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Reviewed by:
  • Spain during World War II
  • Judith Keene
Spain during World War II. By Wayne H. Bowen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8262-1658-8. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 279. $39.95.

This book draws on what is now a large body of published work dealing with the early years of the Franco dictatorship and applies it to Spain's shifting international allegiances during the Second World War. The diplomatic [End Page 261] to-ing and fro-ing between Allies and Axis over Spanish neutrality has been studied systematically by scholars, within and outside Spain. These include Wayne Bowen's own analysis, Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration in the New Order (2000), which examined the particular Iberian conditions that caused many Spaniards to find the "Axis temptation" irresistible even after it was clear that Germany would be defeated in World War Two. The present study differentiates itself from these other works by incorporating the Spanish home front into the analysis of Spain's external relations. This eminently sensible approach enriches both diplomatic and military history and at the same time can highlight what was unusual in the Spanish case.

The first two of eight chapters track the course of diplomatic relations that brought General Franco from a firm commitment to the Axis to a slow reorientation towards the Allied camp. Bowen argues that Franco's shift was the result of the failure of German perspicacity in dealing with Spain rather than any transformation in Franco's ideology that might have softened his opposition to the democracies and taken him out of the Axis line-up. The remaining chapters deal with the domestic structures that underpinned the first years of Francoist state formation and later hardened into the clerico-totalitarian style that characterised the mature regime.

The economy was central. Bowen attributes most of the blame for Spain's parlous economic state to poor economic management in the 1940s. The propensity, on political grounds, to intervene in the market, such as in the misguided commitment to autarchy, aggravated the hunger, dislocation, and destruction left from six brutal years of civil war. In a similar mode, but in the name of promoting traditional Spanish values, the Franco state undertook large-scale social engineering, intervening in the public and private lives of Spanish citizens to an unprecedented degree. Even when the models for such state intervention in Italy and Germany had been discredited, the Spanish state under Franco pressed on with its objective of creating a centralized nation around a reasserted Castilean Spain. The new state was articulated along Falangist lines but managed by military officers chosen by Franco.

In constructing the culture and daily life of most Spaniards and the leisure pastimes available to them, Bowen examines the role of sport in the new state. In Spain the abiding passion for football (soccer) had always been (and still is) tied closely to regional identification. In the new Francoism, however, football, and indeed the other allied sports, were harnessed to quash regionalism by promoting a national unitary Spain. In the quintessential mass leisure activity, cinema-going, Church and the state censors cooperated to ensure that the films that were shown in local cinemas were those that embodied desirable Spanish Catholic values. Luis Buñuel's films, for example, were not seen until after Franco's death. All foreign films were dubbed into the Castilean language. This meant that it was possible by altering the Spanish dialogue to change what the state considered to be an undesirable relationship, for example between lovers, into a more acceptable form.

In the case of Spanish families and children the state's totalitarian aspirations were clear. All marriages were declared illegal that had been entered in civil ceremonies, which had been an option during the Spanish Republic. [End Page 262] Similarly, all names that signalled the parents' Republicanism or left wing affiliations, such as the first names of Libertarió or Octubre were declared illegal. Where families did not change these names themselves, the state intervened to record the name of the child's birth saint in official registries. Bowen devotes a good deal of space to the interesting example of the Sección...

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