Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Maps

  Maps

  Chronology

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

  Prologue

  List of Political Parties and Organizations

  Foreword

  JULY 1936

  Friday, 17 July

  Saturday, 18 July

  Sunday, 19 July

  Militancies 1 : Left republican schoolmaster

  Monday, 20 July

  FEBRUARY TO JULY 1936

  Militancies 2 : Falangist farmer

  Militancies 3: CNT day-labourer

  JULY 1936

  Monday, 20 July: the rising frustrated

  JULY TO SEPTEMBER 1936

  Militancies 4: Carlist peasant

  Episodes 1 : Attack

  Militancies 5: Monarchist student

  AUTUMN 1936

  The Basque country

  Episodes 2: Flight

  Barcelona: collectivization

  Militancies 6: CNT textile worker

  Asturias

  Militancies 7: Socialist railwayman

  Militancies 8: Communist peasant

  Episodes 3: Repression

  WINTER 1936

  Episodes 4: Return

  Militancies 9: FUE-JSU education militiaman

  Madrid: revolution

  Episodes 5: In hiding

  Episodes 6: Liberation

  Episodes 7: Escape

  SPRING 1937

  Militancies 10: Falangist leader

  Militancies 11: CNT column leader

  Militancies 12: POUM leader

  SUMMER TO AUTUMN 1937

  Militancies 13: PNV engineer

  Militancies 14: CEDA lawyer

  Militancies 15: Madrid priest

  Asturias: end of the war in the north

  Episodes 8: Fugitives

  Episodes 9: Silences

  Episodes 1O: Evacuees

  WINTER 1937 TO SUMMER 1938

  Barcelona: Italian air raids

  Militancies 16: Lliga Catalana lawyer

  Episodes 11: Imbroglios

  Madrid: life under siege

  Militancies 17: Socialist commissar-inspector

  Episodes 12: Crossing the lines

  Episodes 13: Execution

  Episodes 14: Survivor

  Episodes 15: Death-watch

  WINTER 1938 TO SPRING 1939

  Madrid: civil war within the war

  Militancies 18: Socialist youth political commissar

  Madrid: surrender

  Alicante: tragedy

  Vae Victis!

  THE REPUBLIC 1931–6: POINTS OF RUPTURE

  A. The land

  B. The petty bourgeoisie and the religious question

  C. Two nationalisms

  D. Libertarians and the republic

  E. October 1934, the Popular Front, orthodox and dissident communists

  F. The army

  Author’s note

  Glossary of Spanish words

  Acknowledgements

  APPENDIX

  A. Collectivization and foreign capital

  B. Non-libertarian collectivization

  Bibliography

  Name Index

  General Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Spain today has been shaped by the outcome of its intensely bitter civil war (1936-9). Here are the recollections of the participants – the landowners and landless labourers, factory owners and workers, students, housewives, priests, miners, soldiers, as well as members of all the political groupings.

  We discover what civil war, revolution and counter–revolution actually felt like from inside both camps. The contours of the war take shape through the words of the eyewitnesses. The atmosphere of events is vividly recaptured. And through the lived experience of the participants is revealed the uniquely tragic essence of all civil war.

  About the Author

  Ronald Fraser was born in 1930 in Germany, educated in England, the US and Switzerland, and has worked on Spanish contemporary history, among other things, for the past 25 years.

  He first went to Spain in 1957, living in the then isolated mountain village of Mijas, Malaga, to write a novel, published in 1960. Thereafter, dividing his time between Spain and London, he collected accounts of personal work experiences in Britain, first published in New Left Review and subsequently by Penguin as Work and Work 2.

  In 1970 he wrote In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes, an oral history of the last socialist mayor of Mijas who had emerged from 30 years of hiding after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War.

  This was followed by The Pueblo: The Story of a Village on the Costa del Sol in which, through the personal accounts of a representative sample of villagers, Fraser described the changes which had affected Mijas over the previous 75 years – most notably foreign tourism.

  He then spent five years working on Blood of Spain.

  Subsequently he wrote In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933–1945, an autobiographical memoir in which the servants’ memories of the English manor where he was brought up revealed an unspoken history of his own childhood. Relinquishing the role of questioner to be questioned himself in psychoanalysis, Fraser interwove in this book both techniques of recalling the past.

  After publishing in 1988 an international comparative oral history of the 1960s student movements Fraser returned to his original interest in Spain where he is currently researching a history of the Spanish people’s role in the Peninsular War.

  Ronald Fraser is married to a Spanish historian, Aurora Bosch, and has taught Spanish history and oral history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  LIST OF MAPS

  Regions of Spain

  Six stages of the war

  Major areas of political affiliation under the republic

  Latifundist Spain and Impoverished smallholders in 1936

  Street Maps: Madrid

  Barcelona

  Oviedo

  Source: G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, Cambridge University Press

  FOR R v d B

  Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

  On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary year of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, King Juan Carlos of Spain solemnly lighted an eternal flame to the dead of both sides at a monument in Madrid. The ceremony was attended by the socialist prime minister and leading civil and military authorities. Erected in honour of the people of Madrid who rose against Napoleon’s troops in 1808, the monument henceforth commemorates all those who have fallen for Spain: the republican dead of the Spanish Civil War have at last joined the dead of their former nationalist enemies, and together they are honoured with those killed in all the intervening conflicts. In the stillness of that perpetual flame, the most bitter civil war in modern West European times has been laid to rest, become ‘history’.

  The fact that little more than a decade ago such an act of reconciliation would have been unthinkable under General Franco, victor of the civil war, is itself significant. For forty years, ‘by the Grace of God’ Caudillo of Spain, he refused even minimal Christian recognition to his enemy’s dead; for forty years he executed, imprisoned and persecuted the living among them. To his death in 1975 he remained ruthlessly determined to rid the nation for ever of ‘pernicious’ parliamentary democracy, of ‘subversive’ working-class organizations and parties, of ‘divisive’ regional autonomies, of anything tha
t threatened his authoritarian concept of the fatherland.

  In the decade since then, a parliamentary democracy has arisen like a phoenix from the bitter ashes of his legacy. The left-wing parties he vanquished in the war, outlawed and repressed with ferocity throughout his reign, are legal—even governing—parties; the monarchy which, within his corporativist-style state and rubber-stamp parliament, was to perpetuate his regime, has turned itself into a constitutional monarchy; regional autonomy is enshrined in the constitution; and despite attempts by small, albeit important, sectors of the army to reverse the current of history, the armed forces as a whole remain loyal to their commander-in-chief, the king.

  Franco’s authoritarian institutions had long outlived their purpose and were swept aside in the years immediately after his death; but the economic system his uprising and subsequent dictatorship were designed to foster and protect remains. That, after all, underneath the corporativist and Catholic rhetoric, was what Franco’s war was about: to defend capitalism and its values from the perceived threat of revolution from below. It remained his regime’s purpose to the end—and in that it was successful. His victory in the war and his authoritarian state gave an exiguous bourgeoisie the time and freedom to accumulate, on the back of a brutally repressed working class and peasantry, the resources which permitted the economic take-off of the 1960s. In this, his anti-communism during the cold war of the previous decade paid him handsome dividends, not surprisingly, from the United States. Later, mass tourism and the mass emigration of impoverished Spanish workers to the rest of Western Europe brought in the foreign exchange necessary to consolidate the take-off.

  Like the civil war, the Franco era has been consigned to oblivion by most of today’s political rulers in Spain. Understandably, they look to the democratic freedoms of the present and a European future rather than to the incubus of a dictatorial past which proclaimed itself the incarnation of ‘eternal Spanish values’. Values enforced in concentration camps after the civil war, and later in police cells and prisons, on all those who lived to oppose them.

  To turn one’s back on the past—a past like this, anyway—is always a temptation. But to do so is to forget that the past cannot be ‘forgotten’, only repressed; to forget that Spain today, and a generation of Spaniards, have been shaped by the outcome of the civil war. Whether in opposition, passive acceptance or fervid support, every Spaniard over twenty-one today spent at least a part of his or her formative years under the ancien régime. To deny the past, rather than to confront it, is to deny not only history but a generation’s experience.

  This book is about remembering. Not the post-war Franco years, but what led to them: the civil war, the social revolution in the republican camp, the insurgent military’s barbarous repression, the conflicting loyalties, aims and aspirations that moved people on both sides to fight in a total, fratricidal class war. A war precipitated by a military uprising in defence of the established order, which was foiled by the heroic resistance of workers and peasants who then seized the opportunity to try to create a new, often visionary, social order out of the chaos. Their revolution failed in its essential revolutionary task of finding the means to win the war; the insurgent military, under Franco, showed greater coherence in their aims. In their recollections gathered here, landowners and landless laborers, factory owners and workers, students, housewives, priests, miners, soldiers, as well as members of all the political groupings: socialists, falangists, anarchists, monarchists, communists, dissident communists, Basque and Catalan nationalists, reveal the essence of the war through their own lived experience.

  If the roots of that war in the Spain of the 1930s seem remote to us today, it is because capitalist development has tempered the antagonistic style of class relationships (without, of course, changing their fundamentals), has modulated the virulence of ideological commitment, moderated expectations. Spain in the 1930s was an economically under-developed country, part of what today would be called the third world. It was a society still dominated by an agrarian oligarchy, lacking a strong national bourgeoisie, with a combative but politically fragmented urban and rural working class—a society not yet sedimented by the routines, disciplines and rewards of modern capitalism. A measure of the difference can be seen in the reaction to violence then and now. In the labile society of the 1930s, violence on a scale less than that wreaked by the Basque separatist ETA today was sufficient to frighten large sectors of the dominant classes into supporting the military rising.

  The experiences related here can thus tell us not only about how the Spanish Civil War arose and was fought but, by analogy, something about a number of developing countries in more recent times. Brazil and Chile, which escaped civil war but not military dictatorships, in the 1960s and 1970s; El Salvador in the 1980s … History does not repeat itself exactly, but it has a way of recurring. This book is dedicated to those who are not prepared to forget, to those who acknowledge that understanding the past is also a key to understanding the future.

  —Ronald Fraser

  London, January 1986

  Prologue

  UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT

  The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 was the fourth (some will say fifth) in a century. The struggles of the nineteenth century revolved around many of the same basic problems of Spanish society and state which led to the explosion of the 1930s. A brief survey of the former may, thus, assist an understanding of the last, and most total, of these civil wars.

  The foremost of the underlying problems, indubitably, was the weakness of capitalist development. The nineteenth-century civil wars between Carlists and liberals were part of the long struggle in the overthrow of absolutism and the consolidation of a bourgeois state. The relative strengths of the two opposing social forces can be gauged by the fact that these wars stretched intermittently over more than forty years, of which some sixteen were consumed in actual fighting at different levels of intensity. In the name of a past Catholic unity of Spain (as opposed to a future capitalist unification of the national market) and of a traditional Catholic (as opposed to a constitutional) monarchy, a northern rural resistance fuelled the Carlist counter-revolution to the advance of liberalism. Significantly, the first of these wars, from 1833 to 1840, aroused the conscience of Europe which felt – as it was to do again in 1936 – that the great issues of European civilization were being fought out on Spanish battlefields. In the one case, as in the other, as Raymond Carr has pointed out, the projection distorted and over-simplified the issues at stake.1

  Liberalism proved the stronger (initially in no little part thanks to British and French aid, which included volunteer forces) and the Carlist cause was overcome. But the underlying problems were not fully resolved. Resistance to the liberalizing concepts of a fully developed bourgeois democracy remained an important factor as was seen again in the 1930s when not only did the Carlists re-emerge in strength but other anti-democratic forces arose. This resistance, moreover, infected the victors of the wars, the new nineteenth-century ruling class.

  The unevenness of capitalist development made the introduction of an advanced bourgeois democracy problematic at the best of times. It precluded, for example, the ascent of a national bourgeoisie to the helm of the nineteenth-century state. This, in turn, contributed to the failure to weld together a modern, bourgeois state from a nation which, since its inception in the fifteenth century, had been prone to centrifugal tendencies. The latter were reinforced by the advance of industrial development in the geographically peripheral north and north-eastern seaboards which coincided with a growth of local Catalan and Basque nationalist sentiment directed against an agrarian and centralist ruling class in Madrid.

  Three ‘national’ Spanish institutions attempted to make good this developmental deficiency: all failed. The monarchy never succeeded in acquiring the respect of the masses, never became a ‘useful symbol of community’, in Pierre Vilar’s phrase.2 Nor, by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, was the church better placed to pla
y this role. The identity between Catholic orthodoxy and Spanish national ‘cohesiveness’, which had been forged in the fifteenth-century reconquest of Moorish Spain, no longer held, except for the Carlists (although later the ruling class would refurbish it for lack of an alternative ideology). Having occupied a dominant position – economic but above all ideological – under the ancien régime, the church moved into an immobilist, reactionary posture in the face of liberalism which threatened it on both scores. From this period anti-clericalism became an overt and recurrent fact of Spanish history: 1835 marked the first massacres of clergy and church burnings, on rumours that monks had started a cholera epidemic by poisoning drinking water. (The persistence of anti-clericalism can be judged by the fact that one hundred years later a rumour that monks had given poisoned sweets to children was still capable of driving a mob to attack and burn churches.)

  The last of the institutions, the army, started the nineteenth century as a liberal force, and owed much of its importance as a political power to its role in defeating the Carlist counter-revolution. But as the century progressed, it turned increasingly conservative. A ‘state within a state’, it came to see itself as the incarnation of the national will, the bulwark of moral and social order, the defender of territorial unity. As such, it expressed not the popular will but a centralizing force ready to substitute for an as yet uncertain ruling class; the presence of the army officer in politics reflected the absence of the businessman. When, in the last quarter of the century, the military withdrew from direct political intervention, it was in order to stand as the ultimate power behind the new political alliance of the old landowning class and upper bourgeoisie which took control of the state.

  It was, indeed, a pronunciamiento which ushered in this new alliance, sweeping aside an unstable republic which lasted barely twelve months (1873–4). The army’s previous overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in 1868 had unleashed a revolutionary process. Attempts by General Prim to contain it by instituting a new constitutional monarchy failed; so too did the subsequent republican regime under petty bourgeois leadership. In the revolution’s final stages, due in large part to anarchist influence, sovereign ‘cantons’ were established in a number of cities, threatening the nation’s unity as well as ruling class domination. Frightened, the upper bourgeoisie sealed its pact with the old landowning class to put an end to it. The army restored the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII.