The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The repression of the guerrillas between 1947 and 1949 was relentless. Altogether some 60,000 people were arrested during the decade following the civil war, yet in fact the guerrilla resistance involved only a tiny minority of the population, probably fewer than 8,000 within the whole of Spain. Among the very last survivors were Francisco Blancas, who led a group between Ciudad Real and Cáceres until 1955, when he fled to France; Patricio Serra in Badajoz who lasted until April 1954; and in the first and last stronghold of Galicia, Benigno Andradé, who was executed in July 1952, José Castro Veiga, shot down by the Civil Guard in March 1965, and Mario Rodríguez Losada, who finally escaped to France in August 1968. By then, foreign tourists packed the beaches of the southern coast and Franco’s Spain found itself being subverted more by new values from without than by the old ideologies within.

While the struggle continued in Spain, the republican leaders in exile had pursued their vicious and self-destructive rivalries abroad. In November 1943 Indalecio Prieto had set up a political coalition in Mexico which brought together the PSOE, Unión Republicana and the Catalan parties under the leadership of Martamp2;ñez Barrio.¹¹ The anarchists and communists were excluded.

In August 1945, Negrín moved from London to Mexico to take part in the session of the Cortes in exile, called by Martínez Barrio at Prieto’s instigation. Negrín formally announced his resignation as president of the council of ministers, six years after the fact, and Martínez Barrio was elected president of a republic which had ceased to exist. Negrín put himself forward as the new head of government, but Prieto vetoed this and José Giral stepped forward to take on the task. In his phantom administration there were again no communists and no anarchists. Even with a Labour government in power in London, there was still no hope of achieving recognition by either Britain or France. Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, nevertheless arranged a meeting in October 1947 between Prieto and Gil Robles, the former leader of the CEDA, his enemy at the time of the rising of October 1934. After tense and difficult discussions, a pact was signed in Saint Jean de Luz near the Basque border. This demanded among other things an amnesty in Spain, the end of reprisals and the right of Spaniards to choose their own government. It was almost ten years since the same three points had been made at Figueras.

The pact was to have little effect. Five days after it was signed the son of Alfonso XIII, Don Juan, the Count of Barcelona, met Franco aboard the yacht Azor off San Sebastián. He agreed that his son, Prince Juan Carlos, would follow his studies in Spain under Franco’s tutelage. This boy, then less than ten years old, would become the Caudillo’s heir. But after Franco’s death in 1975 he would preside over Spain’s successful return to democracy and freedom.

Lost Causes

In June 1937, Cardinal Gomá had described the Spanish Civil War as ‘an armed plebiscite’. It was indeed an extension of politics by military means. Yet the violence of the conflict created a great impression abroad. Stereotypical assumptions about Hispanic passions were sometimes strengthened by the male Spaniard’s own image of himself. ‘I am not pretending’, El Campesino wrote later, ‘that I was not guilty of ugly things myself, or that I never caused needless sacrifice of human lives. I am a Spaniard. We look upon life as tragic. We despise death.’¹ But such statements are not merely a grotesque self-indulgence, they are profoundly misleading. Violence is often the product of a distorted expression of fear. And the more that fear is suppressed out of a need to show bravery, the more explosive the result.

The cults of virility and death went hand in hand as the imagery of Queipo de Llano, the Falange and the Foreign Legion demonstrated. Nationalist leaders also revelled in the language of the stern patriarchal surgeon, whose diagnosis and proposed treatment for the country could not be questioned because the patient did not know what was best for him. Foreign contagions and cancers had to be cut out. National regeneration could only come through pain, in the medieval manner of trial by ordeal.