The Spanish Republic and Civil War

The enormous literature on the Spanish Revolution and civil war is dominated by a political, military or diplomatic perspective. Few historians, whether Communist, Republican,franquista, anarchist, syndicalist, Trotskyist, or even those lacking a clear political perspective, have written a social history of the events leading to the Revolution and the Revolution itself. This article will attempt partially to fill the vacuum by analyzing the economic and social development of Barcelona, the capital of Spain's most economically advanced region, Catalonia, and its most important city. The social and economic development of Barcelona in Catalonia will be interwoven with the story of the two main actors in the drama of the Spanish Revolution - the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the working class. The study of their relationship will aid our understanding of workers' control of the factories and workshops of Barcelona from July 1936 to the end of 1938. The historiography on workers' control in Barcelona has largely ignored a fundamental problem in Spanish history: the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie. This weakness is twofold. Politically, the Spanish bourgeoisie never forced a lasting separation of the Church from the state and the military from the civilian government; and economically it created neither a viable agriculture nor productive industry in most of Spain. While the Catalan bourgeoisie had industrialized to some extent and had produced a respectable textile industry in the nineteenth century, by the opening of the twentieth

Book Review| January 01 2011 The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. William A. Pelz William A. Pelz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2011) 5 (1): 135–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William A. Pelz; The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1 January 2011; 5 (1): 135–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41889951 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal for the Study of Radicalism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Raymond Carr, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00 and Pierre Broué and Emile Témime. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by Tony White Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50 Get access Carr Raymond, editor. The Republic and the Civil War in Spain. (Problems in Focus Series.) [New York:] St. Martin's Press. 1971. Pp. x, 275. $10.00. Broué Pierre and Témime Emile. The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain. Translated by White Tony. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1972. Pp. 590. $12.50. Temma Kaplan Temma Kaplan University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, October 1974, Pages 1198–1199, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/79.4.1198 Published: 01 October 1974

Reviewed by: Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War by Miriam M. Basilio Yves Laberge Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War. Miriam M. Basilio. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Pp. xvi + 304. $119.95 (cloth). In her first monograph (possibly a derivate from her doctoral dissertation from 2002), Professor Miriam M. Basilio from New York University positions her interdisciplinary research into three salient trajectories related to Spanish history: the visual culture and political propaganda; the politicized posters from the 1930s; and the memory of the 1936–39 civil war in Spain. These intertwined topics are not totally new if considered individually, but there are relatively few books in English that have centered these perspectives upon visual history in an effort to understand the dynamics and redefinitions of the nation in its transition into fascism. Incidentally, some portions of this substantial book have already appeared elsewhere, mainly in scholarly journals (cited on xvi, 276). Although this book primarily covers the years 1936–1940, especially in her last chapter Basilio also studies many recent retellings of the era. That time period marks the early days of modern propaganda, corresponding to the darkest strategies of public outreach practiced by Germany’s Nazi regime. Basilio’s main point is to conceptualize the Spanish Civil War through contemporary theoretical approaches, centered on citizenship, national identity, memory studies, and the public sphere (in the Habermasian sense): “I argue that rival political factions within the Republican and nationalist camps placed questions of national identity and historical memory at the forefront of visual-propaganda campaigns and exhibitions” (1). Despite the complexity of this situation, her methodological approach is nuanced, considering the various trends and influences of this era: Catholicism, the heritage of Spanish colonialism, and the sentiment of national pride (208). In her impressive corpus, Basilio has chosen a wide array of vintage images, posters, cartoons, and various advertisements, either pro or against the advent of a new republic in Spain. Most of these forgotten images are reproduced here in black and white, with a few exceptions in color. The author studies how various exhibitions of these images have been conceptualized, conceived, and perceived by audiences, as in the unforgettable Paris World Fair of 1937, for example, when “the Spanish republican government presented a remarkable modernist pavilion,” which included Pablo Picasso’s latest masterpiece Guernica (174). The analysis is broadly conceptualized into several theoretical frameworks, for example in Basilio’s study of masculinity in some sketches of the Spanish military junta (29). The number of combatants involved was impressive then: as tangible proof of these vast propaganda efforts, “the junta issued approximately 40 posters, many reproduced as postcards in editions up to 50,000” (29). This book comes into five chapters, highlighting the social construction of the imagined nation of Spain (Chapter 1); observing how art, museums, and world fairs were used as vehicles for propaganda (Chapter 2); analyzing how the new nation was redefined (Chapter 3); showing how roots and patrimony were recuperated (Chapter 4); and finally asking how the persistent memory of civil war can be revisited and represented in the twenty-first century (Chapter 5). As she attempts to address these complex questions, Basilio admits that she cannot provide answers to all of them: after so many decades, it is now almost impossible to know exactly how individual citizens really reacted to these propaganda campaigns and exhibitions—whether they adhered to or resisted them—in the early days of the Spanish Civil War (2). As such, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is not just a book about Catalan history. Chapter 5 concludes with questions about how these events are represented by contemporary Spanish artists in the twenty-first century and raises some issues related to memory [End Page 1049] (what we retain from the past), amnesia (what is forgotten or what remains undiscussed), and human rights (especially how citizens were manipulated by political propaganda and effectively forced into a dictatorship) in the context of images from artists such as Fernando Bryce (232–33). Recent images from Francesc Torres’s photography project, “Dark is the Room Where We Sleep,” such as a black-and-white photograph showing a hand...

So far the empirical evidence adduced in favor of my theory of wartime violence has been drawn from a single case, namely, the Spanish Civil War. For the purposes of lending external validity to the results taken from the Spanish case, in this chapter and the following I will compare it to other cases, showing that they are broadly consistent. In this chapter, I present a study of the Ivorian Civil War(s) (2002–2007; 2010–2011), with a focus on the subnational dynamics of violence in this African conflict. My interest in Côte d'Ivoire stems from the fact that this civil war was fought along clear frontlines and characterized by uncontested control over large territories on the part of each of the armed groups. As with other cases of conventional civil wars, current theoretical approaches cannot fully explain violence against civilians in the Ivorian case. Thus, despite the fact that Côte d'Ivoire and Spain differ extremely in many respects, their civil wars exhibit commonalities that are relevant for the purposes of this book.

War and armed conflict — War — Definition — Whether limited to hostilities between States — Civil war — Whether capable of constituting war in international law — Recognition of belligerency — Spanish Civil War — Whether Germany a party to Spanish Civil War Recognition — Belligerency — Governments — Whether recognition of insurgents as belligerents required to turn insurgency into war — Collective non-recognition of belligerency — Recognition of insurgents as government of State — Whether equivalent to recognition of belligerency — Whether civil war then becomes war — Spanish Civil War — The law of the Federal Republic of Germany

One Step Closer To a Believable Francisco Franco Bahamonde Ricardo Landeira Payne, Stanley and Jesús Palacios. Franco. A Personal and Political Biography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. Pp. 617. ISBN 978-0-299-30210-8. More has been written about the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) than any other conflict in the 20th century. Such historical fixation can no doubt be attributed firstly to the grim spectacle of a nation convulsed by unspeakable carnage and ideological retribution, but ultimately to what many foresaw as impending doom for other more powerful countries than Spain vying for the largest stake imaginable, that of global hegemony. Germany, Italy, Russia, Britain, France and the United States all played significant roles in the Spanish war; the first three, in fact, became near protagonists, and Germany and Italy tipped the balance to such an extent that, once committed to Franco’s Nationalist side, the outcome was hardly ever in doubt. Every historical event of such magnitude has its heroes as well as its villains, the former chosen from among the victors, and the latter fingered from among the vanquished by those same victors. And yet the Spanish Civil War, as in so many other ways (eg., a civil conflict with international combatants), turns out counter to such expectations. Here, a single individual has been made to play both roles by all of the critics and historians who’ve dedicated major portions of their lives and writings to the subject. Other than the implicated foreign leaders, readily characterized by universal consensus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin on one side and Churchill and FDR on the other), Francisco Franco (1892–1975) has been portrayed, alternately, as either the most demonized or the most lionized European leader of recent memory. In the course of half a century of scholarship, time and again, Stanley Payne has authored some of the most significant volumes about Spain and its dominant political figures, among them Franco. His titles include: Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (1961), Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (1967), The Spanish Revolution (1970), A History of Spain and Portugal (1973), Basque Nationalism (1975), Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980), Spanish Catholicism (1984), and the immediate forerunner to the present volume, published in 1987, The Franco Regime (1936–1975). Here, Payne, in collaboration with the Spanish historian and journalist Jesús Palacios, returns to his favorite [End Page 185] subject with a balanced, sober, and well documented account of Spain’s longest and most notorious head of state since Philip II’s sixteenth century reign. The Hapsburg King’s tomb rests in the monumental palace of El Escorial, which he ordered erected (1563–1584) to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Quintín. It parallels Franco’s own folly when he ordered an equally outsized basilica, the Valley of the Fallen, a scant ten kilometers away. Forty thousand Civil War casualties lay buried there, among them José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange and Franco’s formidable rival. Franco himself, of course, is the only occupant of the mausoleum who died in bed decades later. Three major contributing factors may explain this volume’s ring of historical veracity. First, its double authorship, by an admired American scholar of unquestioned stature and amazing productivity and by a respected and seasoned Spanish journalist and educator, which lend it a balanced and thus less biased version of Franco and his regime. Secondly, the passage of time itself—75 years since the end of the Civil War and 39 since Franco’s death—which attenuates the passions of those directly and indirectly involved in both the three-year conflict and its four-decade long authoritarian aftermath. And thirdly, the accessibility to key archives finally open to researchers, as well as the willingness of those individuals close to the dictator to offer oral testimony, including his daughter and members of his retinue, who were previously unable to speak freely. Exemplary for their clarity and the dispassionate portrayal of a modern day dictator, Franco. A Personal and Political Biography’s twenty chapters plus conclusion are chronologically ordered, and accompanied by nearly one hundred pages of notes and a comprehensive index. The very...

This chapter situates the origins and evolution of the Movement for the Recovery of Historical Memory (MRHM) within a wider narrative, both intellectually and geographically. This narrative encompasses the European experience of dealing with the memory of Fascism in particular and with the legacy of political violence, the so-called European Civil War that ravaged the continent in the interwar period 1919-39. The chapter explains the evolution of the concept of anti-Fascism in post-1945 Europe. It identifies the developments in and the connections between both recent Spanish history and historiography. The chapter demonstrates how and why the MRHM emerged, as well as its achievements and shortcomings about the Spanish Civil War. It shows the need to develop a new paradigm for historical analysis in the study of political violence based on humanistic, democratic, and universal values. Keywords: anti-Fascism; European Civil War; MRHM; political violence; Spanish Civil War; Spanish historiography; Spanish history

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticlesRecent Historiography on the Spanish Republic and Civil WarStanley G. PayneStanley G. Payne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 60, Number 3Sep., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/600405 Views: 27Total views on this site Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reflections of a Civil War Veteran Abe Osheroff Dialogues between Painting and Narrative: From Goya to Malraux Countering L'Espoir: Two French Fascist Novels of the Spanish Civil War Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War Simone de Beauvoir and the Spanish Civil War: From Apoliticism to Commitment The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History Ramon Sender's Civil War Icons of War in Alberti: Madrid-Otono From Page to Screen: Contemporary Spanish Narratives of the Spanish Civil War The Failed Ideal in Leon Felipe's Poetry of the Spanish Civil War Two Spanish Civil War Novels: A Woman's Perspective Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers

Reflections of a Civil War Veteran Abe Osheroff Dialogues between Painting and Narrative: From Goya to Malraux Countering L'Espoir: Two French Fascist Novels of the Spanish Civil War Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War Simone de Beauvoir and the Spanish Civil War: From Apoliticism to Commitment The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History Ramon Sender's Civil War Icons of War in Alberti: "Madrid-Otono" From Page to Screen: Contemporary Spanish Narratives of the Spanish Civil War The Failed Ideal in Leon Felipe's Poetry of the Spanish Civil War Two Spanish Civil War Novels: A Woman's Perspective Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers

The history of collectivization during the Spanish civil war has been controversial from its inception. Contemporaries who were sympathetic to anarchism and hostile to Communism authored the first accounts of workers’ and peasants’ collectives. Subsequent Republican and Communist authors dismissed or ignored this largely apologetic literature. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s revived interest and empathy for the revolutionary experience. In particular, Noam Chomsky’s polemical essay renewed the debate. Like his libertarian predecessors, he accused liberals and Communists alike of hiding the successes of anarchists during the civil war. Chomsky had no doubt that their collectives were ‘economically successful,’ and he attributed their difficulties to state hostility and the consequent restriction of financial credit. Although questionable, Chomsky’s New Left perspective was a sign of fresh interest in the question of the collectives. More scholarly accounts, based on original research, followed. Some researchers synthesized serious investigation with political concerns that were usually associated with 1960s idealism. In the 1980s Spanish scholars, armed with new documents from recently opened archives, tackled the subject with critical distance. They adopted a local or regional approach which delved into collectivization’s difficulties and dilemmas. Just as importantly, they began to move away from traditional political history from above to social history from below. The following pages attempt to develop this recent trend in the historiography by focusing on agrarian collectives in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. Aragon was part of what one agrarian historian has designated as the Interior, an area of relatively backward agriculture with low soil and labor productivity. The Michael Seidman

This article focuses on the importance of military factionalism in a nonconsolidated democracy: the Spanish Republic (1931–9). It builds a new micro‐dataset for over 11,000 officers during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) to study how professional and economic interests created divisions within the military and influenced officers’ allegiances during the war. Results confirm that distributional conflicts influenced officers’ decisions in Republican‐controlled territories: officers who gained from military reforms in the years before the civil war and those with more rapid promotions in the months predating the war were more likely to remain loyal to the government. This article also explores the behavioural determinants of officers’ propensity to rebel and finds that hierarchy mattered, as senior officers influenced subordinates’ choices of side.

Spanish military history since the Reconquista has traditionally been understood as occurring within two broad chronological periods. During the first phase, starting with the dual reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1479–1516), and continuing to the Thirty Years’ War, Spain was a superpower, dominant within Europe as well as in its own overseas empire. From the late 17th century to the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain was in relative decline, overshadowed by rising British and French economic and military power, and struggling to maintain a European and global role. After 1898, Spain was no longer even a minor power, confined as it was to a handful of colonies, and it was a nonfactor in both world wars. While, in general, this is an accurate description, this history was punctuated by significant attempts at military revival, including in the mid-19th century and during World War II (in connection with the Axis powers). While the historiography of Spanish military history in the English-speaking world has focused on the earlier centuries of Spanish strength, as well as on the Spanish Civil War, Spanish-language works have covered a broader scope, thus accounting for what appears to be a relative imbalance between the major fields of study. There has also been a relative deficit within the historiography of works on tactical, and especially operational, warfare. In the 20th century the discipline suffered from the impact of a civil war, self-imposed exile by many historians after that conflict, and ideological and professional restrictions under the Franco regime, all of which left military history almost the exclusive domain of the professional military. With the liberalization of universities from the 1970s onward, many new scholars focused more on broader political and sociological topics related to military affairs, rather than research on traditional military subjects. In many cases, it has been foreign historians who have introduced the most innovative research into Spanish historiography. Perhaps the best example is the thesis of the “military revolution,” the early modern transformation of military operations, articulated most clearly and successful in Parker 2004 (cited under Habsburg Spain), a work on the history of Spain’s military engagement in the Netherlands, in the context of its broader imperial project. Especially since the 2000s, a broader range of historians have engaged more actively in operational and strategic histories, as well as participating in vibrant historiographical debates, such as those on the Spanish Civil War and the role of the former dictator Francisco Franco during that conflict and beyond.

Reviewed by: Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott Wayne H. Bowen Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States. Paul D. Escott. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8130-4941-0, 256 pp., hardback, $74.95. The task Paul Escott has undertaken at first seems problematic: to craft a comparative history of civil war memory in two nations, with conflicts that did not share century, political ideology, continent, or language. The American Civil War, 1861–65, and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, however, prove sufficiently malleable to the author’s approach to make this book an engaging success on the theme of war and memory. After a brief introduction and a background chapter, the book is divided into four thematic chapters, examining the major subjects of “Ideology and Memory,” “The Past and Political Evolution,” “Reconciliation,” and “Economic Change and the Transformation of Cultural Landscapes.” Escott skillfully draws parallels between the conservative forces in both countries—southern pro-slavery elites, and Catholic, military, and other right-wing leaders in Spain—that resisted what they saw as dangerous innovations from central governments. In the case of the United States, southerners feared economic modernization, leading to northern financial dominance, but even [End Page 469] more the movement for abolitionism. In Spain, the –isms—secularism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and anti-clericalism—provoked the uprising that would become the Spanish Civil War in 1936. While there are some analogies between right-wing Spain and what would become the Confederacy, the respective aftermaths of these two civil wars were starkly different. In Spain, a civil war won by the Nationalists became the regime of Gen. Francisco Franco, in which former Republicans faced decades of persecution, restrictions on their opportunities, or even imprisonment. In the American South, after a brief period of Union occupation and Reconstruction, the same white men who had led the rebellion against the North resumed their political influence. Just over a decade after the final Union victories, segregation, intimidation, and economic repression had recreated the race-based social order of the pre–Civil War period. There were more similarities in the nurturing of respective memories after both conflicts, with the losers in each creating a more coherent and enduring vision of civil war. Spanish Republicans in exile spent decades crafting explanations for their defeat, influencing historians in other nations to take up the Republican cause. Even as the late Franco era of the 1960s and 1970s deemphasized the glorious Nationalist movement that had won the Civil War, on the Left the memory of these events remained vibrant, even if during the transition to democracy in the decade after Franco there was a conscious effort to put aside the war in the interest of civic peace. While less consistently, southern historians and popular writers created nostalgic accounts of the lost antebellum era, before the destruction wrought by vengeful industrial armies of the Yankees. Indeed, instead of a collective vision of these two conflicts, the regional and ideological divisions that had seen the actual civil wars were perpetuated by the generations that followed. Only in recent decades has anything close to a national consensus emerged in both Spain and the United States to explain these wars. Rather than the victory of a vision by winning or losing sides, in both countries a more balanced account is now replacing the rivalry of partisan memories. Complexity now seems more widespread than one-sided assigning of blame. While there continue to be political arguments over physical monuments—Confederate statues in the American South and Spanish streets named for Francoist leaders—these are no longer violent, nor of more than symbolic impact. Each civil war, especially those of the remarkable violence seen in both the American and Spanish conflicts, features its own peculiarities amid what are, after all, national circumstances and origins. At times, the author draws parallels that are too close, obscuring their historical uniqueness. For example, the gulf between Spanish landowners of the twentieth century and southern plantation owners of the nineteenth was quite significant, but both groups are described similarly, as rural elites. However, Escott has shown that...