The Spanish Second Republic and Political Violence

In the last decade, political violence has become a central feature of studies on the Second Republic and the Civil War, making historiography on Spain comparable with that on the rest of Europe. From this perspective, Spain, despite its neutrality during the First World War, was not exceptional in the inter-war period, witnessing the agony and collapse of its liberal system (1914–23); a military dictatorship (1923–30); the omnipresence of violence during the democratic Republic (1931–6); and the outbreak of a bloody Civil War (1936–9) and subsequent military dictatorship (1939–75) that was particularly repressive in its early years.

However, historians have yet to reach a consensus on the origins, meaning and significance of violence in Spanish politics during this period. Discussion has centred on issues such as the responsibilities of political parties for the violence, its role in the collapse of Republican democracy and above all the theoretical categorization of the repression that took place on both sides during the Civil War. Thanks to the extreme approach of a small (but very noisy) number of politically committed scholars, this debate has become increasingly ill-tempered. Moreover, the recent politicization of academic debate has also been a consequence of the so-called ‘Historical Memory Law’ passed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government on 31 October 2007.

Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust ¹ has inevitably been shaped by these polemics, possibly against the wishes of the British historian. Certainly The Spanish Holocaust is an essential introduction to the subject, a veritable book of books. Unquestionably, whether or not one shares the author’s conclusions, this commercially successful study has a strong narrative and provides much information, although its best sections are the few that are based on primary sources. However, in the context of the aforementioned polemics that transcend the university seminar room, The Spanish Holocaust has become a weapon in the Spanish ‘memory wars’ of the twenty-first century, a logical outcome given the book’s focus on revolutionary and counter-revolutionary repression.

Leaving aside the political controversy, the historiographical debate on the book has centred on the theoretical repercussions of its title, which expresses a thesis – Francoist ‘genocide’ or ‘extermination’ – which several leading historians consider completely inappropriate. Moreover, the use of the term ‘Inquisition’ in the English version’s subtitle, which resuscitates the ‘Black Legend’ of the sixteenth century and has nothing to do with Spanish realities of the first half of the twentieth century, has produced bewilderment among these historians. Indeed, the use of this concept is a reversion to the cliché of ‘Spain is different’ that was typical of the romanticism of Hispanists such as Gerald Brenan, who presented an exotic Spain that was also backward, barbarous and brutal, an anomaly in Western Europe even in the extremely tumultuous interwar period.

Nevertheless, Preston has largely kept his distance from these polemics. The British historian seems more interested in the difficult and praiseworthy task of making the history of modern Spain accessible to a wider public than in becoming involved in the bitter intellectual disputes of the Spanish academic world. This can be seen, for example, in his recent and very critical biography of Santiago Carrillo, a crucial figure in twentieth century Spain. ² Those historians identified with the antifascist mythology will probably not greet Preston’s latest work with open arms. ³

For these historians, virtually the only bright spot of the last 200 years of Spanish history has been the Second Republic, proclaimed on 14 April 1931. Republican democracy has for decades been idealized because of its ambitious plans of social transformation and above all as being a symbol of resistance to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe. Not surprisingly, this romanticized vision of the Republic is in complete contrast to that given by the Franco dictatorship, which presented its vanquished adversary as a radical, anarchic and calamitous regime that was on the point of opening the door to Bolshevism.

Since the 1960s, Spanish scholars such as Santos Juliá, Javier Tusell, Juan José Linz, Santiago Varela, José Manuel Macarro, Andrés de Blas, Juan Pablo Fusi, Mercedes Cabrera, Enric Ucelay, José Luis de la Granja and Juan Avilés (among others), have presented a far more nuanced picture of the 1930s. Without ignoring the problems of the Republic’s democratic experiment, these historians rejected – and discredited – these Francoist theses. In fact, despite the claims of committed antifascist historians, it is absurd to say that Francoist historiography has any great influence in Spanish universities nowadays. While there has been a neo-Francoist revival in certain sections of the Spanish media, virtually all professional historians have remained immune to this passing fashion.

In truth, the myth of the historiographical rise of neo-Francoism has been championed by that small group of historians determined to defend at all costs the vision of a sacred and ‘heroic’ republican democracy. Under the cover of a ‘memorial fever’ (fiebre memorialista), this myth has given them a public prominence difficult to achieve in other circumstances. The central objective of their strategy has been to establish a monolithic and ‘final’ interpretation of the Republic, Civil War, and Francoist dictatorship. These historians have not been reluctant to employ questionable tactics to preserve this simplistic and Manichean representation of the past. Dissenters have been subjected to insults (being called ‘pro-Francoist’, ‘neo-Francoist’, ‘revisionist’, etc) with the fallacious argument that they are reviving Francoist tenets. For example, the British historian Julius Ruiz, author of two excellent books on the repression in the Civil War and postwar period, has been stigmatized by the politically committed historiography both for rejecting the ‘exterminist' view of the Franco regime as well as highlighting unflattering aspects of the ‘Red Terror' in the Republican Zone. ⁴

Apart from presenting a one-sided and idealized representation of the Republic, these politically committed historians depict all leftist parties and trade unions (including the Communists, revolutionary Socialists and anarchists) as ‘fighters for freedom and democracy’ and identify the Republic exclusively with the left. Consequently, they marginalize others—such as liberals, centrist Republicans and moderate rightists—who also supported the new regime created in April 1931. Moreover, these historians project a misleadingly monolithic, demonized and totalitarian image of the diverse elements of Spanish conservatism, underestimate the degree of political conflict in the Republican period and downplay the significance of political violence before 1936, claiming that it was provoked solely by misery and socio-economic injustice. When examining the murderous repression of the Civil War itself, ‘militant’ historiography invariably portrays rebel killing as genocidal while justifying and excusing revolutionary violence. ⁵

The real problem for these politically committed historians is not the supposed Francoist revival, but how to react to the appearance of serious historical research that offers new perspectives on the Republican period. They have recently begun to de-emphasize the Francoist bogey in order to criticize an enemy of their own invention. As a recent edited volume on the so-called myths of the Civil War argues, the old Francoist myths have been replaced by a right-wing revisionism that attempts to discredit the Republic. Surprisingly, no evidence is provided to support this extraordinary assertion, and the thesis is based on the authors’ arbitrary assertions on the supposedly unstated objectives of those that they label pejoratively as ‘revisionists’. ⁶

Why has such as aggressive attitude been adopted against their critics? Simply put, rather than accept the ‘heroic’ myth of the ideologically led historiography, recent work on Republican democracy has convincingly identified its problems. These include a constitutional framework that excluded conservatives; the patrimonial and instrumental attitude that the left (above all left-republicans and Socialists) had towards the Republic; the revolutionary and anti-democratic nature of an important part of the workers’ movement (that is, anarchists, Communists, left-wing Socialists); the growing spiral of violence (especially in the summer of 1933, and above all in October 1934 and the spring of 1936); the deep divisions of conservatives and the political defeat of moderates harassed by both leftist militants and the anti-liberal forces of the extreme right. However, for the politically committed historians, evidence – however significant – can be dispensed with if it does not fit their theses. In this sense, it does not matter that ‘revisionists’ also consider the key role that the extreme right played in the crisis of Republican democracy. If a historian does not accept the dogmas of the politically committed historiography, they are condemned as heretics. ⁷

What is ironic is that those historians who romanticize the Republic do not recognize that they have much in common with Francoist historiography. Their approach is based on the same logic as anti-Republican Francoist propaganda. They have internalized the false equation that recognition of high levels of political violence and conflict automatically implies a justification of anti-Republican conspiracies and the outbreak of the Civil War. In other words, Francoists argued – and antifascist, ideologically-led historians now seem to accept – that a breakdown in public order can legitimize a military rebellion against an elected Republican government. This helps to explain why these historians attempt to downplay the significance of political violence in Spain before July 1936.

In reality, the authors contributing to this forum who have drawn attention to high levels of political violence in the Second Republic have never expressed themselves in the terms claimed by their critics. The only objective of our research has been to highlight the significance of political violence and conflict in problematizing the transition to democracy in Republican Spain. This process was not doomed to failure: after all, although political violence was common in other European countries undergoing democratization in the interwar period, civil war was rarely the final outcome. Furthermore, we do not believe that the problems facing Republican democracy were solely ones of public order. But what is undeniable is that frequent political clashes significantly undermined consensual politics and impeded the rapid stabilization of democracy. What happened afterwards is a different question.

In summary, political violence in Republican Spain was an increasingly frequent phenomenon before July 1936. There were three large-scale anarchist insurrections in January 1932, January and December 1933; a failed military coup in August 1932; a revolutionary insurrection led by Socialists and leftist Catalan nationalists in October 1934; a steady succession of killings produced by conflicts of different kinds (strikes, peasant unrest, clashes with the police, anticlericalism, right and left-wing urban terrorism). A minimum of 2500 people suffered violent deaths for political reasons. Of these, around 1200 were killed in the insurrection of October 1934, and approximately 400 between 1 January and 17 July 1936. Given these dreadful statistics, no one can deny the impact of political violence on Spanish democracy and on the lives of Spanish citizens. ⁸

But can one conclude from these figures that the Civil War was inevitable? Do these deaths justify the military rebellion of July 1936? We have never subscribed to these theses. Rather, we argue that the Republic needs to be studied for its own sake and not simply as a prelude to the subsequent fratricidal conflict and military dictatorship. The war was not inevitable, and rebellion can never (either then or now) be justified from a democratic point of view. Ultimately, it was the military rebellion that provoked a civil war that could have been averted until the very end. Our work does not contain a single sentence legitimizing the dictatorship that emerged victorious from the war. Nor will readers find any arguments suggesting that the war was caused by pre-war conflict. We reject such a teleological approach. ⁹

We have also been accused of being ‘equidistant’, ‘presentist’ and even ‘democratic fundamentalists’ ¹⁰ (despite the latter contradicting other charges of ‘revisionism’). These derogatory labels are only a means, as Chris Ealham’s recent demagogic review article in this journal demonstrated, of ignoring our arguments. ¹¹ This attitude contrasts starkly with the much more reflective and refined research of the latest generation of Hispanists such as Pamela Radcliff, Michael Seidman, Geoffrey Jensen, Gerald Blaney, Tim Rees, and Nigel Townson. The truth is, of course, that we are not ‘equidistant’ in terms of establishing ‘responsibilities’ for the Civil War but have striven to be balanced and nuanced in our approach to the 1930s, sensitive to the changing contexts in which contemporaries operated. Therefore, in judging the import, virtues and deficiencies of the Republic, one has to place Spain in the wider context of interwar European parliamentary democracy rather than comparing it to twenty-first century democratic systems. We are only motivated by the modest and legitimate desire to understand and explain, from a comparative perspective and without prejudices, myths and taboos, the difficulties of consolidating democracy in Spain during the interwar period. In this, Spain was not ‘different’.