Republic was destabilized by skilfully provoked disorder had sombre echoes in Italy, and even Spain, in the 1980s. Fortunately, Spanish democracy survived in 1981 the attempts to overthrow it by military men nostalgic for a Francoist Spain of victors and vanquished. The Spanish Civil War was also fought because of the determination of the extreme right in general and the army in particular to crush Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalisms. Spain did not witness ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the kind seen in the civil war in the former Yugoslovia. Nevertheless, Franco made a systematic attempt during and after the war to eradicate all vestiges of local nationalisms, political and linguistic. Although ultimately in vain, the cultural genocide thus pursued by Castilian centralist nationalism has provoked comparisons between the Spanish and Bosnian crises.
In Spain itself, the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1986 was marked by a silence that was almost deafening. There was a television series and some discreet academic conferences, one of which, held under the title ‘Valencia: Capital of the Republic’, had its publicity poster, designed by the poet and artist Rafael Alberti on the basis of the Republican flag, unofficially, but effectively, banned. There was no official commemoration of the war. That was an act of political prudence on the part of a Socialist government fully aware of the sensibilities of a military caste brought up in the anti-democratic hatreds of Francoism. More positively it was a contribution to what has been called the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido), the tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts after the death of Franco. A rejection of the violence of the Civil War and the regime which came out of it overcame any thoughts of revenge.
In fact, in 1986, the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of a war which would see Spain suffer nearly forty years of international ostracism, the country was formally admitted into the European Community. Ten years later, the withering away of Francoism and continued consolidation of democracy were demonstrated when the Spanish government, with all-party support, granted citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought against fascism during the Civil War. It was a welcome but belated gesture of gratitude and reconciliation which serves as a reminder of a violent and bloody Spain which has perhaps gone for ever.
It might therefore be expected that, by 2006, passionate interest in the Spanish Civil War would at last be fading. Indeed, the very opposite was the case. It was only in the early years of the twenty-first century that for many families a major area of unfinished business, the location, proper burial and mourning of their dead, has begun in earnest. It is a process that, for half of Spain, was completed more than sixty years ago. That it has been denied the other half of the country until so recently is one of the main reasons for the continuing ability of the Spanish Civil War to provoke passion.
On 26 April 1942 Franco’s government set in train a massive investigation called the ‘Causa General’. Its immediate objective was to gather evidence of Republican wrongdoing. The ‘material’ gathered ranged from documents to unsubstantiated hearsay. It was an invitation to all those with genuine grievances – the relatives of those murdered or those who had been imprisoned or had had property confiscated or stolen in the Republican zone – to vent their desire for revenge. It also permitted anyone with a personal score to settle or who coveted someone’s property or wife to smear their enemies. Although the procedures were lax in the extreme, the declarations made, substantiated or otherwise, were used to intensify the generalized image of Republican depravity. It was a part of a general pattern that had been seen since July 1936 in every part of the Nationalist zone as it fell to rebel forces. Once the Nationalists were in control, those rightists killed by the left were identified and buried with honour and dignity in ceremonies that were often followed by acts of extreme violence against the local left. In the case of extremely famous victims of the war, such as the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera or the original leader of the military coup, General José Sanjurjo, their bodies were exhumed and then reinterred in elaborate ceremonies.
The consequence of these various procedures was that the large majority of the victims of crimes in the Republican zone were identified and counted. Their families could mourn them and very often their names were engraved in places of posthumous honour, inscribed in the crypts of cathedrals or on the external walls of churches, with crosses or plaques placed where they died or even, in some cases, with streets named after them. The structures of law and order disappeared in Republican Spain as a result of the military coup and it took several months for them to be re-established. Accordingly, the atrocities in the Republican zone were often the work of criminal elements or out-of-control extremists, although also, less frequently, of deliberate policy by leftist groups determined to eliminate their political enemies. This great variety of crimes was portrayed for nearly forty years by the propaganda machine of the victorious regime, written largely by policemen, priests and soldiers, as if it were the official policy of the Republic. The purpose of such writing was to justify the military coup of 1936, the slaughter it provoked and the subsequent dictatorship. Through the press and radio of the Movimiento, the education system and the pulpits of Spain’s churches, a single, monolithic interpretation of the Spanish Civil War was propagated. Until 1975, official propaganda carefully nurtured memories of the war and the bloody repression not only to humiliate the defeated, but also to help the victors recall what they owed Franco. For those who were complicit in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, it served to remind them that they needed Franco and the regime as a bulwark against the return of their victims who, they imagined, would want to wreak bloody revenge.
For those on the left there had been no equivalent process of closure. There were thousands of the ‘disappeared’ (desaparecidos), their bodies not located, their manner of death not confirmed. Unlike the families of the Nationalist victims of Republican violence, the relatives of the Republican victims of the Nationalist repression could not mourn openly, let alone bury their dead. Even after the death of Franco, the problem of confronting the memory of the Civil War remained immensely difficult because the hatreds of the war had continued to fester for thirty-seven years after its formal conclusion. The dictatorship had imposed a single vision of the past but there were many other memories, hidden and repressed. Many thousands of families wanted to know what had happened to their loved ones and if, as they feared, they had been murdered, where their bodies lay. In the first months of the transition to democracy, fear of a new civil war wrestled with the desire to know about the Republican past. In the event, the drive to guarantee the re-establishment and, later, the consolidation of democracy weighed more both with politicians and with the bulk of ordinary people. The formal renunciation of revenge which was an essential precondition for change was enshrined in a political amnesty not just for those who had opposed the dictatorship but also for those guilty of crimes against humanity committed in the service of the dictatorship. The amnesty text of 14 October 1977 was supported by the majority within the political spectrum. The ghosts of the Civil War and of Francoist repression weighed on Spain, but to prevent the reopening of old wounds successive governments, both conservative and Socialist, were extremely cautious when it came to funding commemorations, excavations and research connected to the war.
The determination of the great majority of the Spanish people to secure a bloodless transition to democracy and to avoid a repetition of the violence of another civil war not only overcame any desire for revenge but also saw the sacrifice of the desire for knowledge. Thus, the ‘pact of oblivion’ saw a curtain of silence drawn over the past in the interests of a still-fragile democracy. Accordingly, there were not only very few official initiatives aimed at commemorating the past but also a certain reticence within the education system about teaching the history of the Civil War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, at a local level many historians continued to pursue research into the Francoist repression, and, for many victims, appearance in the lists compiled in their books was their only gravestone or memorial. Despite its crucial value in political terms and its importance as a measure of the great political maturity of the Spanish people, the pacto del olvido did not apply to historians. In fact, from the first, in La Rioja, in Catalonia and in Aragón, there had been considerable research into the most disagreeable aspects of the Civil War, despite the pacto. Elsewhere, the uneasy truce with the past was soon broken, with the appearance of several important works on the repression in Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia and other regions that had found themselves within the Nationalist zone during all or part of the war. Over the last twenty years, what began as a trickle has become a torrent of books which, although written from many widely differing perspectives, has produced a generally critical vision of the insurrectionary officers of 1936.
In addition to the flood of historical works, in the same period, there has emerged a popular movement in favour of the detailed reconstruction of the war and Franco’s dictatorship at a local level. The creation of a series of organizations and associations dedicated to what has come to be called ‘the recovery of historical memory’. Several factors lay behind this development. On the one hand, there was a sense that democracy was now sufficiently consolidated to be able to withstand a serious debate about the Civil War and its consequences. Underlying this was also a terrible urgency driven by an awareness of the dwindling numbers of surviving witnesses. Without engaging in the thorny issue surrounding the fact that there are many different historical memories of the same events, it remains true that the concept of recovering memory has had a profound impact on a people whose collective memory was kept behind bars for so many decades. A process began involving the excavation of common graves (fosas), the recording of the testimonies of survivors and the proliferation of innumerable television documentaries about what happened. In consequence, today, eighty years after its outbreak, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath are again generating passionate and, at times, bitter argument.
The breaking of the taboo associated with the pacto del olvido has had a dramatic and unexpected impact. The creation of associations dedicated to the recovery of historical memory and the efforts to locate the mortal remains of the disappeared have helped close the emotional wounds of many families. Newspapers regularly print accounts of exhumations. Barely a week passes without the publication of a detailed account of the repression in some town or province and the number of known victims is rising. Indeed, after years of such figures being reduced, they are now rising towards the levels once suggested by horrified eyewitnesses during and immediately after the war itself. In some places, ‘memory routes’ have been created along which it is possible to see places where atrocities or acts of resistance took place, all of which has created enormous discomfort, not just among the perpetrators or their relatives. The outrage provoked has extended even beyond those nostalgic for the dictatorship. It has also caused distress to extended sections of society which, over time, derived benefit from the regime. It is to this audience that a series of immensely successful historical polemics have been directed.
While there is at work a veritable army of serious researchers, there has emerged a small group of authors and broadcasters who barrack from the sidelines. Their cry is that the sufferings of Republican victims were notably less than has been claimed and that any such sufferings were, in any case, their own fault. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is being fought all over again on paper. These self-styled ‘revisionists’ allege that the historiographical advances of the last forty years, in all their infinite variety, are the result of a sinister conspiracy in which almost the entire historical profession and many amateur historians are involved. A wide range of historians from conservatives and clerics to liberals and leftists, as well as regional nationalists, are accused of linking arms to impose a monolithic and politically motivated interpretation of the history of the Spanish Civil War and the regime that followed it. There is little in terms of research that is new about the revisionist works. They resuscitate the basic theses of Francoist propaganda, of writers like Tomás Borrás, or the secret policemen Eduardo Comín Colomer and Mauricio Karl. In some cases, they have even recycled the titles of famous Francoist texts. The only thing that is new is the addition, in both books and inflammatory tertulias, or radio debates, of the techniques of reality television in insulting the authors of the new historiography rather than debating with them.
The consequence has been to introduce a level of abrasive tension to daily political discourse in Spain. The bulk of the historiography of the Civil War is comprised of more or less seriously researched history, which, unusually for such research, is feeding a popular demand. In contrast, the works of the revisionists have exactly the contemporary political purpose which they denounce in others. Their criticism of the Republic is implicitly a criticism of those of its values which have survived the dictatorship or been reborn in contemporary Spanish democracy. This is particularly the case with regard to the federal elements of Spain’s current structure, revisionist ire having been provoked by the fact that the present left-wing coalition government in Catalonia is actively sponsoring research into the repression. Even before this, the right had been outraged by the successful Catalan campaign for the return of tonnes of documents plundered by the Francoists in 1939. This documentation, housed in Salamanca, was originally seized to be scoured for names of leftists and liberals. Organized by archivists provided by the Gestapo, it was used, with similarly sequestered documentation from other conquered areas, to build up a file card index which became the infrastructural tool of the repression. In the view of the fiercely anti-Catalanist revisionists both the Republic and by extension the Socialist government of 2004–11 were ‘Balkanizing’ Spain. The revisionists have also derived some succour from the re-emergence in the United States of a fiercely Cold War vision of the Spanish Civil War which portrays the vanquished as the puppets of Moscow. This view, and the response it has provoked from historians within Spain and Great Britain, has also contributed to the ongoing renovation of the historiography of the Civil War.
It is possible that the revisionists are inadvertently helping to consolidate democracy in that the Civil War will not cease to be a ghost at the feast of democracy until the resentments and hatreds associated with it are vented. They have underlined the urgency of the task at hand: not to stir up the ashes, which is what they accuse historians of the repression of doing, but to investigate, demonstrate and remember what the Civil War really was – not a war of good and evil according to the prejudices of whoever happens to be writing, but a traumatic experience of mass suffering, in which there were few winners and many losers. As one of the most dedicated and thoughtful historians of the repression, Francisco Espinosa Maestre, put it recently, ‘oblivion is not the same as reconciliation and memory is not the same as revenge’.
ONE
A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931 (#u38c53c5c-a141-5d72-8bc6-12552c02b479)
The origins of the Spanish Civil War lie far back in the country’s history. The notion that political problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for a thousand years civil war has been if not exactly the norm then certainly no rarity. The war of 1936–9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s. The religious ‘crusade’ propaganda of the Nationalists joyfully linked it with the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. On both sides, heroism and nobility vied with primitive cruelty and brutality in a way that would not have been out of place in a medieval epic. Yet, in the last resort, the Spanish Civil War is a war firmly rooted in the modern period. The interference of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin ensured that the Spanish Civil War would be a defining moment in twentieth-century history. Yet, leaving that international dimension aside, the myriad Spanish conflicts which erupted in 1936, regionalists against centralists, anti-clericals against Catholics, landless labourers against latifundistas, workers against industrialists, have in common the struggles of a society in the throes of modernization.
To understand Spain’s progress to the bloodshed of 1936 it is necessary to make a fundamental distinction between the war’s long-term structural origins and its immediate political causes. In the hundred years before 1931, it was possible to discern the gradual and immensely complex division of the country into two broadly antagonistic social blocks. However, when the Second Republic was established on 14 April 1931 amidst scenes of popular rejoicing, few Spaniards outside the lunatic fringes of the extreme left and right, the conspiratorial monarchists and the anarchists, believed that the country’s problems could be solved only by resorting to violence. Five years and three months later, large sections of the population believed that war was inevitable. Moreover, a substantial proportion of them felt that war would be a good thing. Accordingly, it is necessary to establish exactly what happened between 14 April 1931 and 18 July 1936 to bring about that change. Nevertheless, the political hatreds which polarized the Second Republic in those five and a quarter years were a reflection of the deep-rooted conflicts within Spanish society.
The Civil War was the culmination of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had dominated Spanish history since 1808. There is a curious pattern in Spain’s modern history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have attempted to use political and military power to hold back social progress have inevitably been followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, the 1870s, between 1917 and 1923, and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the country’s social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to introduce fundamental reform, especially on the land, and to carry out redistributions of wealth. Such efforts in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional balance of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General O’Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874 and by General Primo de Rivera in 1923.
Accordingly, the Civil War of 1936–9 represented the ultimate expression of the attempts by reactionary elements in Spanish politics to crush any reform which might threaten their privileged position. The recurring dominance of reactionary elements was a consequence of the continued power of the old landed oligarchy and the parallel weakness of the progressive bourgeoisie. A concomitant of the tortuously slow and uneven development of industrial capitalism in Spain was the existence of a numerically small and politically insignificant commercial and manufacturing class. Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were broken. The power of the monarchy, the landed nobility and the Church remained more or less intact well into the twentieth century. Unlike Britain and France, nineteenth-century Spain did not see the establishment of a democratic polity with the flexibility to absorb new forces and to adjust to major social change. That is not to say that Spain remained a feudal society but rather that the legal basis for capitalism was established without there being a political revolution. Accordingly, with the obvious difference that her industrial capitalism was extremely feeble, Spain followed the pattern established by Prussia.
Indeed, even until the 1950s, capitalism in Spain was predominantly agrarian. Spanish agriculture is immensely variegated in terms of climate, crops and land-holding systems. There have long existed areas of commercially successful small and medium farming operations, especially in the lush, wet hills and valleys of those northern regions which also experienced industrialization, Asturias, Catalonia and the Basque Country. However, throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the dominant sectors in terms of political influence were, broadly speaking, the large landowners. In the main, the latifundios, the great estates, are concentrated in the arid central and southern regions of New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia, although there are also substantial latifundios to be found scattered in Old Castile and particularly in Salamanca. The political monopoly of the landed oligarchy was periodically challenged by the emasculated industrial and mercantile classes with virtually no success. Until well after the civil war, the urban haute bourgeoisie was obliged to play the role of junior partner in a working coalition with the great latifundistas. Despite sporadic industrialization and a steady growth in the national importance of the political representatives of the northern industrialists, power remained squarely in the hands of the landowners.
There was never any strong possibility in Spain that industrialization and political modernization would coincide. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the progressive impulses, both political and economic, of the Spanish bourgeoisie were irrevocably diverted. The removal of feudal restrictions on land transactions combined with royal financial problems in the 1830s and the 1850s to liberate huge tracts of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and common lands. This not only diminished any impetus towards industrialization but, by helping to expand the great estates, also created intense social hatreds in the south. The newly released land was bought up by the more efficient among existing landlords and by members of the commercial and mercantile bourgeoisie attracted by its cheapness and social prestige. The latifundio system was consolidated and the new landlords were keen for a return on their investment. Unwilling to engage in expensive projects of irrigation, they preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros. The departure of the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age together with the enclosing of common lands removed most of the social palliatives which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval. Paternalism was replaced by repression as the Civil Guard was created to form a rural armed police with the principal function of guarding the big estates from the labourers who worked on them. Thus, the strengthening of the landed oligarchy exacerbated an explosive social situation which could only foster the reactionary tendencies of the owners. At the same time, the syphoning into the land of the capital owned by the merchants of the great sea ports and Madrid bankers correspondingly weakened their interest in modernization.
Continued investment in land and widespread intermarriage between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed oligarchy debilitated those forces committed to reform. The feebleness of the Spanish bourgeoisie as a potentially revolutionary class was underlined in the period from 1868 to 1874, which culminated in the chaos of the First Republic. With population growth in the middle of the century increasing pressure on the land, unskilled labourers had flocked to the towns and swelled the mob of unemployed who were highly sensitive to increases in bread prices. Hardly less wretched was the position of the urban lower middle class of teachers, officials and shopkeepers. Conditions were perhaps worst in the Catalan textile industry which produced all the horrors of nascent capitalism – long hours, child labour, overcrowding and low wages. When the American Civil War cut off supplies of cotton in the 1860s, the consequent rise in unemployment combined with a depression in railway construction to drive the urban working class to desperation. In 1868, this popular discontent combined with a movement of middle-class and military resentment of the clerical and ultra-conservative leanings of the monarchy. A number of pronunciamientos by liberal army officers together with urban riots led to the overthrow of Queen Isabel II in September 1868. The two movements were ultimately contradictory. The liberals were terrified to find that their constitutionalist rebellion had awakened a revolutionary movement of the masses. To make matters worse, a rebellion began in Spain’s richest surviving colony, Cuba. The chosen replacement monarch, Amadeo of Savoy, abdicated in despair in 1873. In the ensuing vacuum, the First Republic was established after a number of working-class risings, an intolerable threat to the established order which was crushed by the army in December 1874.
In many respects, 1873–4 was to Spain what 1848–9 had been elsewhere in Europe. Having plucked up the courage to challenge the old order, the bourgeoisie was frightened out of its reforming ambitions by the spectre of proletarian disorder. When the army restored the monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII, reform was abandoned in return for social peace. The subsequent relation of forces between the landed oligarchy, the urban bourgeoisie and the remainder of the population was perfectly represented by the political system of the 1876 monarchical restoration. Two political parties, the Conservative and the Liberal, represented the interests of two sections of the landed oligarchy, respectively the wine and olive growers of the south and the wheat growers of the centre. The differences between them were minimal. They were both monarchist and were divided not on social issues but over free trade and, to a much lesser extent, over religion. The northern industrial bourgeoisie was barely represented within the system but was, for the moment, content to devote its activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the twentieth century, they could organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers were inclined to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, while the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders.
It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression outside the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. When results were not falsified in the Ministry of the Interior, they were fixed at the local level. The system of electoral falsification rested on the social power of local town bosses, or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’). In the northern smallholding areas, the cacique was usually a moneylender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore who did not starve. Caciquismo ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened.
On occasion, overzealous local officials would produce majorities by more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, casual falsification became somewhat more difficult and, if the requisite number of peasant votes could not be mustered, the caciques were said sometimes to register as voters the dead in the local cemetery. In consequence, politics became an exclusive minuet danced out by a small, privileged minority. The nature of politics in the period of caciquismo is illustrated by the celebrated story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local casino (club). Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.
Challenges to the system did arise, however, and they were linked to the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization and to the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, especially in the countryside. Land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as the southern labourers came under the influence of anarchism. Giuseppe Fannelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, was sent to Spain by the First International in November 1868. His inspirational oratory soon secured him his own evangelists who took anarchism to one village after another. The message that land, justice and equality should be seized by direct action struck a chord among the starving day labourers, or braceros, and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fannelli’s eager converts took part in outbreaks of occasional violence, crop-burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, easily defeated revolutionary outbursts began to alternate with periods of apathy.
It was but a short step from direct action to individual terrorism. The belief that any action was licit against the tyranny of the state saw increasing levels of social violence. In January 1892, an army of braceros, armed only with scythes and sticks but driven by hunger, invaded and briefly held the town of Jerez before being driven out by the police and the Civil Guard. As anarchism took root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage reprisals from the forces of order. In August 1897 mass arrests and the use of torture provoked the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Cirilo Cánovas by a young Italian anarchist. A mass campaign against the torturing of anarchist prisoners in Barcelona’s Montjuich prison, the Spanish Bastille, saw the rise to fame of the buccaneering demagogue Alejandro Lerroux.
The system was rocked in 1898 by defeat at the hands of the USA and the loss of the remnants of empire, including Cuba. This was to have a catastrophic effect on the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. Barcelona was the scene of sporadic strikes and acts of terrorism by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Moreover, by the turn of the century, a modern capitalist economy was developing around the textile and chemical industries of Catalonia, the iron and steel foundries of the Basque Country and the mines of Asturias, although the Spanish economy remained essentially agrarian. Asturian coal was of lower quality and more expensive than British coal. Neither Catalan textiles nor Basque metallurgy could compete with British or German products in the international market, and their growth was stifled by the poverty of the Spanish domestic market. Nonetheless, even the limited growth of these industries in the north saw the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. Industrial development also witnessed the beginnings of nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country born of resentment that Basques and Catalans paid a very high proportion of Spain’s tax revenue but had little or no say in a government dominated by the agrarian oligarchy. In 1901 the Catalanist party known as the Lliga Regionalista won its first electoral victory.
In the two decades before the First World War the working-class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao and the coal miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). However, any possibility of overall unity within the organized workers’ movement was eliminated when the Socialists made the decision, in 1899, to move the headquarters of the UGT from the industrial capital, Barcelona, to the administrative capital, Madrid. To a large extent this cut off the Socialist option for many Catalan workers. Moreover, the PSOE was hobbled by its reliance on a rigid and simplistic French Marxism, mediated through the dead hand of the party’s rigid leader, Pablo Iglesias. The party was isolationist, committed to the view that the workers’ party should struggle for workers’ interests, convinced of the inevitability of revolution, without, of course, preparing for it.
The traditional dominance of the political establishment by representatives of the landed oligarchy was thus gradually being undermined by industrial modernization but it would not be surrendered easily. In addition to the differing challenges represented by powerful industrialists and the organized working-class movement, a more cerebral opposition to the system came from a small but influential group of middle-class Republicans. As well as distinguished intellectuals like the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, increasingly there were dynamic new political groupings. In Asturias, the moderate liberal Melquiades Álvarez worked for a democratization of the monarchical system, in 1912 creating the Reformist Party. Álvarez’s project for modernization attracted many young intellectuals who would later find prominence in the Second Republic, most notably the intensely scholarly man of letters Manuel Azaña, who would come to represent modernity and the European Spain of the distant future.
