Egos and Ideals in the Spanish Civil War

Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936-1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; xiv + 472 pp., £19.95. ISBN 0-521-45932-X.

Michael Seidman, Republic of Egos: a Social History of the Spanish Civil War, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2002; xi + 304 pp., $55 hbk, $24.95 pbk. ISBN 0-299-17864-1.

One feature characteristic of cataclysmic events is the subjection of individual lives to vast social forces. This relationship has always been obscure in historical accounts of the Spanish civil war. Both these books, in very different ways, attempt to reconnect individuals to the collective processes at work during the Spanish conflict. Even by the standards of civil wars and revolutions, so often serving as totems to the founding of modern states, the history of Spain's civil war, and the left-wing social revolution that was enmeshed within it, is unusually complicated by conflicting mythologies. Often as a result of the reflections of outsiders, these competing visions have in turn been subject to ideological and political distortion. Histories of the war have thus been put to use by political forces of all shades, clouding our understanding of its origins, effects and outcome and playing down individual agency.

The complex origins of the civil war were located in centuries of Spanish history and in the harshness of Spanish life that the Second Republic, inaugurated through elections in April 1931, attempted to alleviate. When the Republic was challenged violently in July 1936 Spain was plunged into a bitter war involving the European powers that would end in April 1939 with the establishment of a military government headed by General Franco. The trauma of the war and the dictatorship it produced—allowing victory and defeat to become a political presence for nearly forty years—continue to form an essential part of social inheritance and historical consciousness in Spain after Franco.

While the origins were essentially Spanish, the outcome of the war is principally to be explained by the way competing Spanish interests and identities were largely obliterated by unstoppable international forces. This serves to underline the way modern war sacrifices cultures to the dictates of global realpolitik. Helen Graham's The Spanish Republic at War, 1936-1939, is a powerful reminder of how the social and human context of wartime Republican political relations has been neglected, almost criminally, for decades, distorting our understanding of the reasons for the defeat and of its long-lasting effects. People in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s bestowed meaning on the war by referring to their lived experience of the pre-war years and of the tragedy itself. Thus, aspects of social memory and customs, and multiple collective desires, rituals, phobias and fears, revealed through largely locality-specific social relations, are indispensable to historical explanation.¹ As both of these volumes suggest, this lived reality presented problems of mobilization for the Republican side as monumental efforts were made first to 'nationalize' the war and then to control the forces of internationalization unleashed by the anti-government coup. As many of the reference points through which people in Spain understood the world around them disintegrated, those against whom the odds were so heavily stacked from the beginning increasingly took refuge within their own private selves. Michael Seidman, in Republic of Egos, sees this as confirmation that individualism was, in effect, the dominant feeling amongst Spaniards at war (of which more below).

From the beginning, the Second Republic was an entity weakened by political and ideological contradictions that made the construction of durable unifying symbols problematic. The tradition of secular nationhood in Spain was much weaker than the sense of the Spanish nation culturally nourished by Catholicism. The way in which the Catholic Church became an adjunct of the state in the last third of the nineteenth century suggests the ineffectiveness of other institutions that were supposed to organize authority and legitimacy and provide public services throughout the country. Constitutional patriotism, as...