The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (review)

The culture and ideas surrounding the Spanish Second Republic and Civil War serve as the point of focus for this anthology, which attempts to correct the dualistic, simplified portrayal of the war that the editors believe has long predominated in historical scholarship.

The chapters in the first part of the book, by Eduardo González Calleja, Xosé-Manoel Nœñez Seixas, and Mary Vincent, cover the closely linked themes of the symbolism of violence, wartime nationalist discourse, and "the greatest anticlerical bloodletting Europe has ever seen," in which thousands of priests, monks, and nuns were murdered during the first few months of the war (p. 68). All three contributors offer noteworthy accounts and interpretations of their subjects, stressing not so much the developments they describe as their cultural meanings. The second part of the book covers more specific developments and issues on the Republican side. Examining the political ideas and machinations of Catalan populism, Enric Ucelay-Da Cal's astute but densely written chapter devotes most of its attention to the pre–Civil War period. Building in part upon the work of Charles Tilly and others on the French Revolution, Chris Ealham writes about crowd violence and spatial politics in Barcelona after the outbreak of the war. Pamela Radcliff's chapter highlights the symbolic heterogeneity of revolutionary Gijón, thereby calling into question the same kind of binary historical analyses that the editors also criticize in the introduction. In the last part of the book, Rafael Cruz, Francisco Javier Caspitegui, and Michael Richards offer compelling interpretations of Francoist symbolism and identity, making clear the prominent role religion played in the rebel camp.

Although the book includes many very good contributions, its publication also reveals, albeit indirectly, a major shortcoming in the historiography of modern Spain: the slowness of most Spanish historians to acknowledge and engage issues long current elsewhere in Europe. Many of the themes highlighted in the introduction, such as symbols of group identity, mentalités, and history and memory, may indeed represent innovative topics of inquiry for Spanish scholars, but in a broader European context they are nothing new. Since the appearance of Pierre Nora's multivolume Lieux de mémoire (1984–93), for instance, European and North American historians have created a virtual industry of "history and memory" studies. In Spain, however, this topic received scant if any attention before the publication of Paloma Aguilar's highly influential Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil española (Madrid, 1996). [English transl.: Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York and Oxford, 2002)].

This anthology reflects another shortcoming in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War as well: a paradoxical lack of interest in military history, especially among Spanish academic historians. Rather curiously for a book constructed explicitly around the framework of a war, soldiers themselves receive virtually no coverage, with the exception of Caspistegui's fine chapter, which includes an attempt to ascertain ideological reception by Carlist soldiers. The military's absence from most of the book undoubtedly corresponds to the extremely low esteem in which the Spanish academic community continues to hold military history, even as the growing market in Spain for popular accounts of the Spanish Civil War begins to generate some solid operational histories. Although technical analyses of military operations may not fit here, the anthology certainly could have devoted at least some attention to the cleavages, symbolic expressions, and ideological formations—to use the language of the book—that colored Spanish military culture and actions.

Nevertheless, the anthology sheds light on important aspects of modern Spanish history that have until now received little attention, and the analyses of its contributors are often interesting and astute. It thus has much to offer historians of modern Spain and of civilian wartime culture...