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  • Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott
  • Don H. Doyle (bio)
Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States. By Paul D. Escott. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. Pp. 278. Cloth, $74.95.)

At its 150th anniversary, the once tightly encased national narrative of America’s Civil War is opening to some exciting new approaches coming from the international turn in historical studies. In this fascinating study [End Page 465] of war, memory, and reconciliation, Paul Escott, an eminent historian of the South at Wake Forest University, examines the legacy of the two most significant civil wars of the modern Euro-American world.

Both wars originated in illiberal rebellions against democratically elected governments. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 with a pronunciamento by the Nationalists, a coalition of military leaders, Catholic conservatives, Carlist monarchists, and the fascist Falange Party. Unlike the Confederate rebels, who sought separation, Nationalist rebels wanted nothing less than to destroy the Second Republic and to establish a military-Catholic dictatorship. With active support from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the Nationalists conducted terrifying aerial bombing raids on civilians, massacred thousands of Republican civilians and soldiers, and imposed a repressive regime of military dictatorship and Catholic censorship that dominated Spain for decades.

The ferocity of Spain’s war, the ideological distance between belligerents, the scale of atrocities, and the political consequences of the Nationalist victory all make America’s contest between Blue and Gray seem almost decorous by comparison. Just as foreign observers came to see America’s Civil War as an epic battle between freedom and slavery, the conflict in Spain was seen as a rehearsal for the coming contest between democracy and fascism. While Germany and Italy lent men and arms to the Nationalists, the democracies of Europe and the United States stood back, leaving the Republicans to fend for themselves with limited foreign aid from the Soviet Union, Mexico, and thousands of volunteers, including the storied Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States.

After the Nationalists finally ended their war against the Republicans in 1939, General Francisco Franco, together with the fascist Falange Party and the Catholic hierarchy, established an authoritarian dictatorship that effectively isolated Spain from the modern world for the better part of four decades. Franco died in 1975, and the young Bourbon king Juan Carlos proclaimed a constitutional monarchy two years later. Spain began the Transition, as this period became known, from dictatorship to democracy. It was not until the electoral victory of Spain’s Left in 1982 that Spain finally embarked on a course of genuine democracy, and with the Transition also came the hard business of reckoning with the past.

Escott deftly lays out the essential history surrounding the Spanish conflict, then introduces comparative perspective as he takes us through the United States’ experience. His purpose is not to compare the two civil wars but to “examine how these two societies have remembered, debated, and argued about their civil wars and how those past loyalties and divisions [End Page 466] have affected later generations” (3). The book is organized in five coherent chapters dealing with the civil wars themselves, memory and ideology, the politics of each country’s civil war legacy, efforts at reconciliation, and the role of economic change in salving the wounds of civil war. Escott’s impressive command of the Spanish and American literature allows him to serve as an able guide through what will be unfamiliar foreign territory for many readers.

A riveting chapter on truth and reconciliation goes beyond Spain and the United States to address similar problems in such nations as South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, whose troubled pasts have left deep, unhealed wounds in the national psyche. As Bishop Desmond Tutu said, “The past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us, unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.”

Spain’s Left wanted, for example, to end the national veneration of such monuments as the Valley of the Fallen, created as sacred ground honoring Nationalist heroes. The Left also wanted...

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