Michael Richards: From war culture to civil society: Francoism, social change, and memories of the Spanish Civil War

Trauma is also evident in the experience of exile. The novelist Luis de Castresana, who lived through temporary wartime exile as a child, and later met many Spanish exiles in several countries, commented in 1970, that they remained psychologically ‘fixed’ (‘anclados’) in the year 1936, and mentally in the ‘forbidden territory’ which was Spain, beginning a never-ending parenthesis. For Castresana, also expressing metaphorically his profound patriotism, it seemed as if ‘surgically transplanting a person’s heart’ could be less painful and easier than ‘transplanting a human being geographically’, against his will.⁴³ Thus, a distinction needs to be drawn between the memory of exiles and of those who could remain to make a life in Spain.⁴⁴ The temporal boundaries (and the ‘frontiers of memory’) that sub-divided the Franco years were perceived differently for an exile since the passage of time itself was experienced differently.⁴⁵ This struggle with identity meant that later integration was difficult and the experience of return, often to once rural towns no longer surrounded by countryside and with a population increased perhaps by 6-fold, was of disillusionment and a sense of ‘schizophrenia’, of life cut in two.⁴⁶ In this question, where the evidence is usually from ‘subjective’ sources, important generational distinctions overlap with geographical differences.

The Spanish Civil War was not only a focus of memories but also a turning point in social terms. In a sense, it represented the painful beginning of a forced modernization based on a frantic movement from place to place and above all a sense of sacrifice. Part of this was the gradual destruction of old communities, (and cultural inheritance, values and forms of identity), and the problematic development of new communities.⁴⁷ In demographic terms, the conflict represented what one observer, attempting to explain the spread of post-war epidemics, dubbed ‘the dance of the Spaniards.’⁴⁸ The war represented a rupture, in many ways, not least of memory, of personal and collective narratives of identity. Consider, for example, the destabilizing social effects of the exploitative black market which became a second economy (bigger than the first) in the 1940s, or the psychological effects of forced migration in the 1950s or emigration in the 1960s, and the effects on family, community and politics. The demands of material necessity were linked to recollection: the association between (or comparison between) past hopes and present frustrated expectations, on the one hand, and what the future might hold, desires and prospects, on the other. The outcome of the Civil War ended hopes of land reform, for example, producing a sense of resignation that could only be sublimated for many people through sacrifice, not in religious terms, but materially, in terms of silent work, determined auto-didacticism, hard physical endeavor. It amounted to the sacrifice of one generation in the interests of the next.⁴⁹

Re-building a sense of community, especially around loss, was difficult in small towns, polarized before 1936 and traumatized by violence during the war. The social life of the hard but comparatively harmonious rural Catholic society of Castille and much of northern Spain, for example, revolved around the local priest, doctor and schoolteacher, who sponsored the ‘healthy’ life of ‘organic memory’. This seemed to be threatened by the urban preference of 1930s’ Republican politics and culture. The war, usually blamed on Republican politicians and trade union organizations, (though the real ‘culprit’ was modernization), signified the loss of these values and of an enormous popular culture 'forgotten by liberalism'.⁵⁰ In the purge of priests and other religious personnel at the beginning of the Civil War almost 7,000 religious were killed and campaigns were begun after 1939 to encourage young men to the priesthood.⁵¹ In the Catalan province of Lérida, for example, 270 priests were killed during the war, some 65% of the total. By 1943 there were only some 100 priests there to attend to the 352 towns and villages, although, in fact, the decline in religious vocations had begun well before July 1936.⁵² The bitterness of the pre-1936 ‘war’ over secular as against religious education spilled over into the Civil War itself resulting in purges of teachers. The struggle over symbols, like the violence done to school crucifixes and the politicized ritual of their recovery, seems to have had a powerful effect on memory.⁵³ But, in spite of everything, some level of Catholic, conservative community, within which memory played an important part, was salvaged from the wreckage of family, Church, municipality, and ‘Patria’.

On the other hand, salvaging a community of memory in left-liberal circles was virtually impossible as liberal associations, political parties, the social clubs and Casas del Pueblo of the Socialist workers’ movement and trade unions were made illegal and closed down. The post-war experience was marked by direct incursions by the Francoist authorities into the realms of labor. A period in a labor battalion or penal detachment was designed to punish past political affiliations and explicitly to remind Republicans of the damage caused by the war. The Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas put prisoners to work on the reconstruction of battle sites like Teruel, Belchite and Brunete as a way of allocating culpability and enforcing memory of ‘the futile destruction wrought by communism’.⁵⁴ These places would also have monuments to those ‘Fallen for God and for the Patria’. Children at the time remembered years later that some friends who had no fathers could read their names, inscribed on similar memorials, while other dead fathers’ names had left no trace.⁵⁵ These memorials were less grandiose versions of Franco’s Valle de los Caídos, again constructed principally by the forced labor of Republican prisoners.⁵⁶ But the socially integrating potential was limited because the ‘triumph of the Cross’ was always, in some part, an obviously ideological proposition in Franco’s Spain.

The daily structure of work was also affected by pressure from the state through its system of sindicatos verticales (vertical unions) given over to the Falangist Movimiento to administer as recognition of victory in the war. A system of rewards for workers was soon begun to commemorate auspicious days, like the small bonus marking 18 July (the start of ‘the war of liberation’ in 1936) and the day off on 1 October to commemorate Franco becoming Head of the Nationalist State on that date during the first year of the war (el Día del Caudillo). Neither of these can hugely have affected ordinary working class lives when post-war wages, for example, did not return to 1936 levels until 1959.

Before 1936, 29% of the Spanish population lived in urban centers of more than 20,000 inhabitants; by 1958 (even before the ‘boom’ of the 1960s) this proportion had grown to 40%. Landless laborers, tenant families and small-holders all migrated in large numbers. Approximately half a million farms would be swallowed up by larger concerns in the ten years beginning in 1962. An important part of the migratory transition was from small population nuclei and communities of rural habitat constructed of groups formed from direct (‘natural’ or ‘primary’) contact to large industrial conglomerations (‘mass societies’) of complex, indirect contact groups. The shift was rapid and continued in the 1960s, and took place within the space of little more than a generation. In 1950, one of every four persons active in agriculture was a waged worker. By 1965 the proportion was one of every ten. The process of reconstructing post-war social relations based on a collective memory made of recognized beliefs and practices, was never a uniform process in the confused post-war situation. A kind of cultural ‘aphasia’ seems to have inflicted minority social groups whose common identity was based on long-standing, even ancestral, working patterns and politics. One example are the ‘maketo’ miners in Cantabria studied by Abdón Mateos, who suggests that suppression of any social voice in this case was an example of self-silencing (or ‘forgetting’) under the force of threatened repression.⁵⁷

This ‘fear as prudence’ is also recognizable in the process of the destruction of bracero (land laborer) communities in Andalucía during the war. The Civil War marked a watershed in the rural latifundio province of Jaén, dependent on the mono-cultural economy of the huge olive estates (latifundia) and rife with devastating poverty in the first post-war decade.⁵⁸ Jaén was transformed rapidly from an area of pre-war population growth into a situation of depopulation and degradation. The turning point was precisely the Civil War. There was a psychological change involved in the disappointment of expectations of land reform in the 1930s and the violence and dislocation of the war itself. Bringing about change had been the main reference point of left-wing political identity. It was from this that a collective memory of the left sprung linking the past with an idealized future. The Civil War caused a rupture between this past and the future, creating a deep psychological and political crisis and heightened a sense of resignation about the prospect of change. The previous relative balance between acceptance of honorable manual labor and rejection of the system was upset in the immediate post-war years. The ‘people’s rising against the señoritos’ in 1936, and the experiment of comunismo libertario had been ultimately defeated. Memories of the repression were still ‘live’ in the 1960s, but their political ‘value’ was re-oriented by the extent of social change.⁵⁹ Resignation reinforced a dissociation with the past more broadly, with previous generations, and with the culture and forms of identity of the pueblo.⁶⁰ Migration amounted to 10% of the provincial population of Jaén in the period 1941-50 and another 10% from 1951-5. By 1955 very few municipal zones of the province could claim a stable population:⁶¹ ‘Of course, we are full of misery here, but nothing could compare with what we have lived through in the pueblo. Disease, hunger, cold, and each year another child’.⁶²

Separated from their new surroundings by the sacrifice of accumulated cultural capital and social status, rural immigrants in the 1950s and 60s were forced to ‘invent’ a new way of living and new ways of relating to groups around them. ‘Collective memory’, in complex societies, like social identity itself, is produced through a diversity of interactions freely undertaken within the public sphere. For obvious reasons, only very slowly did a developed civil society, based on such a situation, emerge in the post-war martial era in Spain. The revolution and Civil War could only be integrated into the ‘normal’ narrative of memory under the pressure of profoundly changing circumstances, extreme exploitation, provisionality and fear, ‘invented’ identities, and a dictatorial political system. Inevitably, in effect, this meant ‘forgetting’. Migrants’ relationship to the state also changed, though the insecurity of employment, as casual Madrid construction laborers found, was little different from latifundismo. Many families were motivated to migrate by the prospect of social security, sickness insurance and urban health dispensaries, though poor pay and work conditions were all too familiar. All of this, and the fact that it was the ‘men with ideas’ who were targeted in the Civil War repression, inevitably affected the way political memory shaped activities. Much of the evidence suggests that the move to Barcelona or Madrid, (or, indeed, provincial cities), once undertaken, entailed also a mental shift, from thinking about the past to a concentration on the future. Life, and how it might improve, often became child-centered, for example, suggesting a significant deferment of expectations. The one thing that all Jaén immigrants in the Madrid chabolas (‘shanty-towns’) at the end of the 1950s agreed on, in spite of the dreadful hardships in the city and the lack of a social and political infrastructure, was that they would never go back.⁶³

This sense of deferred social gratification depends on an understanding of the hardships endured in the 20 years or more after 1939. The year 1959, which saw the initiation of a radical re-direction of political economy, more closely in line with social desires, can therefore be seen as an alternative symbolic frontier to 1939. In a sense, more than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, 1959 might better mark the ‘borderline’ between ‘history’ (the war and first post-war decades) and ‘memory’ (economic take off, higher standard of living, ‘prospects’). This is accentuated by the ‘biological decline’ of those who actually experienced the war and the effects of the global culture. Whereas in 1970 it took some mental effort (and a degree of wishful thinking) to argue that the war was ‘history’ because the year 2000 was closer in time than 1936, in the year 2001 the case is somewhat easier to put.

Another example that was much studied as a contemporary phenomenon was the impact of immigration in the Barcelona industrial suburb of Hospitalet de Llobregat in the 1960s. Almost 50,000 people arrived here in the period 1961-65 and settled in culturally strongly demarcated areas, though immigrants had been arriving in large numbers before the war and especially since 1939. The ‘natural’ population, established in the nineteenth century, identified itself with quite traditional religious values, attended the Centro Católico, and maintained strong associations with the past (including the tradition of the Catalan language). Then there were the first workers’ barrios where a level of spontaneous participation in the political and syndical life of the area before the war had acted as a social agglutinate and an important part of identity. But the effects of the war were again traumatic in the extent of the disarticulation of political memory and identity: ‘After the war of ’36, the general context of the country and, in particular, its laws, dismembered the dynamism and specificity of these barrios and the old associations gradually disappeared. Only the associations of the Church still managed to maintain any activity, though not spontaneously, but promoted by a few people, more or less linked to an ideology that was not exactly the most widespread. Some groups of quaint enthusiasts survived with their marginal activities: pigeon-fanciers, societies of bird-lovers, choral societies, etc… Gradually, a style of life associated with a consumer society and mass culture became generalized’.⁶⁴ The more recent arrivals, mainly from Andalucía, lived in other zones, even further from the center, and were also kept culturally separated.

Memory is related to mentality, language and culture and, therefore, historical interpretation of memory is only feasible through reference to a range of shifting, contingent influences: what oral history specialists call the ‘scenification’ of memory. The contention is that both individuals and collectivities, as well as their memories, are all part of social history. Any social history of post-war Spain is likely to be weak without an analysis of memory. Individual and collective memories tell us something about the significance (often changing) of major events (like the Civil War), and about popular and élite mentalities. Because memory is intrinsically historical, it helps to explain change over time and, because memories are subjective, or felt, they help us to gauge the effects of change at several levels, allowing space for the role of individual agency.⁶⁵

The ‘silence’ that surrounded children’s lives in the 1940s is often recalled as something stubbornly intangible. Some people speak of growing up with a profound, though inexplicable, sense of instability during the early Franco decades, when the year 1936 acted as a barrier within the family, widening the generational gap. The Spanish reality was contemplated as a provisional situation, and many children conveyed an unfathomable but pervasive sense of frustration and anguish.⁶⁶ It has often been argued that it was ‘evasion’ and ‘apathy’, rather than consent or support (or resistance) that characterized state-social relations from the 1950s in Spain.⁶⁷ This seems to be borne out by other evidence from ‘the obedient generation’ growing up in the post-war, struggling against a ‘monolithic conspiracy of silence’.⁶⁸ But the silent compliance of the majority in the 1950s and 1960s may not have been motivated by apathy or a fear of repression as such. Rather, it could be that it became accepted that one had to keep quiet, to hide one’s opinions not only about politics but about acquaintances, individuals and seemingly innocent non-political issues. The psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino, speaking with the authority of amassed case-histories from the period, has claimed that ‘prudencia’ was the key. Making careful judgements about what was permissible and what could not be done was part of everyday existence. The legacy of the war and the harsh disciplining of the 1940s was a form of self-censorship and repression: ‘the Spanish inhabitant acquired a subtle perception of the reality and refined his/her sense of this to adapt to the rules of the game of the existing socio-political context’.⁶⁹ It may be here that the subjective sense of ‘totalitarianism’ becomes important. This ‘silencing’ was inevitably felt by many as repression of a sense of identity in many respects. Behavior that in the early years would be considered ‘desafecto al régimen’ (‘hostile to the regime’), was later incorporated into daily life as ‘failure to adapt’ (‘inadaptación’), as social self-marginalization or abnormality. In a sense, the stifling ‘closure’ (‘clausura’) of the Franco era, amounted to the transplantation of what we might today call a ‘small-town mentality’ to wider society. Effectively, this was a form of asocialization or forced ‘privatization’ of the individual. Prudence, born out of a more or less sub-conscious sense of fear and adhering to the motto ‘no hay que meterse en nada’ (‘one mustn’t get involved in anything’), is, it could be argued, somewhat different from ‘consent’, just as it is also not straightforwardly a case of ‘forgetting’.⁷⁰

The stubborn psychological effects of the Spanish war and repression and imprisonment, including physical war disablement on the Republican side, were buried during the Franco years by both politics and social change.⁷¹ First, they were submerged beneath the struggle for mere survival in the years of autarky: forced economic self-sufficiency, repression, and migration. Then they were silenced by the claustrophobic atmosphere created by the anti-communist politics of the 1950s that conjured up the ‘chaos’ of the past. Later, memories were more or less brushed aside during the popular rush to economic development in the 1960s, a kind of collective release of tension after the first post-war decades. Finally, painful war memories were too sensitive to debate publicly during the peaceful transition to democracy after the death of Franco in 1975, though they may well have subliminally influenced social and political behavior during the process.

‘Amnesia’, individual and collective, came gradually to be seen as ‘the best medicine’ for Spain.⁷² This prognosis was in line with the generalized and tacit agreement in the 1960s and 1970s that the Civil War had been a tragic act of ‘madness’ for which all Spaniards were to blame. The logical corollary of this was that Spaniards were somehow innately ‘bad’, though this was rarely explored: ‘it has been said over and over again (‘hasta la saciedad’) that in Spain we cannot enjoy the freedoms that they have in other countries because we are ungovernable, because we have “fire in our veins”, because we are uncultured, because, because……’⁷³ It remained difficult to forget that the political system, as it functioned at the beginning of the 1970s, had been born with the ‘punishment’ of the Civil War and at the cost of basic liberties.⁷⁴ A sense of original sin with its sequel of ‘frustrations and guilt complexes’ continued to be felt while Francoist power prevailed. Acceptance of equally shared responsibility for the war implied that the ‘baptism of blood’ and the ‘purification’ and ‘purge’ of dictatorship were somehow justified.⁷⁵ This ‘justification’ was articulated in the official discourse of the Franco regime.

The danger of relying on this discourse is that the Spanish population is depicted homogeneously as somewhat passive, as mere recipient of the cultural and political diktat. In fact, Spain was witnessing a huge social resurgence during these years. As Fraga said in the late-1950s, this was a bigger and more ‘energetic’ society than ever before. The manipulation of collective memory ‘from above’ suggests a political functionalism which is more mechanistic than the complicated reality.⁷⁶ Personal and collective Civil War memories demonstrated that the link between the past, the present, and the future was far from harmonious. The Franco state was inevitably forced to evolve. ‘Bunker’ elements grudgingly responded to pressure from slowly maturing civil society as it located intermediaries able to act within the state arena. This was a task of active social agency. But the evolution of state and society (and the relative ‘spaces’ occupied by each) was not merely a unilinear and positive road to modernity. Tracing the fate of post-war collective memories shows that remembering could be imposed through forms of repression more than freely expressed in the public sphere. Memory was also, however, subject to the uncertain exigencies of profound social change and displacement. The development of collective memories was as much about an often contradictory social process as it was about simple social ‘progress’.