The Spanish Civil War and Social History

Regarding social history, local or regional studies on rearguard behaviour have led to some general studies on both areas such as Michael Seidman's. His study puts non-altruistic or even clearly selfish motives (motivated by allegiances of kinship, family or village, or reasons of personal or collective gain) before class, national, ideological or gender identities. Recently, Chris Ealham and Michael Richards have called for expanding research on social history and local history with a culturalist perspective that addresses issues such as identity (not just political-ideological, as with Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Ismael Saz on concurrent national identities), language, memory and gender. With few exceptions (Mary Nash and Ana Martínez Rus), the latter is perhaps the least treated perspective when it comes to femininity.

Since the first works about everyday life on both sides of the conflict, published in 1973 by Rafael Abella, or the republic and civil war's first oral history compilation edited by Ronald Fraser in 1979, history from below has been making progress, although more slowly than other historiographic perspectives of the conflict. Despite various attempts at synthesis, by Michael Seidman or Fernando Díaz-Plaja, the study of daily life remains largely stuck in the fields of local, institutional and political-partisan history. This research has focused more on the experiences lived by the most committed people in the conflict, the soldiers in the front and the militants in the rear, than on the routines of the population less involved in the mobilisation of personal, material and symbolic resources for the war. The great work of synthesis that addresses the daily life of these ‘ordinary people’ has not yet been done according to the analytical instruments provided by microsociology, cultural anthropology and oral history. This last historiographic subdiscipline (and methodology) is advancing very rapidly, encouraged by the civic movement in favour of the recovery of the memory of the victims of the civil war, and urged by the imminent disappearance of the last generation that participated in the conflict. There is no lack of compilations (César Vidal and Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza) that follow the classic purely narrative line of past experiences, without addressing major methodological questions.

Testimonies of intentional justification were drawn up in the decades immediately after the civil war by the most prominent protagonists of the conflict, especially political and military. These were in the form of diaries or memoirs and made their way into a huge number of publications in which ordinary individuals narrate their experiences, more focused on the origins of conflict, repression, refugees, expatriation (especially children's) and exile than on military experiences and war stricto sensu. But related to other traumatic experiences lived in Europe during that period, Spanish historiography finds it very difficult to gather testimonies on sensitive issues, such as repressive violence, especially sexual violence against women, or physical violence in general, viewed from the perspective of its perpetrators. Authors such as Ángel Alcalde have demonstrated the solidarity of the victims through communion in the violence perpetrated as a mechanism of political fidelity and social cohesion.

In recent years renewed military historiography has paid attention to the war experiences and subcultures of different types of fighters. For example, James Matthews has inquired into everyday life in the trenches and the means of keeping the morale of recruits on either side high. As for the volunteers, Rémi Skoutelsky has studied the diversity of motivations and ideology of International Brigade fighters, while Sebastian Balfour and Gustau Nerín have analysed the circulation of brutality of the colonial war of Morocco to the mainland. Lastly, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum has inquired into the male socialisation mechanisms of the professional soldiers of the German Condor Legion through their autobiographical narratives.

The Alleged Exceptionality of the Spanish Conflict

Until recently the Spanish Civil War has been marked by the sign of exceptionality: it was the last conflict between democracy, revolution and counterrevolution that was resolved through a civil war in a European country at the end of the interwar period, acting as a prelude to the Second World War. However, due to the political and ideological characterisation of the fighting groups, the dynamics of violence (especially repression) or the intervention of foreign powers, it could be compared to other earlier civil wars that occurred in Europe, such as the Russian of 1917–22 or the Finnish of 1918.

The relevance, not the exceptionality, of the Spanish conflict is that it took place at the culminating moment of the confrontation between fascism, communism and liberal democracy, in the late thirties. This gave it an ideological intensity and a mobilising capacity on a continental scale greater than any other armed conflict in interwar Europe. The practice of revolution and counterrevolution (which characterised other political conflicts of the time, of which very few ended in open and lasting civil wars) fascinated much of European public opinion, which supported one side or another for reasons of a political and ideological nature, but also for sentimental motivations, linked to the image of wild romanticism that Spain had enjoyed abroad since the early nineteenth century.

From a pragmatic point of view, the Spanish conflict is relevant because it was the laboratory of many of the political, social and military experiences that would be applied intensively from September 1939. During this ‘miniature world war’, according to Hugh Thomas, key alliances were established such as the Rome–Berlin Axis of October 1936; broad spectra of anti-fascist fronts were articulated; the population was mobilised through mass propaganda to carry out and support a war effort that, at least from the end of 1937, aspired to be ‘total’; welfare policies such as civil protection, evacuation and rationing of basic products or the protection of the most vulnerable social sectors were implemented; and combat technologies and tactics were developed that would be widely used in the impending global conflict.

Finally, the study of the Spanish conflagration of 1936 to 1939 may be attractive because of its possible paradigmatic nature, which made it, together with other warlike processes such as the American Civil War, a referential model of a specific type of fratricidal conflict studied by the social sciences: the ‘regular’ or ‘conventional’. This is because from the end of 1936 equally powerful armed agents faced each other, and defined front lines existed together with regularly deployed and organised armies and formalised battles. According to Stathis N. Kalyvas, conventional civil wars cause more deaths on the battlefield than irregular conflicts, require higher levels of violence in the early stages if the population of both sides is mixed in the same territory and are usually the result of previous polarisation processes together with a high availability of resources for the actors in conflict.

The myth of the exceptionality of the Spanish Civil War is under attack from comparative histories which have identified civil conflicts as a common feature of modern societies. Authors such as Javier Rodrigo and David Alegre have recently begun the task of interpreting the Spanish conflict from the transnational perspective of the civil wars of the last century, in parallel with the revolutionary cycle opened by the Bolshevik triumph in Russia. Therefore, the war in Spain can be integrated into the war cycle of the world wars characterised by the warlike and symbolic rearmament of the counterrevolution in its different national manifestations. A period of global crisis characterised by the overlapping of violence is linked to intense processes of social homogenisation, forced nationalisation and systematic political cleansing.

Civil War and Collective Memory in Present-Day Spain

The Spanish Civil War was a conflict ‘of principles’ based on the annihilation of the class and ideological enemy. As the great founding moment of modern Spain, its memory has remained alive throughout the generations. After Franco's death the years of political transition towards democracy saw a recovery of the collective memory of the violence suffered by the losers of the civil war, which frequently clashed with the distancing with which the public authorities dealt with the issue – an allegedly appeasing attitude that was censored from the left as a shameful ‘policy of oblivion’. This perception contrasted with the extraordinary developments experienced by Spanish historiography dedicated to the crisis of the thirties.

From the mid-1990s a ‘duty of memory’ began to spread that was assumed by the grandchildren of the protagonists of the war. This commitment was induced by what they considered as an insufficient policy of material and symbolic reparation to the victims of the war and of Franco. It was foreseeable that the criticism of the disgrace of the civil war and the dictatorship was directed against the right-wing governments installed in power since May 1996, determined to reach a ‘new consensus’ that tried to equate winners and losers without assuming moral responsibilities for the excesses of repression in war and post-war. The return to power of the Spanish Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE) in March 2004 enabled the activation of a restorative policy of the memory of the victims of Franco, which was reflected at the end of 2007 in a law ‘by which rights are recognised and extended, and measures are established in favour of those who suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and dictatorship’. The legislation, colloquially called the ‘Law of Historical Memory’, generated several negative reactions: the left criticised the inclusion of victims of repression on both sides and that the resolutions of the Francoist criminal courts were not annulled; the right contrasted ‘historical memory’ (read as a form of ‘social revenge’) with ‘democratic coexistence’, since, in their opinion, the rule jeopardised the harmony on which the founding agreements of the current regime are based, which they claim as their own.

The recent exhumation of Franco's corpse (the last surviving dictator of the era of fascism who died holding power and remained buried with all honours in an immense mausoleum, along with thousands of victims of his regime) has fuelled the controversy over the causes and the effects of political war and post-war violence. I think that the collective trauma will not be overcome until the location and burial of the tens of thousands of disappeared, whose situation constitutes another historical anomaly at the continental level.

The end of the civil war as a lived historical experience is already a fact, with the virtual disappearance of the protagonists of the conflict, whose testimony allowed a family transmission of the events of the war, blocking at the same time its definitive historicisation. The intensity of the various public narratives – even those grounded in historical research – of the Spanish Civil War demonstrates the lack of social consensus on – as Éric Conan and Henry Rousso termed it in regard to the ‘Vichy syndrome’ – a ‘past that does not pass’.