The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. Paul Preston
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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
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