The First Great Patriotic War: Spanish Communists and Nationalism, 1936–1939*

Abstract

A small advertisement in the first issue ofEspaña Popular, a weekly journal begun in February 1940 and edited by Spanish communists in exile, announced that it would be publishing chapters ofThe Terror of 1824.This 1877 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) was part of the second series of hisNational Episodesand served as a literary standard for reinforcing the master narrative of Spanish liberal nationalism at the turn of the century. Spanish communists consideredThe Terror of 1824a representative work of common patriotic heritage that should be preserved and publicized among their followers. Built around the absolutist repression of liberals after the anti-Napoleonic War in Spain, the novel was given an updated political meaning. An implicit parallel was traced between the fate of nineteenth-century liberals and the recent exile of Spanish communists, with the former cast as the progressive forerunners of the twentieth-century freedom fighters in Spain. This was coherent with the Republican and socialist interpretation of the Spanish history of that period.