Abstract
Until the 1970s, in spite of the many thousands of books and articles written about the Spanish Civil War, very little was directly known about the experience of the rank and file, the millions of common people who were caught up in one of the most bloody internecine conflicts of modern history. There are a number of explanations for this ‘silence of the masses’. Within Spain during the long, bleak period of the Franco dictatorship it was extremely dangerous for any individual, especially of the left, to make any public statement about the events of 1936–9 or to ‘tell the truth’. Nor, if they had been brave or foolhardy enough to have attempted this would they have found a publisher or escaped the rigours of state censorship and police repression. Official Francoist versions of the war, portrayed as a holy crusade against barbarous and bloodstained communist hordes, was too important to overall political control and systematic indoctrination via classrooms, newspapers, radio and television to tolerate any accounts that undermined the myths.1
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Notes
See P. Preston, ‘War of Words: the Spanish Civil War and the Historians’ in P. Preston (ed.), Revolution and War in Spain 1931–1939 (London: Methuen, 1984).
Figures taken from P. Preston, ‘The Anti-Francoist Opposition: The Long March to Unity, in P. Preston (ed.), Spain in Crisis: The Evolution and Decline of the Franco Régime (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976), p. 133.
See also H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 760–1.
See for example V. Cunningham (ed.), Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
and B. Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty: Spain 1936–1939 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982).
On the emergence of oral history as a discipline and for the methodological issues which it raises see P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past. Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)
T. Lummis, Listening to History: The Authenticity of Oral Evidence (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
Ian Gibson’s delicate investigation after 1965 of the murder of Garcia Lorca also used the interview and was an early sign of a changing atmosphere inside Spain. I. Gibson, The Assassination of Federico García Lorca (London: W. H. Allen, 1979).
On caciquismo see R. Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 366–79.
See J. R. Mintz, The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
A. Shubert, The Road to Revolution: The Coal Miners of Asturias 1860–1934 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 6–7.
P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War. Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic 1931–1936 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 158.
R. Carr, The Spanish Tragedy: The Civil War in Perspective (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp. 76–7.
H. R. Southworth, Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
The history of the Spanish Republicans in France has been studied mainly by non-French scholars, notably L. Stein, Beyond Death and Exile: The Spanish Republicans in France 1939–1955 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
and D. W. Pike, Vae Victis: Los Repúblicanos Españoles Refugiados en Francia 1939–1944 (Paris, 1969).
More recently R. Schor has studied anti-Spanish propaganda in, L’Opinion Française et les Étrangers en France 1919–1939 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1985), Part 4, Chapter 7.
See B. Pollack, G. Hunter, The Paradox of Spanish Foreign Policy: Spain’s International Relations from Franco to Democracy (London: Pinter, 1987), Chapters 1, 2.
S. Carrillo gives an account from the position of a leading member of the PCE in Dialogue on Spain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. 14, 92–6, 101; see also P. Preston (ed.), Spain in Crisis, pp. 133–6.
Jorge Semprún, expelled along with Fernando Claudin from the PCE in 1964, has revealed the damaging impact of Stalinism in his autobiographical study, Communism in Spain in the Franco Era: The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).
R. Carr, J. P. Fusi, Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), p. 94.
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© 1990 Neil MacMaster
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MacMaster, N. (1990). Introduction. In: Spanish Fighters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21009-1_1
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