New Interpretations of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

Michel Lefebvre and Rémi Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales. Images retrouvées (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 192 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 2-02-052390-6.Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 472 pp., £13.99 (pb), ISBN 0-521-45932-X.Javier Rodrigo, Los campos de concentración franquistas. Entre la historia y la memoria (Madrid: Siete Mares, 2003), 251 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 84-933012-05.Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), 388 pp., €18.70 (pb), ISBN 84-206-3706-8 (English edition: Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 304 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0299178641).The Spanish Civil War is among the most passionate conflicts of the long twentieth century, as one which arouses considerable emotion, in favour of either the Republican or the Francoist side. Its duration – far beyond what had been predicted in July 1936 by the military rebels and most international observers – together with its rapid conversion into an arena of international dispute between two opposing world-views, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’, made it of long-standing interest for world public opinion. Moreover, its internationalisation made it appear as the prelude to the Second World War. The survival of the Francoist dictatorship until 1975 contributed to the fact that the first historical analyses of the Spanish Civil War had to be written abroad and by foreign scholars, mostly French and Anglophone. Even now the Spanish conflict continues to be a matter of interest for non-Spanish scholars, who rely on a long-standing tradition of scholarship on the topic.