Entrenching Democracy: Education and Cultural Participation in the Spanish Republican Army,1936–1939

The Republican Educational and Cultural Mobilization Strategy

The Republican government’s attempt to legitimize a centrally coordinated war effort, revolving around a reconstructed army, inevitably required it to take command, from the outset, of the narratives that would imbue the war with political meaning. Within the army, the main institution charged with this task was the War Commissariat, created in October 1936 – the same month in which the government issued its first conscription decree. According to the preamble to the legislation announcing its creation, the commissariat was to remind Republican soldiers of ‘the spirit that has to animate all fighters in the cause of liberty’. ¹⁷ Yet the commissars, trained by the new organization and posted within a specific units where they worked alongside the military officers, had wide-ranging practical as well as political responsibilities: they monitored all aspects of soldiers’ physical and mental health, advised on personal hygiene, and oversaw the maintenance of trenches and other frontline constructions. In quiet periods they organized leisure activities – for example, sports events and theatre shows – to relieve the men’s boredom. ¹⁸ The commissars, who typically had some pre-war experience of left-wing activism, also served as mediators between officers and their men. This was vital, not only because Spain, as a neutral power in the First World War, had never previously experienced the realities of modern warfare, but also because large sections of the Spanish working class harboured deep suspicions of career officers proclaiming their loyalty to the Republic. Their distrust was most immediately fuelled by the fact that substantive sectors of the officer class had rebelled against the legitimately constituted Republican government, but it also had deeper roots in longstanding perceptions of the army as a tool of class oppression – perceptions based on Spanish workers’ experience of being conscripted to fight brutal colonial wars abroad and seeing the army being used on numerous occasions during the early twentieth century as a violent public order force to quell popular protests at home. ¹⁹ To overcome such perceptions and create conditions conducive to effective command, commissars constantly had to explain the rationale of orders and remind soldiers of the progressive political character of the new Republican Army. ²⁰

The commissars’ political responsibility thus made them the principal conduits through which the Republican government could disseminate an ‘official’ war narrative among the army rank-and-file. In brief, this narrative, shared with many left-wing organizations, presented the insurgency as a desperate attempt to defend the traditional privileges of a quasi-feudal Spanish elite against a popular effort to modernize Spain politically, economically and culturally. To defend its interests, this elite had joined forces with international fascism and accepted Hitler and Mussolini as their puppet masters, which also gave the conflict the character of a war of national independence. ²¹ The latter point was increasingly pushed to the forefront as the Republican authorities began to exercise greater control over the mobilization process, thus displacing, to some extent, references to the war as a class conflict. Patriotic discourses were undoubtedly important as tools of war mobilization, as historians have shown. ²² Yet the idea that the Republic represented a progressive political project, striving for greater equality and social inclusion, was not incompatible with patriotic discourses, and in some ways this idea remained an essential (and distinct) aspect of the Republic’s raison d’être throughout the war. ²³ In this sense, the popular legitimacy of the Republic could not be entirely divorced from progressive politics – a fact that the Republican government, too, recognized, as is evident in the rhetoric and the content of its educational and cultural reform programme.

Indeed, the idea that the Republic would give workers a meaningful voice and secure equal opportunities for all Spaniards found its most eloquent summary expression in the assertion, made repeatedly by Republican authorities from the beginning of 1937, that the Republic was fighting a war in defence of ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ (cultura), as used in early twentieth-century Spain, related to education in the broadest sense of the word; it referred both to the means and the result of self-refinement, of learning in all areas of human and social life (technical as well as philosophical). However, in the context of the Republican war effort, ‘culture’ also acquired deeper and ideologically specific connotations which linked Republican cultural reform both to social mobility and a positive notion of ‘civilization’. Thus, Republican cultural workers – teachers, artists, intellectuals of all kinds – tended to associate ‘culture’ with a particular set of Enlightenment values; ‘culture’ was progressive, egalitarian and secular, as opposed to ‘backward’ religion, for example. Logically, ‘barbaric’ fascism was also seen as intrinsically inimical to ‘culture’ and cultural development. ²⁴ Thus defined, ‘culture’ became an instrumental shorthand for the ideological ground shared by moderate republican reformers and more radical sectors of the political left. Even some fundamental differences between reformist and revolutionary left-wing approaches to ‘culture’ – including disagreements over the role of ‘the masses’ in cultural production and the value of the national heritage – were typically glossed over whenever the term was instrumentalized in mobilizing discourses. This fact underscores the term’s propagandistic utility: ‘culture’ could be infused with meaning which clearly distinguished the two warring sides whilst also being vague enough to hide differences within the Republican camp. ²⁵

The promotion of ‘culture’ as a legitimizing and mobilizing tool in the Republican war effort followed spectacular investments made in the educational and cultural sphere in 1937 and 1938. The Republican parliament approved a record budget for the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts for 1937, despite juggling increasingly scant state resources. Its relative size of the total state budget was up from 7.1 per cent to 9.4 per cent, making it second only to the budget allocation for the Ministry of Public Works. The educational and cultural budget for 1938 was even larger: 10.4 per cent of the total. ²⁶ We need to bear in mind here that this regular state budget was not used to purchase arms – for which the Republic principally used its gold reserves. Nevertheless, the allocation of such proportionally significant resources still signals just how important the Republican government viewed its educational-cultural mobilization strategies in the war effort as a whole. It was a key means by which the government could shape its numerically superior population into a crucial war resource and legitimize its political and military leadership in a radicalized political environment. The importance of ‘culture’ in the Republican government’s legitimizing discourses was only enhanced further by the fact that, from summer 1937, when the government had dismantled the last vestiges of revolutionary experimentation in the political and economic spheres, expanded opportunities for educational and cultural participation effectively represented the only tangible proof of the war still being a socially transformative struggle. ²⁷

From the beginning of 1937, the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, led by an exceptionally energetic team associated with the Spanish Communist Party, ²⁸ used its record budget to underwrite a massive expansion of educational and cultural activity on both the home- and battle fronts. It built new schools, implemented measures to protect the national artistic heritage from war-related damage, and supported an array of cultural activities – including parades, exhibitions, poster production, film screenings and theatre performances – aiming to instil in the civilian population the collective and self-sacrificing mentality required to win the war. ²⁹ As a part of this educational expansion, the Ministry also created the Culture Militias, which extended the Republican educational programme to the hundreds of thousands of men drafted into the Republican Army. ³⁰

Created on 30 January 1937, the Culture Militias were from the beginning incorporated into the Republican army and should not be confused with the autonomous militias that emerged in the initial phase of the war. The Culture Militias consisted of teams of teachers – typically school teachers, students and other professionals – who were embedded in their units and could adapt their educational activities to the specific demands of the posting. As a rule, however, the bulk of Culture Militia activity focused on basic skills like literacy and numeracy, which reflected the fact that the national average illiteracy rate at the time ranged between 30 and 40 per cent. ³¹ Much time was also invested in politics and history classes that directly or indirectly addressed the root causes of the war. ³² Here the work of the Culture Militias directly overlapped with that of the political commissars, with whom they had to collaborate, both officially and de facto. Such collaboration was not always friction-free, as commissars often took a more instrumental view of education than the volunteers joining the Culture Militias. But the rhetoric of the two organizations nonetheless swiftly merged: liberty and ‘culture’ were linked as end goals of the war, which was fought not only against a political enemy supported by imperialistic fascist regimes, but also against the legacy of an oppressive, undemocratic past. ³³ This view of the war formed the basis of a radical official discourse which in many ways paralleled that of revolutionary socialist or libertarian groups.

To maximize the mobilizing efficacy of this discourse, commissars and frontline teachers repeatedly used their motivational talks and the trench press to stress the importance of Culture Militia classes, which soldiers were expected to attend voluntarily. At times, the transformational potential of learning was even described in near-lyrical terms. ³⁴ In April 1937, for example, Filipe Molinero, Culture Militia teacher stationed on a quiet front in the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, wrote in his battalion paper about a 25-year-old soldier who had just learnt to read. Molinero imagined the ‘joy’ his now-literate student must feel as he had ‘opened a window’ onto the world and abolished all ‘distances’. Addressing the soldier directly, he continued:

Now, books and newspapers, which you previously found indecipherable, lovingly open their pages for you, inviting you to read them, to feel the pleasure of knowing about events throughout the whole world, to taste the marvellous and enjoyable pages of literature which were previously unavailable to your intellect. ³⁵

But the politics of ‘culture’ naturally extended beyond questions of boosted self-esteem and individual refinement. As the Republic had purportedly removed traditional obstacles to ‘culture’, commissars and Culture Militia staff suggested, all soldiers fighting for liberty shared a responsibility to educate themselves to the degree required for collective self-governance. To acquire ‘culture’ was in this sense a civic duty – a duty carrying deep ethical as well as practical meaning. It was not only a matter of being able to occupy positions in ‘town halls, factories and everywhere’ as soon as circumstances allowed, ³⁸ soldiers had to see ‘culture’ as an essential tool in the construction of a new society. ‘Once the war is over, culture will allow us to reconstruct our beloved country – to build on the ashes in which our Spain currently lies buried … another [Spain] that will be more just and humane, based on equality and justice’, declared Chispa, a trench journal produced on the Madrid front, in September 1937. ³⁹

The acquisition of ‘culture’ was a prerequisite of active citizenship, integral to any struggle for liberty. ‘Only culture makes us completely free’, insisted Alicante Rojo on 28 August 1937. ⁴⁰ ‘A cultured people can never be a prisoner of fascism’, echoed Chispa the following month. ⁴¹ From this point of view, ‘culture’ was clearly another weapon against fascism, which had to be defeated with ideas as well as arms. It followed, for some commissars and educational staff, at least, that ‘culture’ had to be approached with the same mentality as any other aspect of the anti-fascist struggle. ⁴² Thus, discourses regarding ‘culture’ were not only politicized but also militarized. ‘Culture’ was something to be ‘conquered’, like a hill on a battlefield: to acquire it required ‘courage’ and ‘discipline’. ⁴³ ‘You have shown on many occasions that you are not cowards. Do not act like cowards now!’, Juan Soto blasted in an article published on 21 February 1937, as he called on soldiers in his Madrid-based battalion to attend Culture Militia classes. ⁴⁴

Soto’s exhortation suggests that soldiers’ voluntary participation in the Republican Army’s educational programme occasionally fell short of expectations, but before discussing issues of soldiers’ engagement, it should first be noted that the militarization of educational and cultural discourses added to these an important voluntarist dimension. Now that soldiers had the means of learning at their disposal, commissars and Culture Militia staff insisted, all that was missing was the will. ⁴⁵ When given a positive spin, this outlook gave rise to boundless optimism regarding the potential results of the Republican educational programme: it was repeatedly suggested that 30 days would be sufficient for an illiterate person to acquire full literacy. ⁴⁶ In an attempt to better the efforts of other units, one brigade set itself the goal of eradicating illiteracy in 15 days only. Later they proudly reported that after eight days, not a single soldier in the unit remained unable to sign with his own name. ⁴⁷ As long as learners approached learning with the correct mindset, it seemed, the educational programme could achieve its core goals within an increasingly compressed time period.

On one level, the voluntarist language taking shape in official educational discourses during the war was indicative of significant departures from pre-war educational reforms. To some extent, this reflected the influence in this sphere of the Communist Party, which had embraced the idea of the War Commissariat more firmly than other political organizations, and had, as indicated, a direct influence on educational and cultural policy. Many commissars – especially but not exclusively those affiliated with the Communist Party – were inspired by the Stakhanovite movement in the Soviet Union and Soviet ideas of ‘socialist emulation’. According to the official Soviet narrative elaborating on such ideas, the initial phase of the ambitious industrialization process underway in the Soviet Union had been a spectacular success largely due to the tireless efforts of heroic Soviet workers who, in their desire to contribute to the construction of socialism, constantly broke new individual and collective production records. ⁴⁸ Borrowing from this narrative and seeking to encourage what we may call ‘anti-fascist emulation’, many commissars in Spain constructed comparable stories of heroic rank-and-file engagement helping to further both the military and the educational goals of the Republican army. To be a ‘good’ anti-fascist, commissars thereby implied, it was not enough to exert oneself on the battlefield; one also had to transcend one’s intellectual limitations through an unwavering commitment to study and self-improvement. ⁴⁹

But voluntarist discourses also reflected the urgency of mobilization efforts on the Republican side. Again, it must be remembered that the Republic had to build an army almost from scratch, as the war was already close to destroying it, with conscripts who often had little education and no military training. Low- to mid-ranking officers had to be recruited from the rank-and-file and often trained in the field of battle (though the Republican Army did have officers’ schools too). Throughout 1937, the pressure on all sectors of the army further increased as a result of devastating infighting on the home front, culminating in the so-called May Days in Barcelona, and heavy losses in the industrial north, all of which affected rank-and-file morale and forced the Republican leadership continuously to reorganize its military forces. In this context, educational efforts served a literally vital function by trying to ensure that soldiers exhibited both the motivation and the competence required to compensate for deficiencies in improvised or rapidly changing army structures.

Soldiers’ Participation in Frontline Cultural Production

The logic of anti-fascist emulation is also visible in another key aspect of the educational and cultural programme implemented in the Republican Army: the expectation that soldiers contribute regularly to the content of trench journals. Due to the Army’s acute training needs, large sections of most printed journals were dedicated to practical and technical instruction. However, through their letters’ sections and discussion pages, they also served the Republican government’s broader educational agenda. The latter was especially true of so-called wall-newspapers, which could be found in most small units. These typically took the form of a large noticeboard onto which soldiers could, in theory, add and thematically arrange contributions of any kind – be they essays, poetry, drawings, or cuttings from the printed press. Commissars, who typically also served as journal editors, explicitly described soldiers’ participation in the production of wall-newspapers as a crucial form of citizenship training (albeit one naturally reserved for the already literate). It encouraged soldiers’ self-expression and helped to build an atmosphere of ‘mutual respect’, according to an editorial in La Voz del Combatiente, the commissars’ own newspaper, published on 30 January 1937. The same editorial even suggested that frontline papers based on soldiers’ contributions served as instruments ‘to awaken’ brains sent to sleep by the old social order. ⁵⁰ A subsequent editorial in Acero, the glossy magazine of the 5th Army Corps, echoed such sentiments and added that, in this sense, frontline papers were the most direct evidence of the ‘constructive’ and ‘revolutionary’ work done within the Republican Army, words which clearly aimed to strengthen the army’s progressive credentials in the eyes of radical left-wing constituencies. ⁵¹

To substantiate such views, editors of trench journals often presented their publications as fora for relatively open democratic debate, allowing soldiers an opportunity to voice their opinions freely on social and political matters. An editorial note in a January 1937 issue of La Voz del Combatiente, for example, reminded readers that their articles and letters were vital to the publication’s work: soldiers should see in the publication’s pages ‘a reflection of their own experience in the line of battle’ and feel it ‘belong[ed] to them’ rather than being something ‘alien’. ⁵² Similarly, an editorial in an April 1937 issue of Leal, bulletin of a Madrid-based battalion, stated that soldiers should use contributions to express their opinions ‘without reservation’ and know that the bulletin would receive these ‘with the greatest esteem.’ ⁵³

However, in practice, censorship relating both to military and political matters inevitably set limits on what could be said in frontline journals, which arguably also complicated journals’ self-image as democratic fora. Yet, such tensions notwithstanding, commissars who also acted as editors were often remarkably candid about the role censorship played in their work. In fact, numerous published and internal reports on frontline education and cultural production openly described the rigorous censorship undertaken in specific units with pride. Here, censorship was declared to have a positive, constructive function as a tool of political education. One extensive report, composed in spring 1937 by a commissar of a brigade based just north of Madrid, highlighted that soldiers under his command received ‘systematic’ political education by virtue of a controlled daily press. This allegedly enabled them to see how ‘the traditional social system’ could come to an end through ‘a democratic transformation’. ⁵⁴ Similar acknowledgements could be made in journals read by soldiers themselves: in July 1937, the commissar of a brigade stationed on the Madrid front happily reported that the unit’s wall-newspapers correctly reflected the realities of the war once they had been censored. ⁵⁵ In February 1937, the masthead for the letters section of a brigade journal published on the Guadarrama front, north of Madrid, bluntly stated that contributions already sent would be published once they had undergone some ‘necessary’ changes. ⁵⁶ No further detail was provided regarding the nature of these changes, but it must have been obvious that they could have related to the contributions’ political content. On the surface such practices may look like an uncompromising exclusion of undesirable views. But simply to dismiss it in those terms is to disregard the complex reality of the war. The Republican mobilization effort depended, in some measure, on the creation of a revitalized political community, based on new notions of citizenship and a coherent set of values and worldviews. While commissars’ celebrations of censorship were problematic in many respects, it is unlikely that any such political socialization project could ever succeed without a mixture of censorship, propaganda and education, as commonly practised in other contexts.

The link between censorship and education was also clear in the way some journal editors communicated with specific contributing soldiers. For example, Combate, the journal of a battalion stationed in the Guadarrama mountains, included a column with comments to soldiers whose contributions had been excluded from the publication. The messages were brief and direct: ‘Pablo López: try to focus your articles on the politics on the Popular Front. Send us another’, stated one published in the issue of 7 March 1937. ⁵⁷ ‘Andres Ortiz: try to rid your articles of sectarian tendencies. Send another immediately’, advised another, published in the same issue. ⁵⁸ The summer 1937 issue of A Vencer, the journal of a Madrid-based brigade, included a more general overview of soldiers’ contributions in a column entitled ‘Your writing’. The paragraph on excluded contributions listed six titles which the editor said did not adhere to the guidelines set by the War Commissariat for military publications. ‘There are other political outlets [that you can turn to]’, the editor concluded. ‘Keep up the work and send us articles that we can publish!’ ⁵⁹ Of course, political sectarianism was not the only reason for exclusion; common editorial concerns also played a part. In Combate, ‘Felipe Garcia’ was told his article had been excluded because its topic (what the topic was exactly was not stated) had been extensively explored by other contributors, but that he was welcome, like other authors, to send another article, covering issues less frequently discussed. ⁶⁰ Other problems mentioned related to structural questions and the quality of writing. ⁶¹ To describe the latter as instances of censorship may be to stretch the term too far, but it is instructive to see how the commissars’ responses to authors of rejected contributions took the same form regardless of the reason given for the rejection. These responses recall the feedback tutors may give their students as much the interventions of censors seeking to prevent ‘damaging’ ideas from entering the public sphere. In this sense, censorship clearly had a formative as well as a protective role.

The educative dimension of Republican censorship may be seen as indicative of the political modus operandi of the wartime Republican government, as well as some of the internal tensions of its educational and cultural mobilization programme. The presence of multiple and incompatible views within the army rank-and-file was not denied, nor were censored authors irredeemably stigmatized. On the contrary, these authors were explicitly acknowledged as having a rightful role to play in the Republican polity. Such an approach contrasts sharply with the censorship practices of more brutal dictatorial regimes in the 1930s, commonly seeking to eradicate from the public sphere every trace of opposition – as seen already in the insurgent zone, for example, which was more rigorously controlled by Franco’s press and propaganda office, or in the Soviet Union under Stalin. ⁶² But even if censorship practices in the wartime Republic were, in this sense, relatively mild, they still highlight the fundamental tension that strained Republican cultural mobilization efforts: the tension arising from the need to expand opportunities for cultural participation to strengthen the Republic’s democratic credentials and legitimacy, on the one hand, and to increase state control over cultural production to secure unity and military efficiency in the war, on the other. The only way to resolve the tension without one aspect overriding the other would be create among the Republic’s defenders a unity of purpose and vision, making excessive external control unnecessary.

An example demonstrating that such unity of purpose could be achieved is found in a collection of wall-newspaper contributions written between January and May 1937, by men in a battalion based on the Madrid front. ⁶³ Throughout most of February, these men fought, with mixed success, in the battle of Jarama, after which they would not see action again until the Brunete offensive in July 1937. ⁶⁴ Their letters offer a rare window onto the uncensored content volunteered to army wall-newspapers. (The fact that virtually no frontline wall-newspapers have survived in any form make the letters even more valuable.) A report from the brigade commissar, a Communist Party member called Manuel Fernández Viejo, suggests that the earliest letters were written for the wall-newspaper’s inaugural issue. A substantial proportion of the men decided to write for this issue; there were 47 individual contributions in a battalion where only a quarter of the approximately 500–600 men were literate (that is, about a third of those who could write, did write). The commissar presented these numbers as evidence of the ‘enormous interest and devotion (cariño)’ that soldiers showed towards the initiative. ⁶⁵

The original letters for the wall-newspaper show no visible signs of external interference, but the degree of conformity with official narratives is still, in some ways, remarkable. Apart from portraying the war as a battle for popular sovereignty against a clique of fascist traitors, there are several letters stressing the need to obey orders and maintain the strictest discipline, clearly indicating continuing problems in the relationship between men and officers in the Republican Army, even if the process of incorporating the militias into the army was at this stage formally complete. A certain José Martínez Ibáñez, for example, insisted his peers show greater respect for the officers and reminded them that other units had suffered many losses for not operating with a single chain of command. ⁶⁶ Luis Mateo Rico felt it necessary to point out that officers’ orders stemmed not from ‘bad intentions’ but from a ‘better understanding’ of how to fight the war. ⁶⁷

It may be tempting to see such proclamations as products of self-censorship or pragmatic responses to top-down pressures, motivated primarily by desires of self-preservation or promotion in a rapidly changing social and political environment. Such considerations may have played a part, which makes it difficult to judge the sincerity of the opinions expressed. But it must be noted that soldiers were not forced to write; the decision to write was theirs, regardless of their motive for doing so. Had this conformist discourse strongly clashed with their own conceptions of the war, they could have simply abstained from the exercise altogether – as many in fact did, seemingly without suffering any consequences.

Yet the political significance of these letters is not solely defined by their conformist content. For another striking feature of these contributions is that they appear to have been written by industrial or rural workers who were unlikely to have had much, if any, prior experience of such forms of cultural participation. One explicitly claimed to be contributing to a public debate for the first time in his life. ⁶⁸ ‘I’m neither a writer nor speaker’ was a repeatedly included phrase, ⁶⁹ and several authors added that they would like their grammar and spelling corrected, as they were but simple peasants ‘who have spent their lives working the land’. ⁷⁰ Noting this, it is important to remember, first of all, the courage it takes to write for an audience when one has never felt either capable or entitled to do so. Imputed psychological explanations are inevitably speculative, but these men must in some way have been driven by a sharp sense of the importance of what they were doing, perhaps seeing it as a form of duty or commitment. More importantly, they must also have had a sense that the political conditions which previously constrained their role in society – which gave them a fixed place in a social order – were now in the process of being reconfigured. There likely was, in other words, a genuine belief that the Republic represented some sort of deep change, or at least a credible progressive project, leading to greater social and political inclusion. By acting on that belief, these men took concrete steps to turn this project into actual reality.

That these men decided to write as well as to fight in support of the Republic, despite their evident insecurities about their schooling and academic abilities, also indicates that they took seriously the idea that education and cultural participation was integral to the new anti-fascist identity being forged in the crucible of war. It shows that they identified with the Republican anti-fascist ideal and were receptive, to some extent, to the work done by commissars and Culture Militia teachers. If, in this context, they echoed slogans crafted by their commissars, it was not necessarily because they had abandoned autonomous thought; it could be that the slogans resonated with the soldiers’ own perceptions and served as adequate linguistic constructions through which they could affirm their agency. ⁷¹ From this perspective, the constraints of wartime censorship need not have been perceived as limiting: ‘Long Live the Commissar and the Commandant for their success in creating free and honourable men’, added one of the authors before signing off his contribution. ⁷²

Overall Rank-and-File Reception of Educational and Cultural Activities in the Republican Army

It is possible, then, to read these letters as examples of positive rank-and-file engagement with the educational and cultural initiatives launched within the Republican Army, but a broader assessment of the reception of such initiatives across a majority of units is more difficult to make. To be sure, positive accounts do abound. A dispatch from the commissar of a brigade stationed north of Madrid, undated but seemingly written in the spring or summer of 1937, insisted that all educational and cultural initiatives had been exceptionally well-received by the men. ⁷³ A November 1937 report from the commissar of a battalion which, a few months earlier, had suffered major casualties in the battle of Brunete, highlighted the great interest his soldiers showed in learning. ⁷⁴ Similarly, a later Chispa article on the impressive reduction of illiteracy achieved by the publishing brigade attributed the success largely to the commendable attitude of the soldiers. ⁷⁵ The list of such reports is long. ⁷⁶ The same can be said about soldiers’ contributions to trench journals. Virtually all trench journals, as well as wall-newspapers, included articles apparently sent by rank-and-file soldiers, reiterating key slogans on political, military and cultural matters. ⁷⁷ At times, soldiers’ engagement even exceeded the capacity of the trench press to accommodate their work. The contributions to Cultura en el Frente, a weekly bulletin for a battalion based south of Madrid, were in August 1937 so numerous that the commissar, a certain Bienvenido Hernández García of the main socialist party (PSOE), felt compelled to create an extra wall-newspaper for the material that did not fit the publication. ⁷⁸

To assess the representativeness of such reports, however, we need to set them against a more coherent statistical overview of the Republican educational and cultural programme as a whole. Again, in some ways, the overall quantitative impact of frontline education was impressive, as the Culture Militias contributed to a dramatic extension of educational provision: about 2,200 teachers provided daily classes across Republican territory, ⁷⁹ thousands of libraries were installed along the front, and approximately 40,000 illiterate soldiers attained some degree of literacy between May 1937 and October 1938 alone (about 25,000 of these were stationed in the Army of Centre, which received the largest proportion of educational investments). ⁸⁰ Still, exactly what these figures can tell us about rank-and-file willingness to engage with the educational and cultural programme is unclear. Surviving army statistics, typically highly fragmented and woefully incomplete, tend only to state the number of soldiers who attended literacy classes and the number of soldiers who achieved some degree of literacy; not the number of illiterate soldiers within each unit. In other words, the available figures can tell us something about the efficacy of frontline literacy teaching, which was highly variable: among those who took classes, a number ranging between 15 and 50 per cent were reported already to have acquired a minimum level of literacy. ⁸¹ But they cannot tell us how many soldiers should, ideally, have taken literacy classes but chose not to do so. And even if we had the latter set of figures, they would, of course, only reflect soldiers’ engagement with a specific – if key – aspect of the educational programme, designed only for a specific group among the rank-and-file (i.e. those soldiers who were illiterate).

One rare statistical snapshot of attendance levels for so-called ‘general education’ classes (cultura general) – that is classes which, in principle, all soldiers were encouraged to attend – can be found in figures relating to a brigade stationed on the Madrid front from the moment of its creation in April 1937 to the end of the war. The figures, dating from November 1937, when the unit had not yet seen any significant military action, indicate that no more than 1.6 to 3.7 per cent of men attended the ‘general education’ classes each day (i.e. between 41 and 94 soldiers in a unit composed of 2539 men). ⁸² Even if we may safely assume that different groups of soldiers attended class on different days, the daily proportion of soldiers who received instruction seems very low. (If all soldiers did, in fact, take general education classes on a rotating basis, they would, at that rate, have one class a month.) While we cannot generalize on the basis of a single example, such figures suggest that the importance of the Republican educational and cultural programme lay, in fact, more in its symbolic value than its actual wartime efficacy as a tool to effect broad social change – understandably enough, considering the circumstances. As each brigade typically had several Culture Militia teachers delivering classes simultaneously to its different sub-units, they also suggest that attendance levels in the Army of the Centre were at least periodically lower than the Culture Militias’ teaching capacity. In such cases, the level of rank-and-file participation in frontline education evidently failed to match the authorities’ expectations. ⁸³

Such suspicions are also borne out by more critical reports on soldiers’ engagement with the educational and cultural programme, which appeared with increasing frequency and for reasons explored below during the second half of the war. ⁸⁴ A divergence between leadership expectations and rank-and-file engagement may also be detected in the fact that published exhortations to soldiers to attend class acquired, from the beginning of 1938, a new and at times almost pleading tone. A good example of this can be found in the March 1938 issue of A Sus Puestos, a glossy magazine published by the artillery of the Army of the Centre. The publication included a letter by a Culture Militia man named Lorenzo Ruíz, to be read aloud to illiterate soldiers in all units. ‘We are by your side, dear illiterate or semi-literate comrade’, it began,

We want to make your spirit stronger, and we do not accept that you are inferior to anyone else; … but we also know that when … you see your comrades reach for a pen to write home, reach for newspapers so that they can read and discuss the international situation and all problems to be solved – problems unknown to you – you feel ashamed, you feel impotent and left behind. No, comrade, no; you can be the first in terms of ability, if only you follow us like we follow you. … Come with us to class, without worrying about age or dangers. Remember that we are fighting to win this war against the oppressors of Spain, against the exploiters of your being; remember that we are struggling to create a new society in which we all have an equal worth. ⁸⁵

The fact that the authorities felt it necessary to disseminate this message to all artillery units, reiterating the fundamental legitimizing role of educational activities, clearly indicates a gap between propaganda and reality in these units.

If soldiers chose not to use the educational resources offered – resources which remained considerable through most of the war, despite the disruptions and diminishing governmental initiative that followed the leadership change in the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts in April 1938 – it must be asked why. ⁸⁶ A fairly general explanation may simply relate to soldiers’ interest and the possibility that some conscripts may not have seen the value in formal schooling. Conscripts from underprivileged backgrounds may also have suffered from low confidence in academic matters, making them more reluctant to risk exposing themselves to embarrassing failures in the classroom. Both factors may have been particularly influential in older recruits; age was repeatedly mentioned in commissars’ and frontline teachers’ articles as something that must not be considered an obstacle to learning – as seen in Ruiz’s letter above, among others. ⁸⁷

The problem of low attendance levels in frontline classes must also be considered in relation to the provision and quality of teaching. The ambition to provide education on active frontlines inevitably gave rise to innumerable practical challenges, challenges which became increasingly intractable with the recurrent need, due to war losses, to reorganize both educational structures and the Army as a whole. In addition, Culture Militia staff faced the common pedagogical problem of teaching to a diverse student body of different abilities and levels of motivation. Not all Culture Militia teachers handled the challenge with adequate skill. A report written in summer 1938 by Joaquín Sánchez Revest, Culture Militia inspector for the Army of the Centre, was highly critical of the pedagogy used in some frontline teaching. Discussing a class on electricity, for example, in which the tutor had explained theoretical models with ‘electric speed’, the inspector noted how many students benefitted little from the lesson, despite having a prior interest in the subject. ‘It was fun, but I did not understand anything’ said one when interviewed by the inspector the following day. ‘This gentleman thought he was in a university’, said another, ‘his talk achieved nothing’. ⁸⁸ If such evaluations were common, it could hardly be surprising if attendance levels in frontline classes were relatively low.

Rank-and-file disengagement with the educational and cultural programme, worsening as the war wore on, affected not only class attendance but also soldiers’ participation in the production of trench journals and wall-newspapers. Cumbres, the newspaper of a mountain battalion, published in its July 1938 issue a critical article by the Culture Militia teacher José García, beginning with the candid recognition that the unit had, unfortunately, become used to the fact that ‘only five or six comrades make regular contributions to the wall-newspaper’. ⁸⁹ Whether this had long been the case is not clear from the article, but as other examples show, the level of soldiers’ participation could change rapidly. At the end of December 1937, Cultura en el Frente published an anonymous critical comment, penned by ‘a soldier of the first company’, complaining that the engagement with the battalion wall-newspaper was far from satisfactory. This was only three and a half months after the editor of the same Cultura en el Frente had, as mentioned above, created the wall-newspaper to accommodate the large volume of contributions sent to the journal. ⁹⁰ We can only speculate as to the reasons why such shifts occurred in any specific case. They could depend on any constellation of contingent contextual factors, including changing relationships between officers, the commissar and the men, shifts in the social and political composition of the unit, troop movements and various other practical considerations obtaining at any given moment. In the case of Cultura en el Frente, it seems the unit did not undertake any movements or military engagements that could explain the decline in soldiers’ engagement. The only clue as to why participation dropped in this particular unit may be found in the author’s exhortation to fellow soldiers to continue sending improved contributions even if their first attempts are rejected. Perhaps the impact of censorship had, in this case, blunted the initial enthusiasm for the journal.

But interest in all aspects of the Republican educational and cultural programme would have been affected, above all, by the Republic’s worsening war fortunes. At the end of December 1937, when interest in Cultura en el Frente and associated wall-newspapers had begun to wear off, the insurgent Army had just started its counter-offensive against the provincial capital of Teruel, which Republican forces captured in an increasingly rare victory earlier that month. In February 1938, the Republican army lost Teruel and with it any hope of outright military victory, save a radical change in the international climate. From early 1938 until the end of the war, the Republic moreover battled against multiple pressures on the home front, where acute food and housing shortages, caused partly by international blockades, an internal refugee crisis and extensive bombardment of key urban areas like Barcelona made it increasingly difficult for the Republican government to project a credible progressive project to its half-starved population. ⁹¹ The worsening crisis on the home front did not go unnoticed in the trenches, where fresh conscripts experienced first-hand the morale-sapping impact of successive military defeats. ⁹² Such factors turned an increasing number of soldiers as well as civilians against the Republican government, which was determined to keep up the resistance until the bitter end. In these circumstances, the positive belief and loyalty needed to sustain constructive engagement with the Republican educational and cultural reform project, which fundamentally spoke to a desire for a long-term transformation of Spanish society, was inexorably eroded.

Conclusion

What would have happened with the Republican educational and cultural programme had the war developed differently, we cannot know. The Republic lost the war on 1 April 1939, and instead of an expanded democracy, Spain experienced a nearly 40-year-long dictatorship determined to eradicate every aspect of the Second Republic’s legacy. What is certain, however, is that the Republican educational and cultural programme constituted a crucial aspect of the Republican mobilization effort during the war. Its strategic importance was, in the first instance, determined by the context in which the Republican government mobilized rather than its actual success rate: the educational and cultural reform programme was the only available policy instrument potentially enabling the Republican authorities both to satisfy the demands of radical left-wing supporters for a more democratic politics and maintain some degree of control over the wartime public sphere. To achieve these goals and shape soldiers’ perceptions of what was at stake in the war, Republican educational investments transformed its army into an immense school inculcating both military and civic virtues, including the virtues of intellectual self-improvement and active participation in public debate. While this has been acknowledged in the historiography, the democratic content of the educational and cultural programme has not been adequately analysed in relation to the domestic political context, which made the inclusion of such content virtually unnegotiable. To re-establish the Republic’s popular legitimacy in the wake of military rebellion and social revolution, the Republican government needed a mobilization strategy which explicitly recognized citizenship as a condition for fighting and fighting as an act of citizenship.

Where rank-and-file collaboration was forthcoming, there is evidence that the educational and cultural activities did have an impact on the individuals involved. Military discipline and censorship inevitably circumscribed the plurality of views expressed in frontline papers, but for those who found in the wartime Republic a first opportunity to be heard in the public sphere, the experience of cultural participation was empowering. In this sense, the Republican government’s attempt to harness the transformative and democratizing potential unlocked by the coup of 1936 may also have served to reinforce it. But the extent to which the educational and cultural programme succeeded in convincing a majority of conscripts of the progressive character of the new Republican army is difficult to establish with any certainty. While qualitatively important and potentially transformative where collaboration was forthcoming, the evidence presented in this article shows that rank-and-file engagement with army-based educational and cultural activities was, ultimately, uneven and often limited in quantitative terms. Contextual factors on all levels – international, national and local – impacted in various ways on soldiers’ educational and cultural participation, as is seen clearly in the second half of the war. Army-based educational efforts were simultaneously a tool of mass mobilization and a means to realize a specific, long-term political vision; as that vision faded among the debris of destroyed buildings, enthusiasm for educational efforts inevitably faded too.