There was good art under Franco

Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine years later in the ruins of Berlin. It has been immortalised in the work of Hemingway, Orwell and Koestler and commemorated in the heroic deeds of the International Brigades. This is how it is remembered by Camilo José Cela, the conservative novelist and Nobel Prize winner:

To the conscripts of 1937, all of whom lost something: their life, their freedom, their dreams, their hope, their decency. And not to the adventurers from abroad, Fascists and Marxists, who had their fill of killing Spaniards like rabbits and whom no one had invited to take part in our funeral…

In my copy of the French translation of Cela’s San Camilo, that dedication does not appear. The French contingent in the International Brigade is estimated to have been 9,000, by some way the largest national contingent.

Franco’s excuse for his rebellion was the failure of the elected socialist government to protect its people — principally the clergy — from persecution. With the subsequent intervention of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, the civil war became an international gala of death, in which idealists of all sides could assign themselves walk-on parts and the complex Spanish reality could be forgotten. But, as Cela’s devastating comment reminds us, it was essentially a Spanish quarrel.

Most popular

Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

Jeremy Treglown describes the arrival of the rebellious General Franco at the head of the Army of Africa in Seville in July 1936 as ‘a colonial invasion in reverse’. Subsequently, he argues, in a forthright and original analysis, that Spanish culture and the memory of war have been steadily colonised and manipulated by the demands and pressure of international ideologies. He notes that in England, as recently as 1995, this distorting process was still at work, with the oversimplifications of ‘Ken Loach’s preposterous civil war film Land and Freedom’.