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5 The Coming of the Spanish Second Republic Having crossed the Atlantic with the unruly Buñuel on board, the Lafayette docked on 1 April 1931 in Le Havre, where he had filmed the final sequence of Un chien andalou two years before. This destination may have seemed a symbolic link hinting at the continuity of his career in a Surrealist vein, but the reality was to be very different. The director would give various accounts of his subsequent travels, the most precise being the one to Max Aub: “In New York I spent all the money I had. I got to Paris on a Wednesday and that Friday—Good Friday—I was beating my drum in Calanda. I took a taxi as far as Hendaye, and from Hendaye to Calanda, a second. On the Sunday I went to Zaragoza and on the Monday or the Tuesday I awoke to the Himno de Riego. Boy, that was really something! Never have I seen so much enthusiasm or so many people in the street. There I was, in the café, with [Rafael] Sánchez Ventura and [ José] Gaos, who was a professor at the University. My father would’ve been delighted.”1 The municipal elections of 12 April 1931 that gave rise two days later to the Second Republic expressed a repudiation by the masses of a monarchy that had backed the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera and of an omnipresent ecclesiastical power that had supported the ancien régime, representative of a sociopolitical system by now obsolete on the European scene. María Teresa León would sum up such freedom in a beautiful metaphor: “We were sporting a new set of clothes. Clothes without sleeves, which constricted us.”2 It has to be remembered that the republic’s coming was supported by neither the 78 anarchists nor the Communists. The anarchists declared that a bourgeois Republic was not their affair, but they didn’t attack it.3 Meanwhile, amid the euphoria on 14 April, Communist militants cruised the streets of Madrid in a lorry shouting, in line with the slogans of the Comintern, “Long live the soviets!” “Long live the workers’ and peasants’ government!” and “Down with the bourgeois Republic!”4 In his memoirs José Bullejos, general secretary of the then minuscule Spanish Communist Party (PCE), would admit that the Communist votes cast in Madrid amounted to some two hundred.5 What was Buñuel’s attitude to these political events? When Max Aub asked him if he’d voted in the April 1931 elections, his response was, “No, I didn’t. I couldn’t have cared less. What’s more, I was never a Republican.” From a reading of different statements Buñuel’s juvenile sympathy for anarchism becomes clear, which isn’t surprising given the huge presence in his native Zaragoza of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).6 Buñuel corroborated this when he stated, “At the time, those who, like me, were interested in the sociopolitical aspect of the period, couldn’t help but have a rapport with anarchism.”7 He declared that when attending the tertulia in Madrid’s Café de Platerías, frequented by the Ultraists in the early 1920s, “I began to be an anarchist, and I would like to point out that I continued with the same ideas until 1930.”8 His libertarian ideology led him to celebrate the political assassinations by the anarchists of José Canalejas (November 1912), Eduardo Dato (March 1921), and Cardinal Juan Soldevila Romero, Archbishop of Zaragoza ( June 1923), and as late as 15 April 1931 he co-presided over an anarcho-syndicalist meeting in the bullring in Zaragoza with art historian Rafael Sánchez Ventura.9 (Four months prior to this, Sánchez Ventura had participated, with the teacher and artist from Huesca, Ramón Acín, in the abortive pro-Republican uprising in Jaca, and it was the proclamation of the Republic that enabled them to emerge from hiding.) In his memoirs, however, Buñuel recalls that the general rejoicing that greeted the Republic “subsided extremely quickly and gave way to unease, then to anguish.”10 In any case, following the euphoric Republican celebration in Madrid, Buñuel returned at the end of the month to Paris. The opinion of his ex-collaborator Salvador Dalí of those same political events was much more drastic and denunciatory. In his autobiography he described, in apocalyptic tones, the proliferation of political parties and schisms, which portended that “something...

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