Spain: time to forget the forgetting
It is a truism that nobody comes out well from a civil war. One side wins, the other side loses, but the sense of loss is pervasive and long-lasting. The post-war society that emerges is infected for a generation at least. Memories become distorted; old hatreds are nurtured.
The Irish Civil War, fought between pro- and anti-Treaty forces following the British withdrawal in 1921 was a true brother-against-brother affair. Only now, a century on, is its legacy fading. In America, the war between the Union and the Confederacy that raged between 1861 and 1865 has its political echoes even today, with elections turning on issues such as Black Lives Matter and the tearing-down or retention of statues of Confederate generals.
In our own case, the Civil War took place so long ago, ending effectively with the execution of Charles I in 1649, that it is recollected mainly in re-enactments of old battles. But for decades after the fighting stopped, deep resentments were harboured, not only by Royalists, but by those on the Cromwellian side who felt that the old order had returned all too soon.
The adage that history is written by the victors is less obviously true in the case of civil war, in which the opposing sides are, by definition, drawn from the same overall community. Events are constantly reinterpreted, and resentments passed on through the generations. Yet, with the passage of time, a vein of truth – or at least of shared understanding – begins to emerge.
In the case of the Spanish Civil war, the shared understanding in the year 2021 is that General Francisco Franco – El Caudillo (the Leader) – was a skilful and audacious soldier, but a brute, whose cruelty and unforgiving nature place him securely alongside Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
The only reason he didn’t opt to fight alongside the Nazis in the Second World War was that his country was economically in ruins and lacked the resources to engage in pan-European warfare. Even then, he sent 100,000 soldiers (La División Azul) to the Eastern Front and would have allowed Hitler’s mountain troops to assault Gibraltar had it not been for the Führer’s poor negotiating skills allied to the fact that Spain’s generals had mostly been paid off by Churchill’s ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare.
In the decade and more that followed the restoration of “peace” in Spain, Franco was a monster. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners and suspected Republican sympathisers and their families were murdered, either directly or in slave labour camps that multiplied across the country. The Falange, a proto-fascist movement that flocked to Franco’s banner in 1936, remained the only lawful political party in Spain right up until the year of the dictator’s death in 1975.
For my esteemed colleague Gerald Warner to claim that Franco’s victory in 1939 did not instigate the darkest period in Spain’s contemporary history, but in fact performed “a signal service to civilisation” is thus, arguably, somewhat wide of the mark.
It is true that the Republic that preceded the dictatorship was deeply flawed. The leadership, under, first, Manuel Azaña, then Santiago Quiroga, hardly knew what it was doing. It knew that it wanted to stamp out Communism and Fascism, along with latent insurrection in the armed forces, but in doing so it only aggravated its opponents left and right and opened the door to Franco’s invasion from Morocco.
Thereafter, with Franco aided by both Hitler and Mussolini, the war, which was at first attritional in nature, gradually became a rout. Stalin’s ineffective intervention on the side of the Republic confirmed the Western allies in their belief that they should remain neutral, allowing the rebels to capture city after city and, finally, to enter Madrid in March 1939.
During the war, terrible things were done by both sides. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia records the inhuman nature of the anarchists in particular, which, as Warner points out, involved the burning of churches and the execution of hundreds of Catholic priests.
But the truth is, the wrong side won. The forces of the Republic, had they not been attacked by Franco and the Fascists, were committed to democratic government, split between the centre-left and centre-right. Though assailed from the far-Left and joined in battle by the anarchists, they remained essentially pro-Western, needing only the time and money to restore Spain to some kind of stability. They never got the chance. Instead, Spain was condemned to 36 years of unalloyed dictatorship marked by economic and cultural stagnation as well as by political stasis.
Today’s Spain has its problems, not least with Covid and Catalan nationalism. Its former king, Juan Carlos, once a hero, has ended up a source of acute embarrassment to his family and his people. Recent elections have been indecisive and government from the centre has generally been weak. But all is far from lost.
For Felix Bolaños, the current minister for relations with the Cortés and minister for democratic memory, to seek to ban public veneration of Franco seems to me a step too far. Free speech demands the right to be objectionable. History cannot be repudiated, it can only be placed where it belongs, in the past. But for many years, it was the other way round: no one was allowed to mention the war. As things stand, the Franco years are fading fast. The “Old Shirts” of the Falange are mostly dead and their successors can be disposed of by the usual democratic methods. It is time to move on.
Walter Ellis’s Second World War thriller, Franco’s Map, is available in paperback.