The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past

By Anindya Raychaudhuri

This book features cutting, edge, interdisciplinary research on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War by established and new scholars from across the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783160235

Book preview

Introduction

ANINDYA RAYCHAUDHURI

In October 2008, journalist Tom Whipple of The Times in London was in Denver, Colorado, shadowing grassroots workers for the Democratic Party on the campaign trail in the US presidential elections. In the article describing his experiences, he used a rather remarkable metaphor:

Ms Jenkins has a full-time job in Washington DC but has taken three weeks off work, hired a dogsitter and – along with scores of other volunteers from safe Democrat states – come to help traditionally-Republican Colorado turn blue. This is their Spanish Civil War – and in the final week of the election, the Democrat machine is recruiting in a way that has perhaps not been seen since the 1972 McGovern campaign. (Whipple, 2008)

No explanatory gloss was added to the article, so it is not self-evidently clear what the metaphor of the Spanish Civil War is intended to mean. Whipple and The Times, then, clearly expected their readership to know what the metaphor of the Spanish Civil War might mean in this context. It is quite remarkable that a war that took place just over seventy-five years ago and did not officially involve either Britain or the United States can still have such a resonance in the Anglophone world today.

The year 2008 saw Spain making international headlines often, so it is perhaps not all that surprising that Whipple would reach for the Spanish Civil War as a metaphor. In March of the same year, the socialist government under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had just been re-elected for a second term in office, despite passing the hugely controversial ‘Ley de Memoria Histórica’ (law of historical memory) only six months previously. The ‘memory boom’ associated with this law, which features in many of the chapters in this volume, led, perhaps, to a sense that Spain was finally in a position to be able to negotiate the traumas of its past.

The year 2008 also happened to be an exceptionally good year for Spanish sports. Carlos Sastre of Madrid won the Tour de France; Rafael Nadal of Majorca won Wimbledon and, perhaps most important of all, the Spanish football team shrugged off the tag of perennial under-achievers to win the European Championships, with David Villa from Asturias winning the golden boot for scoring the highest number of goals and Xavi from Catalunya winning the ‘player of the tournament’ in the process. During the final match against Germany, the BBC commentary team ascribed Spain’s success to the fact that players from Barcelona and Madrid were united for the first time. It is impossible to say how aware the commentator was about the historical significance of the conflict between Barcelona and Madrid, but 2008 did seem to somehow mark a national coming-of-age, leading to a newer, more stable and secure Spain which felt confident enough to discuss historical sins and achieve closure.

The period, however, also saw an increased polarisation in the various memorial activities of Spain, from the war of obituaries discussed by Lopez in this volume to the periodic fascicles that Wydell examines, through to the mass beatifications of Catholic victims of the Spanish Civil War that Casanova, among others, discuss. When memory is as contested as it is in Spain, cultural activities that memorialise – from literature and cinema to media to monuments – inevitably take on deeply politicised tones that arguably make any kind of national closure even more elusive. Given the polarised nature of Spanish politics today, and the historic roots of this polarisation, one may reasonably wonder about the political dynamics of the impulse towards closure in the first place.

It is quite remarkable that a war that took place over seventy years ago should still have such a resonance not just in Spain but around the world today, especially when, in the words of Paul Preston, ‘in geographical and human scale, let alone technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts’ (Preston, 1996, p. 1). Estimates of the number of books on the subject (fiction and non-fiction) range from ‘over fifteen thousand’ (ibid., p. 1) to over 35,000 (Celada et al., 2009, p. 79), and many hundreds are published every year. Many of these books are of foundational importance to the conception and structure of the present volume. Space prevents a detailed examination of the legacy of scholarship that this volume hopes to contribute to but two publications merit special mention. The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, edited by Chris Ealham and Michael Richards, and Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity, edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, have proved inspirational for this editor.

Anglophone scholarly legacy of the Spanish Civil War has included at least three major academic conferences in the British Isles in the last four years (including the one that led to this volume),¹ two major touring exhibitions in the last two years,² along with numerous other smaller seminars, conferences, memorial events, film festivals and other educational and commemorative events. There are large memorial organisations on both sides of the Atlantic – the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Britain and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in the USA.³ These organisations have been active in constructing and preserving the memorial legacy of the war.

How and why do we remember the Spanish Civil War? What kind of narratives do we construct while memorialising, and why? What is the relationship between memory of and the history of the war? How far is our memory affected by the way the war is represented in cultural texts? How does the contested nature of the historiography and collective memory of the Spanish Civil War invite us to reconsider the theory and practice of the study of history, memory and cultural representation? These are just some of the questions we were seeking to address when we decided to organise in February 2008, under the joint auspices of the Welsh Centre for International Affairs and Cardiff University, an international conference, at which earlier forms of most of these chapters were originally presented. The present volume shares the same aims as did the original conference, and arises from a deeply felt need to examine the many diverse often contradictory and conflicting ways in which the legacy of the Spanish Civil War can be felt in culture (defined in the widest possible way) today.

The opening chapters of this volume examine various aspects of the history of the War. Julián Casanova examines the role played by the Catholic Church in supporting Franco and interrogates its position in Spain today. Eric R. Smith is interested in the international aspect of the war, focusing on the gendered nature of the ‘Aid to Spain’ movement in the USA. The following three chapters can be loosely described as ‘micro-histories’ – each uses a combination of conventional and alternative sources (importantly including oral history) to illuminate individual people or events, and therefore privilege stories that have often been neglected. John D. Mehta discusses the life and legacy of an individual member of the International Brigades – a Cardiff bookshop manager named Gilbert Taylor. Using information gained from his letters and by speaking to people who knew him, Mehta reconstructs the life of this brigader who went to Spain in 1937 and was killed six months later. David Convery focuses on the Imperial War Museum’s audio archives to showcase the experiences of British and Irish inmates of San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp near Burgos. Andrés Arenas and Enrique Girón concentrate on the events in Málaga in February 1937, which saw 10,000 flee from Franco’s advancing army and walk 200 kilometres to Almería. By using a mixture of written and oral history these chapters shed new light on events that are significant in themselves, but have been overshadowed by other, more famous events.

The five following chapters are most directly concerned with the multifaceted issues of memory. Clare Wydell uses magazines such as El Mundo and monuments such as the Valle de los Caídos to investigate what she sees as the ‘performative’ memory of the Spanish Civil War. By examining the large number of obituaries that appeared in Spanish newspapers in 2005 of those who died during the war almost seventy years previously, Helena López demonstrates that press can become as controversial a public medium when it is concerned with history as it is when reporting current events. Mercedes Aguirre continues the focus on the media and print-culture in particular, as she interrogates the construction of Spanish ‘otherness’ in reports in the American media of the siege of the Alcázar. In my own contribution, I shift the focus onto the effect of memorialisation in cultural texts, examining cinema, poetry, autobiographical prose and fiction, and identifying and analysing the repeated use of dust and earth as a symbol. I argue that this is an integral part of the memorialisation of the conflict.

The Spanish Civil War is famous as the most literary war in human history and, with the sole possible exception of the Second World War, has produced the largest number of books – both fiction and non-fiction – as well as affecting production in music, cinema, theatre and almost any other field of cultural production. The final six chapters can be loosely grouped as examples of studies in cultural representation. Patricia Rae examines poetical responses to the Spanish Civil War or ‘elegies’. By comparing the poetry that emerged from the Spanish Civil War to that from the two world wars, Rae argues that the Spanish Civil War poetry should be incorporated into the story of British literary modernism. Stephen Hopkins takes as his primary text the writings of Jorge Semprún, and argues that the collective memory of the republican defeat has been a constant part of Semprún’s identity, both as a man and as a writer. Sarah Leggott examines the way the war is represented in recent novels by contemporary Spanish women novelists such as Chacón and Caso while Edward Quipp re-visits one of the most famous poems written about the war in English – Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’. Quipp argues that this poem is not only one of the most famous depictions of the Spanish Civil War but represents a landmark in twentieth-century poetry by setting a precedent for subsequent attempts to render the reality of war in verse as a moment of political commitment. Rob Stradling focuses on the representational space of the opposing political side, discussing the work of three figures – the poet Dionisio Ridruejo, the painter Alfonso Ponce de León and the composer Federico Elizalde, who were all part of various strands of the political right during the Spanish Civil War. By examining the neglect these figures face in contemporary criticism, Stradling argues that Spanish Civil War scholarship is tempered by contemporary attitudes to fascism. If Stradling analyses the artistic output of the far right, Sharif Gemie does the same for the far left. He looks at the visual propaganda of the Spanish anarchists, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of visual sources to help understand political movements such as twentieth-century anarchism.

It is important in preparing a multi-author volume on the Spanish Civil War to reflect the contested and intensely political nature of public discourse and scholarship in this field. Certainly, all the contributors to this volume fundamentally disagree with each other on many points – this is as it should be. The aim in collecting these essays in one volume is emphatically not to pretend to provide a unified, totalising narrative about the war but to allow for as many conflicting views as possible. The chapters then approach the subject matter from a wide variety of political principles, theoretical positions and methodological approaches.

The contributors represent both professional academics and non-academics, scholars working in history, social sciences, literature, art history, music and film studies. The intention has been to make it as polyphonic as possible, both in terms of the contributors and in terms of their sources – written and oral, conventional and alternative, high culture and popular culture. The legacy of the Spanish Civil War has been deep, multifaceted and international, and with examinations of the legacy of the war in various fields of cultural production in Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and the United States, I think that this volume represents an important, multidisciplinary intervention in an already rich and ever-growing field of scholarship.

The essays, taken as a whole, demonstrate that narratives of memory are inevitably culturally constructed, through representations of the conflict in the wide variety of discursive spaces examined in the book. They demonstrate that these narratives of memory are always contested, and the conflict that is being commemorated necessarily reflects the conflict over the nature, content and ownership of the commemorative acts themselves. The fight to gain control over the collective memory through cultural interventions (of which this book and the conference that preceded it are also examples) is, ultimately, a fight that is as significant for the politics of the twenty-first century as it is for the history and politics of the 1930s.

Notes

1 ‘War without limits: Spain 1936–1939 and beyond’ at the University of Bristol in July 2006; ‘Spanish Civil War: history, memory, representation’ at the Welsh Centre for International Affairs, Cardiff in February 2008 and ‘ Agonía Republicana : living the death of an era’ at Trinity College Dublin in July 2009.

2 ‘Wise and foolish dreamers: Wales and the Spanish Civil War’ (2008) and ‘ Antifascistas : British and Irish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War’ (2010).

3 See http://www.international-brigades.org.uk/ ; http://www.alba-valb.org/ (accessed 8 August 2012).

Bibliography

Celada, A. R. et al. (2009). Los Internacionales: English-speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona: Warren & Pell.

Ealham, C. and Richards, M. (eds) (2005). The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graham, H. and Labanyi, J. (eds) (1996). Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Preston, P. (1996). A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. London: Fontana Press.

Whipple, T. (2008). ‘Barack Obama’s campaign machine kicks into gear’, in The Times Online, 27 October 2008. Available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5019505. ece (accessed 23 June 2010).

Chapter 1

Franco, the Catholic Church and the Martyrs

¹

JULIÁN CASANOVA

Franco’s dictatorship was the result of a civil war, and in this long, bloody dictatorship resides the distinguishing feature of the history of twentieth-century Spain when compared to other capitalist countries in Europe. It is true that Spain, unlike other countries, never had the chance to benefit from an international democratic intervention to block the authoritarian outcome of the war, which is a key factor for understanding the long duration of the dictatorship. But it is worth emphasising, above any other consideration, the winning side’s commitment to vengeance and its denial of pardon and reconciliation, as well as to hang on to the power provided by arms for as long as possible. The military, the Catholic Church and Franco made peaceful coexistence fairly difficult for several decades.

It is difficult to understand the long duration of this dictatorship unless one takes into account the repression, the army’s rallying around Franco and the international context of the cold war that played into the regime’s hands. But the Catholic Church’s contribution was also considerable. The twentieth century has seen no other authoritarian regime, fascist or otherwise, and there have been some of varying colours and intensity, in which the church has taken on such blatant political responsibility for, and policing of, the social control of the citizens as in Spain. Certainly not the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany or the Catholic Church in fascist Italy. And in Finland and Greece, after their civil wars, the Lutheran and Orthodox churches signed alliances with the right-wing winning sides, defending patriotism, traditional moral values and patriarchal authority in the family. Yet, in neither of these cases were there any calls for vengeance and bloodshed as strong or as tenacious as was the case with the Catholic Church in Spain. It is true that no other church had been persecuted so cruelly and violently as the Spanish Catholic Church. But, once the war was over, the memory of so many martyrs gave strength to resentment instead of pardon and encouraged vengeance among the clergy (see Casanova, 2005 and Raguer, 2007).

Three basic ideas sum up my thoughts on this issue. First, the Catholic Church became involved and steeped in the ‘legal’ system of repression organised by Franco’s dictatorship after the civil war. Secondly, the Catholic Church endorsed and glorified this violence, not only because the blood of its thousands of martyrs cried out for vengeance, but also, and above all, because this authoritarian outcome cancelled out, at a stroke, the major ground won by laity prior to the military coup in July 1936 and gave it a powerful authority and monopoly beyond its dreams. Finally, the symbiosis between religion, nation and the Caudillo was decisive for the survival and maintaining of the dictatorship following the defeat of the fascist powers in the Second World War.

The fall of the monarchy in April 1931 was a genuine disaster for the church. It hated the republic, its system of parliamentary representation, anti-clerical legislation, people power, in which Catholic values no longer held sway. It mobilised the population, giving shelter under the ideological umbrella of Catholicism to a mass movement of the dominant classes, the most conservative sectors, who were concerned about their own order as well as that of the church, although in the history of Spain, during the republican period as well as afterwards, order and the church had always gone together, and would continue to do so.

The Crusade

During 18–19 July 1936 a military uprising, supported by right-wing civilians and militia organisations, erupted in Spanish Morocco and rapidly spread to metropolitan Spain. From the outset, the church and most Catholics placed all of their considerable resources at the disposal of the insurgent military. The military did not have to ask the church for its support, which it offered gladly, nor did the church have to take its time in deciding. Both parties were aware of the benefit of the role played by the religious element: the military because they wanted order, the church because it was defending the faith.

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history, and in memory, for the way it dehumanised its adversaries and for the horrific violence that it generated. If we go by the meticulous research carried out in the last few years, at least 150,000 were killed during the war: close to 100,000 in the zone controlled by the military rebels and somewhat fewer than 60,000 in the republican zone. Figures aside, we are fully aware of the principal manifestations of this terror in the ‘two cities’, one ‘heavenly’, the other ‘earthly’, evoked by the bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel, quoting Saint Augustine (Moreno, 1961, pp. 688–708). The entrance of the church onto the stage, far from reducing the violence, increased it, blessing it on the one hand and kindling the popular feeling that had broken out against the clergy at the same time as the defeat by the military uprising on the other.

The church was delighted with this ‘providential’ uprising, as it was termed by Cardinal Primate Isidro Gomá in the report he sent to the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, on 13 August 1936. It was all the more delighted that it was arms that ensured ‘material order’, eliminated the unfaithful and restored ‘freedom’ (cited in Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, 2001, pp. 80–9).

The clergy’s complicity with this military and fascist terror was absolute and did not need republican anti-clericalism to make itself known publicly. From Gomá to the priests who lived in Zaragoza, Salamanca or Granada, all were aware of the massacres, heard the shots, saw how people were dying, with the relatives of prisoners or the missing coming to them in desperation, seeking help or charity. The clergy’s usual response to all this was silence, either voluntary or imposed by superiors, or else accusation or denunciation. This is how Franco’s church emerged, which identified with him, admired him as the Caudillo, as an envoy sent from God to re-establish the consubstantiality of traditional Spanish culture with the Catholic faith.

On 1 July 1937, the Spanish Catholic hierarchy officially signed its blood pact with the cause of General Franco, in the ‘Carta colectiva de los Obispos españoles a los de todo el mundo con motivo de la Guerra de España’.² Written at Franco’s request by Cardinal Isidro Gomá, it was endorsed by all the Spanish bishops, except two: one Basque (Mateo Múgica) and one Catalan (Françesc Vidal i Barraquer) (Moreno, 1961, pp. 726–41).

There was nothing new in the letter that had not already been said by many bishops and priests in the previous twelve months since Franco’s rising. But the letter, immediately translated into several languages, had a great impact worldwide. The publicity the letter received led to greater acceptance of this Manichaean version of the Spanish war, in which the armed plebiscite of the National Movement embodied the virtues of Christian tradition, and the republican government represented all the vices inherent in Russian Communism.

As well as propagating the lie that the military rising had put a stop to a definite plan for communist revolution, while speaking of the calm and justice that reigned in ‘national’ territory, the bishops included another matter of capital importance, which is still, more than seventy years later, the official position of the Spanish Catholic Church hierarchy. The church, they said, was the ‘innocent, peaceful, defenseless’ victim of the war and, ‘rather than perish totally at the hands of communism’, had supported the national cause, which safeguarded the ‘fundamental principles of society’ (Moreno, 1961, pp. 726–41).

The Carta colectiva won the support of some 900 bishops in thirty-two countries. Its unconditional endorsement of the national cause served as a definitive argument for Catholics and conservatives throughout the world, largely because of its shameless silence about the exterminating violence that Franco’s side had set in motion since the first moment of the rising. The Carta demonised the enemy, and put a seal of approval on the sponsorship of the war as a ‘holy crusade’ against the republic’s assault on the church and the nation.

Both Franco and the church were strengthened by the letter. The conversion of the war into a religious affair, disregarding the political and social aspect, gave Franco licence to go on killing. Franco’s then director of propaganda, Javier Conde, said that the letter had ‘achieved more than all the rest of us in the propaganda area’ (Bolado, 1995, p. 159).

Victory and totalitarianism

On 27 March 1939, the Francoist army entered Madrid, and three days later, on 1 April, the war came to an end. Franco’s victory in the war meant the absolute triumph of Catholic Spain. Catholicism once more became the official state religion. All the republican measures that were cursed by the church and the right wing were repealed. From that moment, the church was to enjoy a long period of well-being, with a dictatorship that protected it, showered it with privileges, defended its doctrines and crushed its enemies.

After the war, the victors settled scores with the losers, endlessly reminding them of the killings of priests and the profanation of churches, while ignoring the bloody cleansing that the right had practised in the war and went on practising afterward.

For some time, fascism and Catholicism were compatible, in statements and daily practice, in the projects promoted by the rebels and in the form of government and way of life imposed by the winning side. Fascism was ‘a virile protest against an absurd democracy and rotten liberalism’, wrote Eloy Montero in 1939, in his book Los estados modernos y la nueva España (cited in Botti, 1992, pp. 102–3). The Jesuit, Constantino Bayle, wrote in a similar vein when the war was at its height, delighted by the fact that fascism was the name given to the overthrow of the parliamentary system and universal suffrage, the elimination of political parties and trade unions, the ‘abomination’ of democracy, the ‘eradication’ of the ‘poison seed of Judaeo-Masonry’. If this was fascism, then ‘the National Uprising, the Government of Franco, and the whole of Christian Spain’ were fascist (Bayle, 1937, p. 326).

The Spain that the victors constructed was a territory particularly suited for this harmonisation of the modern authoritarian current with glorious tradition. The feeling of uncertainty and fear caused by the reform measures of the republic, the anti-clericalism and expropriation and destruction following the military coup was used by the military, the church and reactionary forces to mobilise and obtain a social base willing to respond to what were interpreted as clear symptoms of de-Christianisation and national disintegration. The army, the Falange and the church represented these victors, and from them came the upper echelons of government, the system of local power and the faithful servants of the administration. These three bureaucracies vied with each other to increase their spheres of influence, and recent research has noted these