Before reading this book, if you’d asked me what most people know about the Civil War, I would’ve answered with something like the following:
- people remember the war primarily for its impact: the installation and oppressions of Francoism;
- Francoism is a sibling of German and Italian forms of fascism appearing in interwar Europe; and
- for travelers on the political left, one’s description of the war’s course is something of a shibboleth.
I think the above are correct, but Graham’s book has prepared me to contextualize each a bit better. The focus of Graham’s book is not military history. As she says, the book’s purpose is to “explain the Civil War, its causes, course, and consequences”, both domestically and internationally. I haven’t read many “Very Short Introductions”, but if this book is representative of what one might find from other titles in the series, I think I’ll give them a fairer chance going forward.
I feel I learned the most with regards to the pre-war period. Spain’s empire was essentially gone by 1898, and this had several important effects. First, loss of its colonies meant Spain no longer had a captive market for its goods, triggering difficult political debates over how the country should modernize. Spain’s economy was still mostly agricultural, aside from a few industrialized cities (specifically in the northern regions, and in Barcelona). It was uncommon for the rural poor to have their own holdings, and most earned their sole income from working the estates of large landowners. Second, without an empire to police, the military’s traditional role of external defense was displaced.
Upon the second republic’s emergence in 1931 (following the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera), the new government’s goal was structural reform. Namely, it intended to reduce expenses by trimming the bloated officer corps, and reforming the military to ensure constitutional control. A secular education system was to be established; traditionally, the Catholic Church was responsible for public education, and clergy were compensated by the state for this role. Lastly, the Republican government wanted to stimulate industrial development within the country. To achieve this, they planned to use agrarian reform to increase the purchasing power of average citizens, thus cultivating an internal market. In substance, these pillars were meant to establish basic features of a politically liberal and economically democratic society. However, as Graham details, these reforms clearly threatened traditional power bases within Spanish society.
The Republican government was able to pass legislation, but its implementation was frequently resisted. Police personnel frequently held clientelistic relationships with local elites, and thus refused to enforce laws. Landowners refused to recognize redistributive social welfare initiatives, and left fields uncultivated. Elite hostility to reform and frustration from the landless poor increased the political temperature in the South, at the same time that the Great Depression was reaching Europe. The depression created further stress in urban Spain; unemployment and frustration due to state repression boiled over in an attempted general strike during 1934. The uprising was most intense in northern Asturias, and was violently supressed by colonial troops from Spanish Morocco (deployed under orders of Franco). Over 30,000 people were imprisoned in the aftermath; many were tortured. PSOE and union offices were closed, and those with left-leaning sympathies were discriminated against or fired en-masse. Here’s some of Graham’s analysis regarding the October Revolution (p. 42):
The events of October 1934 are often cited by historians as evidence that the Spanish Left could not be trusted to play by the democratic rules. But this assessment takes no account of the complexity of the events leading to October – not least the conservative government’s own flouting of the law as it sought to brake or reverse social reform. It also ignores the obvious lesson to be drawn from what happened in Asturias: that, in fact, the Left had no other option but to work for social change through legal, parliamentary channels. For in any showdown of physical force it simply could not prevail.
In 1936, a coalition of the Spanish Left regained power, promising to complete the reform program it had attempted between 1931-33. This electoral failure appears to have stimulated plans within Spain’s insular officer corps to pursue a military coup, which was carried out in July of 1936, triggering the broader Spanish Civil War. Outwardly, the military/nationalists claimed the coup was meant to stave off communist revolution, but this is disingenous. It’s clear the coup was an extralegal means to continue resisting social change, following the Right’s electoral failure.
This detail, and Graham’s observation that the pre-war period saw the development of a mix of culture wars (rural vs. urban life, secularity vs. religion, authoritarianism vs. political liberalism, traditional gender roles vs. the “new woman”) felt chilling to read from a book written in 2005. To an important degree, the Spanish Civil War was kindled from antipathy towards the experience of societal change. Unlike the Russian Revolution, a civil war emerging from the country’s disastrous involvement in the first world war (and an entailing famine), the Spanish Civil War was triggered by reactionary fears of status loss and disruption to traditional social order. This feels uncomfortably similar to my own country, which has been unable to exorcise right-wing anxieties over racial pluralism and tolerance for diverse expressions of gender and sexuality. The US has even experienced an autogolpe (and arguably two) in the past 4 years.
Aside from the pre-war period, Graham’s book reimpressed on me the extent to which the Republic was asymmetrically harmed by the diplomatic situation in Europe. The Republic did receive support from the Soviet Union (which provided materiel and technical support), and the International Brigades channeled a large number of volunteers who fought for the Republic’s cause. However, Graham highlights how a jointly dishonest pact of “non-intervention” between Britain, France, and Germany hamstrung the Republican government’s ability to acquire weapons and ammunition needed to defend itself. This same policy also prevented the Republic from searching German and Italian ships that were covertly delivering weapons to the Nationalists. Rather than being a story of failure due to disunity within its left-leaning government, the Republic was constantly on its back foot and undersupplied.
The last thing I want to note about the book is Graham’s discussion of Spanish memory culture. While I was aware that Spaniards were not able to openly talk about the war while Franco was in power, getting some dates and details straight were eye-opening for me. It wasn’t until after Spain’s entry into the EU that historians were able to begin working with archival records from the period (pp. 178-179):
The political opening in Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the tentative beginnings of archive-based histories of the Civil War – mostly undertaken by new generations of Spaniards. But their promise was at first severely curtailed, ironically, by the politics of the transition itself. The return of democracy had been agreed by the Francoist elites in return for a de facto political amnesty, the so-called ‘pact of silence’. No one would be called to account legally, nor would there be any equivalent of a truth and reconciliation commission. While this amnesty did not specifically cover the writing of history, in practice for a while it did. The same social fear of a recrudescent civil war, ceaselessly recalled and manipulated by the dictatorship, and present still in the shape of the firepower of the army and civilian extreme Right in the 1970s and early 1980s, was once again self-censoring Spaniards over what could and could not be said publicly about the war.
… The disadvantage of the democratic transition’s modus vivendi, whatever its necessity in other respects, was that those who had been obliged to be silent for nearly 40 years were once again required to accept that there would not be public recognition of their past lives or memories.
I have many half-formed thoughts about this, but I think the main thing that comes to mind is how hard it is for societies to heal from the damage they sustain, especially when it’s self-inflicted. I can’t say I have an adequate understanding of the weight of Spain’s civil war on its people, but reading about it has prompted me to reflect on the difficulties American society has with speaking about its failures (and self-inflicted wounds). Accountability seems so important as a salve, but it seems elusive everywhere these days. I wish I had read this book before visiting northern Spain; I plan on reading further on the country’s modern history (perhaps more of Dr. Graham’s work) before the next time I’m there.