Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (review)

The story of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion ('the Mac-Paps') and of the other volunteers from Canada who fought for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) has been told in several books and celebrated in films (Los Canadienses), theatre, poetry, and memoirs. Yet, given the important new historical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War – not to speak of the startling recent developments including Spain's Law of Historical Memory (2007), the discovery of mass graves of Franco's victims, and the breaking of many silences imposed by fascism – a fresh take on the Canadian volunteers located within these contexts is very much needed.

The latest book-length treatment of the Mac-Paps, the first in many years, comes from Maclean's writer Michael Petrou, who has turned his Oxford dissertation into Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. While Renegades discusses important new evidence not available to earlier researchers, the book is essentially a 'battle, brigade, and battalion' military history concentrating on the key fights with which the Mac-Paps are associated. Here, Renegades does not depart much from the focus of the existing literature, including Victor Hoar and Mac Reynolds's The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (1969) and William C. Beeching's (himself a Civil War veteran) Canadian Volunteers: Spain, 1936–1939 (1989).

In other respects, Petrou offers something new. He draws on the extensive archive of veteran interviews created by Hoar's researcher, Mac Reynolds, and supplements these with additional interviews of about a dozen surviving veterans, some of whom have since died. The book's chief contribution, however, is that it is the first to appear since the declassification of materials on the International Brigades within the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, now available on microfilm at Library and Archives Canada and at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York City. (Petrou looked at these and not the Moscow originals.) He also draws on the rcmp files to reveal what will surprise few Canadian historians but is important to establish: that the security services had the Mac-Paps under surveillance from the earliest days of recruitment right into the 1980s, whereupon it was decided that a ragtag bunch of eighty-year-olds were unlikely to lead an insurrection in Canada. Indeed, the lifelong hounding of the veterans was linked to the unforgivable abandonment of Spain itself by the 'democratic' countries in 1936 and in the decades after Franco's victory.

As for the extensive declassified sources from the Moscow archives, Petrou uses them to fill out more of the profile (birth and death dates, ethnicity, occupation) of those who went to Spain. While previous researchers had compiled partial lists of volunteers, Petrou's database (in the book's appendix) is very likely the most complete. Petrou also uses these sources both to tease out some aspects of the veterans' relationship to Communism and to show how they were ideologically rated in Spain by Party authorities. Those who went to Spain from Canada were a proletarian 'motley crew;' many were immigrants from Europe who in many cases had no permanent home, no permanent job, and no permanent country. It is in this sense that they should be regarded as true 'internationals' rather than 'Canadian' volunteers who can be politically incorporated into a national narrative. Diverse ideologically, most volunteers were on the far left (including Trotskyists, Communists, Wobblies, and other currents), and many had spent time in the relief camps, where they nurtured a strong dislike of authority. This left libertarianism also sometimes got them into trouble in Spain, as did the desire of some to desert because war conditions were ghastly. Petrou devotes two chapters to the question of discipline and punishment, including for desertion, within the ranks of the International Brigades.

While Renegades has a number of things to recommend it – principally the fact that it is the most scholarly, up-to-date, and complete of the various studies of the Mac...