Abstract
On 1 April 1939 General Francisco Franco, generalísimo of the rebel forces and head of the new Nationalist state, declared the Spanish Civil War over and the Republic defeated (although the campaign against Republicans continued in the post-war period in the form of repression and social exclusion). While historians have dedicated substantial attention to dissecting the Republic’s defeat, its counterpart, the question of the Nationalist victory, has remained relatively understudied.
Michael Seidman’s book is original in two important ways. First, it offers a sustained, thematic analysis of the Nationalist war effort. In itself, this contribution helps understand one of the large remaining lacunae in Spanish Civil War historiography. Secondly, and by judicious comparison with White Russia and Nationalist China in those countries’ civil wars, Seidman reminds historians that the Nationalist victory was far from predictable. In fact, it runs against most twentieth-century counter-revolutions in underdeveloped and agrarian nations, where the forces of revolution generally prevailed.
Seidman’s convincing underlying premise is that mundane social and economic factors were at least as important as political and cultural ones in explaining the Nationalist victory. He argues that while access to foreign aid and Spain’s main wheat-growing areas was crucial for the Nationalists, so too was their ability to manage and marshal these resources better than their Republican enemies. As the Chinese Nationalists and Russian Whites demonstrated all too clearly, access to copious amounts of international support and fertile lands were not, in themselves, a guarantee of victory.
After elucidating how a partially successful coup turned into a civil war and a war of attrition, Seidman analyses the Nationalists’ authoritarian political economy – the key, he argues, to winning a contest of this nature. He contends that the Nationalists’ resource management, both financial and material, was superior to Republican organization and drew strength from mundane sources. Possession of the country’s major fishing ports in Galicia and Huelva provinces, for example, was vital for the insurgents. Readily available sardines were ‘among the uncelebrated heroes (or antiheroes) of the Nationalist zone’, providing ‘several times more calorific value than equal amounts of beef’ (p. 107). The insurgents were also able to marshal successfully the large number of necessary pack animals for a relatively low-tech war in mountainous terrain (p. 96).
Seidman’s research also reveals considerable Nationalist pragmatism: while the regime was certainly underwritten by the threat and application of violence, the insurgents were prepared, for example, to allow leftists who had occupied lands under the Second Republic to continue growing crops, as long as their output was considered reasonable (pp. 82–3). In addition, Seidman demonstrates how the Nationalists were able to build a working relationship with rural Spain through policies that reinforced property rights (which placated owners of even small plots of land who feared Republican reform), pricing systems that generally encouraged profitable production, and access to low-interest farming credits. Reasonably efficient tax collection and inflation management were also important Nationalist fiscal successes.
Seidman analyses the Nationalist revival of ‘Catholic Neotraditionalism’ that agglutinated the cultural counter-revolution. He examines the ways religious revival helped mobilize the Nationalist zone: women worked as seamstresses and nurses for the military, while religious personnel tapped traditionalist religious support. Seidman also makes a case for the Nationalists generating a genuine, if uneven, support base in their zone and establishing dynamics that transcended threats and repression. He persuasively argues, however, that studies of national symbols and their effective manipulation cannot in themselves account for the Nationalist victory: ‘In short, calories were as meaningful as culture’ (p. 11).
Finally, Seidman argues that the Nationalists’ victory was a nuanced success and analyses considerable resistance to state impositions, including political dissidence, black marketeering and evasion of regime-imposed obligations, such as military and civilian service, and price controls. This builds on his innovative work on ‘individualisms’, ‘egotism’, and ‘survival’ in Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI, 2002).
The Victorious Counterrevolution is an important and original publication in the field of Spanish Civil War history which draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources. It will be of great interest to scholars who want to probe beyond claims that the Nationalist success in the conflict was based largely on their foreign support and possession of the country’s wheat fields.