France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War Next Door, 1936-1945, and: France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain (review)

Martin Hurcombe's and David Wingeate Pike's books set out to explore the impact of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) on neighbouring country France. Both follow a historically grounded and rigorous form of enquiry, although they have very different focuses through which to analyse the effects of the conflict on the French population. Whereas Hurcombe concentrates on reportage, essays, and fiction by French sympathizers of both Franco and the Spanish Republic, Pike turns his attention exclusively to the portrayal of the war in the French press. These books contribute to the growing field of war studies, each one enriching the existing body of literature on the Spanish Civil conflict — such as Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War (2001) and Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (2004) — by investigating the complexities of the French perspective. Hurcombe's findings are too numerous to list here, but he discovers a number of uncomfortable truths relating to the French perspective, which situates his book as boundary-defying in the field. He unearths in the French far-Right reportage of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, for instance, the will to model France's divided Right (notably the Front Populaire) on what was perceived as the unified Right in Franco's Spain. Using the notions of restorationist utopia and Lévi-Strauss's idea of the bricoleur, Hurcombe adds theoretical depth to his investigation and concludes, shockingly, that 'the Civil War appears to become a mythical event grounded in an assemblage of foundational narratives and anecdotes rather than in the author's mimetic representation of real events' (p. 52). The author also probes the French Leftist reportage, travel writing, and novels of the time (by Jean-Richard Bloch, André Chamson, Marguerite Jouve, and Simone Téry), and discovers an equal and opposite tendency on the part of the French Left to project the Spanish Republicans as the unified ideal in order to compensate for domestic political stumbling blocks. Hurcombe concludes that, where sympathizers of the French Right conceived the Spanish conflict and the triumph of the Nationalists as a 'restorationist utopia', those of the French Left held on to a notion of their neighbouring Republicans as providing an image of a 'revolutionary utopia'. Providing succinct and clear summaries of historical context, Hurcombe at no point assumes prior knowledge on the reader's part, and this makes his book accessible as well as insightful and exciting in its scope. Similarly user-friendly and even more comprehensive, Pike's book identifies four areas of investigation in the press that allow him to interrogate French reaction to the Spanish Civil War: editorial opinion, propaganda, French correspondents in Spain, and collateral events in France. The author concentrates his field of investigation on the archives in the French départements bordering Spain, making his work geographically specific and focused. Taken together, Hurcombe's and Pike's books complement one another, providing the reader with a rich gamut of cultural and historical representations in France of the Spanish Civil War. In addition, they will be of interest to anyone studying Spanish exiled writers in France (such as playwright Fernando Arrabal) and wanting to gain a thorough background knowledge of the historical shifts inflecting and shaping such writers' oeuvres. Their books constitute the first major studies in English of the French perspective on the Spanish conflict. Both will surely have a long-lasting influence on the fields of war studies and Spanish Civil War studies for this reason.