Abstract
Spain, much more than Algeria, was always France’s Wild West, the exotic badlands to the south which quickened the blood, provided moral lessons and warnings, together with a mirror-image of the more sophisticated state to the north. In other words, from Le Cid to Figaro and Carmen (the theatrical and operatic is truly important here), via El Greco and Goya, Spain has for the French the role of the unruly neighbour: attractive and repulsive in equal measure and, like most unruly neighbours, apt at any time to spill over the garden fence – in this case, the Pyrenees. It was natural, therefore, that France was interested and then concerned when the Spanish elected a Frente Popular government in 1934, just at the time that the French left were concluding their own Front Populaire, which came to power in June 1936, and even more so when that self-same Frente Popular government was threatened by a right-wing military putsch. The ensuing civil war mobilized activists on both the left and the right across the world, but nowhere more so than in France, where, in addition to political debates on intervention and enrolment in the International Brigades, the battle was fought out amongst writers and intellectuals. In this study, Martin Hurcombe discusses a selection of right-wing and left-wing figures who wrote about the war as it proceeded, often from first-hand experience, and places their fictional and non-fictional reports in a framework of Utopias: restoration of the old Catholic monarchical society and the advent of the new warrior hero for the right, or the fraternity of anti-fascist struggle and the creation of a new world for the left. As such, he covers some little-known right-wing authors, such as Frondaie, along with more prominent figures like Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach, together with left-wing journalists like Simone Téry, liberal reporters like André Chamson and the towering figure of Malraux. A welcome retrospective view is contained in analyses of Bernanos’ Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune and the now all but forgotten Henri Pollès. This is a useful addition to an already copious historiography on the issue of Franco-Spanish cultural representations during and after the war. But this is also its problem: the samples chosen are too selective and by no means encompass an exhaustive survey of French cultural representations of the war, not least because they are confined to literary reportage and fiction: it would have been useful to set the accounts of these essentially literary evocations against those of professional war correspondents, war photographers (Magnum was, after all, based in Paris), film makers (where is Joris Ivens and The Spanish Earth?), dramatists (where is Bernanos’ Dialogue des Carmélites?) and French or French-based painters (Guernica?). Where also are some of the key historical texts: Julian Jackson’s study of the Front Populaire, Gabriel Jackson’s classic study of the Civil War, Emile Broué’s and Pierre Thémime’s La Guerre et la Révolution d’Espagne (which could have seriously bolstered the Utopian argument and makes a serious case for there being two simultaneous revolutions against the Republic in 1936, both Francoist and anarchist/Trotskyist) and Noam Chomsky’s commentary on it, and Gabriel Jackson in American Power and the New Mandarins? In fact, this is overwhelmed by a rather clunky methodology on Utopia which is not entirely convincing: you might be fascinated by your neighbours and you might fear that what they do might spill over into your garden, but you would not want to live in their house.