Boletín 93 - A journey learning about the Spanish Civil War.
Boletín 93 - A journey learning about the Spanish Civil War.
Key Stage 5 students in England and Wales will learn more about Spain 1936 - 1975 than most Spaniards their age this academic year🤔
👋Welcome to Boletín #93, an English-language newsletter covering historical, cultural and topical stories related to the A Level Spanish course. These newsletters accompany a student worksheet which can be downloaded here. This week:
The Spanish Civil War (SCW) on the WJEC specification.
Addressing a gap in my subject knowledge.
Hooked.
I discovered an unbelievable family connection to the SCW.
Pre-war societal changes.
Francoist concentration camps.
Deep roots.
Francoism and Falangism - is there a link?
Final thoughts and resources.
In his published letters working as Economic Attaché at the British Embassy in Spain David Eccles describes the time, in 1940, when he witnessed the arrest of a woman in Madrid for offending public morals. But, what had she done that was so indecent? Her dress, caught by a sudden gust of wind, had blown over her head. The civiles, furious and outraged, called her a whore. Her mother watched them lead her away.
The Spanish Civil War on the WJEC specification
The Spanish Civil War is my favourite topic on the WJEC curriculum. It’s broken down into the following sub-topics:
El franquismo – origins, development and consequences.
Post-Civil War Spain – historical and political repercussions.
Spain – coming to terms with the past Recuperación de la memoria histórica.
The Spanish Civil War and the transition to democracy.
Fascinating (so much to learn) and daunting (where to begin).
Edition 93 of Boletín is an introduction to the Spanish Civil War (SCW) and this post is a Spanish Civil War brain/resource dump and for my own sake an account of what I have learnt so far. For my own students, all of the books mentioned below italicised in bold are available for you to read. A massive thank you to @thais_mfl who translated the texts for this edition! 😁
A gap in my subject knowledge
During my PGCE we were set an assignment to develop an unexplored area of subject knowledge and create a scheme of learning (SoL) based on a piece of authentic literature. I picked the SCW and wrote a SoL for Las bicicletas son para el verano.
I was ashamed that I knew nothing about the SCW and was a prospective Spanish teacher. Although, this shame has since dwindled having worked closely with numerous native Spanish teachers over the years whose faces betrayed the internal panic as they too ralised they knew not much about the SCW and indeed post-war Spain.
Previously, I imagined that what happened in Spain was common knowledge, like World War I or World War 2. Little did I know that I wasn’t the only one in the dark and that many Spaniards my age were just as ill-informed.
Early in his book Los campos de concentración de Franco Carlos Hernández writes:
La guerra. Nunca dos palabras supusieron tanto para una generación y tan poco para las que vinieron después. (Hernández de Miguel, 2019)
Surprisingly, today (August 2022) the events of 1936 - 1975 are only taught in some regions within Spain with others showing little or no interest. There appears to be little government support and a desire to avoid complicating life by reopening old wounds.
An Amnesty Law in 1977 swept history under the carpet and as a result Spain didn’t process the war and dictatorship instead opting for collective amnesia before adopting their Constitution and moving into a democracy.
In the aptly named El Silencio de Otros one quote da en el clavo (hits the nail on the head):
Es simplemente un olvido, una amnistía de todos para todos. Un olvido de todos para todos.
Article 45 of the draft bill for the Democratic Memory Law in 2020 titled: Medidas en materia educativa y de formación del profesorado stated that:
El sistema educativo español incluirá entre sus fines el conocimiento de la historia y de la memoria democrática española y la lucha por los valores y libertades democráticas.
A tal efecto, se procederá a la actualización de los contenidos curriculares para Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato
In July 2022 however an amendment to article 45 from 2020 sought to take this further by adding that the repression suffered throughout the war and subsequent dictatorship should also be included in school textbooks!
El sistema educativo español incluirá entre sus fines el conocimiento de la historia y de la memoria democrática española y la lucha por los valores y libertades democráticas desarrollando en los libros de texto y materiales curriculares la represión que se produjo durante la Guerra y la Dictadura.
Hooked
It was a steep learning curve. My exploration of the SCW began with the fantastic Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett. I was hooked and learning as much about the SCW became a mild obsession.
Years later I would get the chance to interview Giles for a Boletín issue!
After Ghosts of Spain I moved on to popular fiction/non-fiction by Laurie Lee, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Gerald Brenan. The more I read the more I realised I didn’t know and the more questions I had:
Why would Italy, Russia and Germany get involved in the Spanish Civil War?
Why would France and England sign a non-intervention pact?
What were the differences between communism, fascism and anarchism, socialism?
What is Carlism?!?! 😕(this one took a while to clear up)
How did Franco come to power and why did he remain there so long?
Were there really concentration camps in Spain?
How can the church and army have so much power?
What were the massacres perpetrated by both sides?
What are the repercussions on Spain today?
Why is the war a taboo subject?
There was a long journey ahead of me. I needed to dig deeper, get more specific and find some answers.
A family link
Then a revelation…
I find out that if it weren’t for the SCW then I wouldn’t be here writing this today!
It turns out my bisbuelo (Pere Mitjà i Figueres Granollers, 1915 – Londres, 1988) was very involved with Catalan politics, was awarded the Order of Loyalty to the Republic and even worked with Luis Companys! After leaving Barcelona via the Pyrenees the Cruz Roja picked him up and he then settled in England.
Coincidentally, he too published a weekly newsletter but in Catalan. He also founded Catalans UK. A really fascinating man.
Digging deeper
The reading continued. Gerald Brenan’s tome The Spanish Labyrinth awaited me and I put off reading it for a while as it’s heavy. It’s certainly a book which deserves its reputation as one of the best on the topic.
The Spanish Labyrinth includes an in-depth description of the factions involved within the SCW, including Carlists (phew) and gives a great account of the socio-historical context of pre-war Spain. Brenan’s other books South From Granada and The Face of Spain contain yet more of his astute observations of Spanish society in the early 20th century. All three are essential reading.
Later, books like Franco and Condor Legion and Help Spain! would help me get my head around the organisation and aims of the International Brigades and the scope of German/Italian/Russian help during the war. Tanks, planes, armaments, advisers, spies etc.
During the 6 weeks holidays, whilst getting to grips with being a parent, Winter in Madrid by C.J Sansom transported me back to 1940’s Spain and synthesized everything learnt so far. It’s an engrossing, historically accurate wartime espionage novel set in the post-war capital. What could be better? A mix of John Le Carré and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Much of it rings true with accounts from Así fue la dictadura: diez historias de represión franquista. I won’t ruin the former but part of the story takes place in a concentration camp.
Now then, whilst I remember, here is a list of some societal changes in Spain in the lead up to the war. Some of these include legislation bought in by the Spanish Republic in 1931.
A list of pre-war societal changes
Some changes below were only proposed and not fulfilled. This list is taken directly from one of my note pads.
But first a quote…
To every worker the necessary conditions for a dignified existence (The Constitution of 1931)
Divorce law abrogated.
The arts of pottery, painting and music flourish.
Novios could go to the cinema together, a break from tradition.
Women wear short sleeves, low dresses, modern bathing suits. Bishops say this is immoral.
New ideas about the independence of women seeped in from abroad.
Secular (non-religious) schooling is free and compulsory.
An 8-hour day for agricultural workers and the banning of outsourcing cheaper labour from further away.
Women available in elections as deputies for the first time.
40% decrease in Army Officers.
Religious liberty declared and Catholic images removed from schools.
Female suffrage.
Equal rights for all citizens.
Civil marriage and divorce.
Provision for regional autonomy.
Permission for state to expropriate private property for reasons of broader social utility.
Priests and nuns are banned from teaching in private schools.
Women work in industry, can be soldiers and are involved with politics + wear worker clothes.
Francoist concentration camps.
Carlos Hernández (war journalist, author and once parliamentary columnist) describes Spain as una gran casa de Bernarda Alba as he quotes her opening/last line of the play in his most recent book Los campos de concentración de Franco.
Carlos had a stark realisation one day whilst running through Casa de Campo in Madrid. The undulating ground under his feet bought back memories of a blissfully innocent childhood spent playing there. He remembered the improvised goal posts between pine trees and how he would go up and down the bumps on his bike pretending to be a motocross rider. At forty years of age he had a stark realisation. These undulations were bunkers, shell craters and trenches. The prologue of Las bicicletas son para el verano springs to mind.
Luis: ¿Te imaginas que aquí hubiera una guerra de verdad?
Pablo: Pero - ¿Dónde te crees que estás? ¿En Abisinia? ¡Aquí qué va a haber una guerra!
Luis: Bueno, pero se puede pensar.
Pablo: Aquí no puede haber guerra por muchas razones.
Luis: ¿Por cuáles?
Pablo: Pues porque para una guerra hace falta mucho campo o el desierto, como en Abisinia, para hacer trincheras. Y aquí no se puede porque estamos en Madrid, en una ciudad. En las ciudades no puede haber batallas.
Luis: Sí, es verdad.
Looking out from Casa de Campo was the Western Front from which Franco’s troops attempted to enter Madrid, close to Parque del Oeste and Ciudad Universitaria (the setting of the exchange between Pablo and Luis) which became battlegrounds. Civil War tours, many organised by British tour guides, will show you all of this. I paid for one in 2016 and saw bullet hole ridden walls and a monument paying homage to the International Brigades which had recently been defaced.
Frontline Madrid by David Mathieson (organiser of the tour I went on) does an excellent job in describing the seige of Madrid and has an entire chapter on Madrid’s Western Front (Casa de Campo, Parque del Oeste and University Campus).
In another of his books Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen Carlos sheds light on the Spaniards deported to German concentration camps by Hitler on Franco’s orders. A challenge closer to home would be researching the Francoist concentration camps in his own country. In Los campos de concentración de Franco Carlos identifies 296 concentration camps in Spain in which he believes between 700,000 to 1,000,000 prisoners passed through. Here is an interactive map of the camps. Carlos states that:
Además de ser el escenario de esta selección ideológica, los campos sirvieron también como lugar de exterminio, de reclusión, de castigo, de trabajos forzados y de reeducación. Exterminio porque los asesinatos de prisioneros fueron parte de la rutina diaria. (Hernández, page 77)
Deep roots
The class struggle and political unrest pre-1936 in Spain had some deep roots. Spain: A Brief History by Giles Tremlett helped me to understand the Spanish Civil War in the context of The First Carlist War of 1833, the Peninsular War and the French Revolution. The clash between liberals and reactionaries (as the ultra-catholic traditionalists are referred to in his book) goes back over 100-years. Did you know there were at least 50 attempted coups in the period between 1814 to 1891 in Spain?
Giles Tremlett also helped me learn more about Carlism. He dedicates a whole chapter to Ferdinand VII aka el deseado. Ferdinand scrapped the constitution of 1812 which included some pretty radical reforms and sent the clock further back in Spain by re-instating the inquisition amongst other things. After a coup in 1820 he would then go back on his word and declare that the liberals were right and swear allegiance to the same constitution he had abolished eight years earlier (Tremlett, 2022).
Tremlett introduces Ferdinand’s wife Cristina María (a corrupt slave trader) and their infant daughter Isabella II. Shortly before his death Ferdinand pushed through a law change which would allow his daughter to become heiress to the throne in a break with Bourbon tradition. However, it was his wife María Cristina who would be regent which stoked the fires of the reactionaries who supported his brother Carlos’ claim to the throne and a return to more conservative, absolutist ways. The First Carlist War shortly followed, and a divide emerged in Spain.
Francoism and Falangism - is there a link?
The simple answer is yes! Click below to view the newsletter for edition 98 which is all about Franco and Primo de Rivera (the founder of the Falange).
Final thoughts
It’s clear that radical new policies threatened a seismic shift in everyday life for traditional, conservative Spaniards who hated the idea of communism and Marxism.
Ian Gibson in The Assassination of Federico García Lorca describes this group:
Spanish traditionalists identify Spain with the Catholic church: Spain has been chosen by god as the torchbearer of the Faith and the guardian of Chistian values in a hostile world, and virtue lies in remaining faithful to the spirit of Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ who unified Castile and Aragon, defeated the Moors of Granada, expelled the jews, promoted the discovery, colonisation and conversion of the New World and imposed state Catholicism.
Franco too hated them. Here’s a snippet from an interview between him and Jay Allen.
Franco: Salvaré España del marxismo, cueste lo que cueste.
Jay Allen: ¿Eso significa que tendrá que matar a la mitad de España?
Franco: Repito, cueste lo que cueste. (Hernándes de Miguel, 2019)
Equally despised were socialists, anarchists, unionists and all were often conflated so that if one had left-leaning tendencies one might find themselves in the half of Spain Franco was alluding to. Either that or locked up, tortured, publicly humiliated, re-educated, sent to a concentration camp, brain washed, shaved and paraded through town naked or paseado. Brutally, if your relatives were known to sympathise with the left the above could also apply to you.
Unsurprisingly, with his cleansing of Spain, Franco was in contact with Hitler’s Nazi Party. Records of Hitler shaping Spain’s internal workings (policing for one) exist.
The UN put on record in 1946 that:
de acuerdo con su origen, naturaleza, estructura y conducta general, el régimen de Franco es un régimen fascista basado en el model de la Alemania de Hitler y la Italia fascista de Mussolini (Hernándes de Miguel, 2019)
Franco harnassed the poetic, intellectual and ideological attractiveness of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange, merged it with Carlism and created a hybrid of the two which formed the building blocks of Francoism. Franco’s problem however was that José Antonio, the popular figure and leader of the Falange, had been executed. The Falange had lost it’s leader and identity. Franco presided over an ideological genocide under the facade of falangism which purist falangists resisted (more on that in edition 98). Spaniards had to adapt to the new regime for fear of being caught or denounced by neighbours.
Nevertheless, resistance to the regime continued up until Franco’s death, albeit predominantly clandestinely with flash protests, anti-francoist literature and leaflets although organised guerrilla units or maquis disturbed the status quo.
The cogs moved slowly after Franco’s death in 1975. In El Silencio de Otros multiple plaintiffs resorted to bringing their post-war torturer Antonio González Pacheco AKA Billy el Niño to justice in Argentina due to the Spanish government blocking a trial in Spain (there was an amnesty🙄).
Spoiler (don’t read the next sentence if you’re planning on watching): Billy el Niño died of COVID-19 before his victims could see justice.
The new Democratic Memory Law is a leap forward and builds on the Historic Memory Law of 2007. Among other things human rights violations, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances can now be investigated internationally under Universal Jurisdiction. On the amnesty.org page you can learn more but below summarises it quite well.
There are many reasons why victims of these crimes are denied justice. They include a lack of political will to investigate crimes and prosecute those responsible, weak criminal justice systems, and the marginalization of victims in society.
As a result, perpetrators may not be held to account and may even continue to hold positions in which they can commit violations or prevent accountability; victims are left to suffer.
Universal jurisdiction refers to the principle that a national court may, and in some circumstances must, prosecute individuals for crimes under international law – such as crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide or torture – wherever they happened, based on the principle that such crimes harm the international community or international order itself, which individual states may act to protect.
The Spanish Civil War is a very complex topic to teach especially when time is limited and you want to do the topic justice.
It would be easy to teach some aspects well and skip over the more difficult ones. What’s clear is there’s no end to the number of books covering it and just when I think everything I’ve read I’ve understood holistically I forget or realise I have misunderstood something. Most of the books above I’ll read again to make it stick.
I’ve seen some feisty exchanges on teaching Facebook groups about the SCW and as a non-native feel slightly perturbed sharing my own thoughts on the topic. There’s lots more to add to this post (I have barely touched on the whole post-war period) and I will try to update it annually. If I’ve misinterpreted anything above or you think I’ve unfairly represented something then I am wanting to learn more so get in touch.
A little something extra
This year I’m looking forward to incorporating newspapers from 1975 (pic below) into the classroom to see how much students can glean about Franco from his obituaries in the press. It’s worth pointing that ABC was a conservative, catholic and monarchist paper so opinions about Franco are rose-tinted. In the future I’d like to get a copy of a periódico de izquierdas for an alternative view. Here’s what Wikipedia say about ABC.
La ley de prensa de 22 de abril de 1938 suprimirá la prensa republicana, convirtiendo al conjunto de la prensa restante en una institución al servicio del Estado, transmisor de valores oficiales e instrumento de adoctrinamiento político. En este contexto, el ABC se convertirá en uno de los periódicos más importantes para el sostenimiento de la dictadura
Whilst I’m on the topic of newspapers you might like to visit the Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Use the search tab to find your own historical news to use in class!
If you’re a Twitter user you can follow @19391936 who tweets SCW events chronologically, day by day or @guroseba who shares images of Spanish newspapers along with newsworthy stories from both sides of the war.
Book suggestions from fellow MFL teachers
As well as the books mentioned above, the following are also worth looking into. This is essentially my SCW reading list:
Las Trece Rosas by Jesús Ferrero
The Real Band of Brothers by Max Arthur
A World Between Us by Lydia Syson
The Fountains of Silence by Rupta Septys
El Lápiz del Carpintero by Manuel Rivas
The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston
A People Betrayed by Paul Preston
Franco by Paul Preston
The Masquerade in Spain by Charles Foltz Jr
The Spanish Civil War: A very short introduction by Helen Graham
Luna de Lobos by Julio Llamazares
Podcast episodes/videos relating to the SCW
All the following are links to the The Sobremesa Podcast on Spotify; an English speaking podcast about modern-day Spanish society, politics and history. It makes me wish I started podcasting myself with Boletín!
On the Democratic Memory Law 1 and 2.
On exhuming Spain’s mass graves.
On Barcelona and the Civil War.
On exhuming Franco from el Valle de los Caídos.
On the relationship between Nazi Germany and Spain.
An interview with Giles Tremlett about the International Brigades.
Spain: A Country Divided (German audio/English captions)
Resources to teach the Spanish Civil War
La Guerra Civil Española and La exhumación de Franco by Neil Jones
The Two Spains 1936 -1975 6-week booklet by @MrFrancisMFL
BBC radio broadcasts related to Spanish history by @lewizrs
Planning the coup on WhatsApp, censorsip after the war, torture and exploitation post-war and rationing post-war by OllieMFL
Boletín 98 - Falangism, Franco/Primo de Rivera and 20N.
Boletín 88 - The disappeared, Historic Memory Law and Maria Martín
Boletín 77 - La transición hacía la democracia
Boletín 71 - The post-war period in Spain
Boletín 49 - Consecuencias de la guerra civil
Boletín 32 - Dictators (Hitler, Stalin and Franco)
Pre-cursor to the Spanish Civil War. A group activity with a reading and card-sort based on the policies/wants/ideologies of the nationalists/socialists/anarchists/communists and International Brigades. I use this every year! I’ve lowered the price to £1 until end of September. Buy here.
An interactive Spanish Civil War museum here.
The download link
Well done if you got this far. Thanks for reading!
Download edition 93 here, leave a review if you like it or buy me a beer here.
