Franco was allowed to succeed because the French, English, and Americans were afraid of Hitler and Mussolini; he survives because of the fear of aggression from Russia. Franco’s argument is that he is the last line of defence against Russian Communism if it attacks. He trades, politically and financially, on that fear. He also relies on the fact that no two Spaniards, in exile or in the country, can agree on what should succeed him. Foreigners burn their fingers in Spanish affairs, which pride and the fragmentation of politics make exasperating and dangerous. In the ordinary course of European life what happens in Spain is of negligible importance; in two world wars the neutrality of Spain has been desired by all, for even Hitler blew hot and cold on the subject of Spanish intervention. The dangerous aspect of American aid to Spain is that it extends the possible war area and makes Spanish neutrality impossible. Like Russia, Spain was a disaster to Napoleon; its population, quiet at first, soon rises spontaneously and furiously against any occupying army and aggravates any conqueror without providing advantage or reward. The Spaniards are blessed with an exorbitant sense of what they can demand for doing next to nothing; this satisfies their pride and enables the negotiator to withdraw with indignation. It was General Franco’s policy—as it had been Alfonso XIII’s in 1914—to be practical and realistic, to get valuable pickings from both sides and to keep out of Europe. On the whole we may be glad of Spanish realism; whether all Spaniards can rejoice in it is another matter.
Franco’s meeting with Hitler at Hendaye in October 1940 was one of the comical incidents of the war. It was a meeting between northern romance, gesture, and vagueness with Spanish evasiveness and precision. After it Hitler said that rather than go through another interview with Franco he would sooner have three or four teeth out. Hitler came for his reward for having supported General Franco in the Civil War; the General asked for large pieces of French Africa, Gibraltar, and also for food and oil. The last was the vital thing for a Spain that was broken and starving; Hitler could not supply them and not even the bait of capturing Gibraltar would tempt the General. When it comes down to a question of necessity, the Spaniards do not really want Gibraltar; they want its nuisance value. The Allies kept Franco quiet by small allowances of food and oil—see an excellent article by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the The Sunday Times of June 7, 1953—put up with Franco’s pin-pricks until the tide of war turned.
Within Spain the conservatives and the Right have usually been pro-German. The choice is instinctive in authoritarians. I once watched a German director training singers in a Spanish choral society, years before the war; they behaved slackly or extravagantly as Spanish artists often do; the German became hysterical, insulting and relentless in his drilling, forcing them to do what he wanted. The ordinary French, Italian, or English director would have relied on willingness, persuasion, slow education, on those techniques which are natural to free people, and in doing so would either have made little progress or have allowed the singers to drift on in those bad habits the Spaniards so readily pick up from foreigners. The German allowed no freedom. He drilled violently. The Spaniards became themselves. They appear to thrive on authority.
The liberals or Left in Spain have generally been Anglophile by a tradition that runs through the nineteenth century and which was fostered by English commercial power. When Britain reversed the old policy of backing the Left against the Right in the 1930’s, it strengthened the hostile and reactionary forces in Spain and got little but contempt and insult for doing so. The friends of Britain in Spain are, however, still the same: most of the intellectual classes and the Left wing. They worked, often at personal risk, to help the Allies in the war; and they know that if the cold war is closed, the period of reaction in Spain will come to an end.
General Franco is the conventional soldier-dictator of the type that has appeared regularly in Spanish life since the Napoleonic Wars. He differs considerably from his predecessor of the twenties, Primo de Rivera, who was a liberal-minded Andalusian and no great Catholic. General Franco is without brilliance; he is a routine officer, simple, pious, and—very unusual in Spanish politics—of blameless private life. Primo de Rivera reluctantly gave in to the pressure of the militant Church; General Franco eagerly does so. He keeps his position by playing off the three forms of contemporary Spanish politics—the Church, the Army, and the Falange—against each other. The Falange began as a crusade, turned into a lower-middle-class fascist movement which drew its membership from communist and anarcho-syndicalist groups; it is fundamentally anticlerical. The intolerance which followed on its triumph in the war has been worn down by fourteen years of power, by rewards in the form of titles, offices, contracts. Its syndicalist theory accords with Spanish social temperament; it runs schools and youth organizations and bedevils Spanish life. The greatest circumspection has to be shown by professional men, or they may find their means of livelihood gone. I have never heard the Falange taken seriously as a force of social reform, and certainly its drastic political power has declined; but it continues to have great power of annoyance in the press, and its main evil has been intellectual. If one compares the Spanish press of the twenties and thirties with the press of today, the loss is enormous.
There are really only three permanent forces in Spanish politics: the Church, the Army, and the people. The last are incalculable. They remain for long periods resigned, docile, quiet, and fatalistic. They are absorbed only in the affairs of their locality. But on certain occasions they have risen ferociously and spontaneously against those who are governing them. They rise, it must be said, in a primitive way, and have been generally hostile to Europeanism and outside influences. Their rebellion against the French on the Dos de Mayo in the Napoleonic Wars is famous: they rose then not only against the foreigner, but against the ideas of the Revolution. They rose in Catalonia against the Moroccan War. They rose in 1936 against General Franco himself when he landed in Spain from Morocco and brought Moors and Italians to fight his own people. They turned upon the Russian advisers on the Republican side.
It cannot be assumed that the Spanish people who rose then were similar to the progressive, revolutionary proletarians who make up the Left-wing parties in Europe. As so many foreigners discovered to their cost, the Left in Spain had a merely superficial and rhetorical identity with the views of communists, socialists, liberals, or anarchists (if they existed) outside of Spain. The Spanish masses are not an industrial proletariat, and even when they are peasants, they are so many different kinds of peasant that there is no natural unity of interest between them. At the time of the Republic, the Left was unable to decide whether it would aim at an agriculture of small peasant proprietors or one of large collectives; and the peasants themselves reject the notion of revolutionary progress, which to them is tainted by the evils of modern life. They look back to a golden age. In a large part of Extremadura many years ago I remember talking to anarchist railwaymen who (at that time) had joined the anarchists in order that they would not have to strike and that all men would be brothers. They were quite willing to shoot down the employers and the socialist workers, on the grounds that these groups were partners in the same wicked modern system. The socialists themselves were hampered by the materialism of the European and American workers. There is a liberal Spain, and a very strong one, which in every generation carries on a difficult campaign against the reactionary forces who have the power, but the liberals are generally middle-class individuals or small groups who have some notion of life over the frontier; and both the mass of the people and the rulers oppose them. These liberals themselves do not believe in “progress” as a vague general faith or hope, in our fashion. They concern themselves with particular unnecessary evils: the huge illiteracy and lack of schools, for example, the fundamental freedoms which are lacking, the serfdom of the south. They are far from wishing to introduce the freedom to have washing machines, television sets, motor-cars for all. With the possible—and doubtful—exception of industrial Catalonia, no one wants this; and indeed, when one
has considered all the bitter miseries of Spanish life, all the barbarous injustices, all the wretchedness which comes from corrupt government, and when one wonders how it is that nevertheless great personal freedom exists there in a people who live with little feeling of social responsibility to one another, the only conclusion is that they are exclusively concerned with the primitive needs of man. The “wants” are despised. Even those who make money or are well off do not kill themselves to make more; there is far more regard for fortune than for the tedious rewards of industry. Hogarth’s industrious apprentice or the trite figure of the ingenious Robinson Crusoe knocking up a bungalow on a desert island are unknown to the Spanish imagination. Money or fortune—those alone are acceptable; and bribery and corruption and “influence” are considered to be more humane than the pious accountancy of the just return.
The reactionary aspect of Left-wing politics was shrewdly noted by Franz Borkenau during the Civil War, and his words are worth reading now because they are still true. In The Spanish Cockpit he points out that there is a vast difference between the conscious and unconscious utterances made by Spaniards on behalf of the Spanish people, and that the unconscious is always protesting against Europe and the foreigner:
In the upper stratum: decay, corruption, political incapacity, as well as complete lack of creative power in any other respect. Below: fanaticism, capacity for self-sacrifice, spontaneity of action, but of action in a narrow, local, prejudiced sense without constructive capacities on a wider scale. Such was the structure of Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century and such it has remained to this day. The content of the political antagonism has changed, but the cleavage between the two strata has remained and broadened. It is the distinguishing feature of Spain as compared with other countries who regard themselves as more progressive.
In other countries, every popular movement originated in the higher stratum of society; in modern Spain, no movement in the higher classes ever penetrated the masses:
In Spain the masses revolted, and, basically, still revolt against all sorts of progress and Europeanization, and, at the same time, take the lead in more than one great historical crisis, of the nation as a whole…. The Spanish masses hated and hate this modern civilization which is forced upon them.
Yet the hatred of European modern civilization is true of the Spanish upper stratum as well. There is always in Spanish life this attraction to Europe, but there is a permanent reaction from it. The Spanish intellectuals who from 1898 onwards preached Europe continually aways hedged a little. Large numbers of Spanish anticlericals always insisted that they were not anti-Catholic; or if anti-Catholic, not irreligious in the manner of the corresponding groups in France or Italy. The word “conscience” continually crops up in Spanish disputes, and in a pragmatic way, it connotes something of the lawyer’s and casuist’s keenness in the fine issue and, on a higher plane, something like a personal mysticism.
The violence which has regularly broken out in Spain since the Napoleonic Wars is the reaction of a primitive people to the seeping in of industrial civilization. So much of Spanish life is locked up or emotionally fixed in the spirit of the Middle Ages—Unamuno said: “I feel within myself a mediaeval soul”—that the adjustment to industrial civilization is an agony. Spain hated and rejected the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.
It is typical of Spain that when the split between Marx and Bakunin occurred in the nineteenth century, the Spanish revolutionaries preferred the decentralized freedom of the Russian anarchist to the central tyranny proffered by the German Jew. The strength of anarchism before the Civil War in Spain was phenomenal, and the movement was unique in Europe. Even now, when anarchism has been driven underground—for it can hardly be crushed; its very defeats confirm it in its hatred of contemporary governments—it is still the only body which sends its agents over the Pyrenees to maintain the underground movement. Anarchism took strong root in Spain partly because it is a country of isolated towns and villages, each capable of a self-contained life on its own; and partly because it meant the total rejection of industrial civilization in its middle-class or socialistic form. No political totalitarianism! The only totalitarianism the anarchists could admit—and their theory obviously implies it—is spiritual or theocratic. Anarchism was religious, and Catholic absolutism had, by an irony, prepared the ground for it. Once the land was taken from the Church in the nineteenth century, once the mediaeval system was broken up and the Church lost its contact with the people, a large number of the peasants sought for a millennial faith elsewhere; the burnings and murders of anarchism must be compared with the auto de fe of the Absolute Church, with the desire to preserve purity. The link of the most idealistic anarchists with gunmen and criminals has a sort of poetic logic: Robin Hood and the bandit are the products of agrarian war.
The history of the Republic from 1931 to 1939 has disillusioned Spaniards about themselves. The early achievements of the Republic were important, but savage intolerance soon swept them away. It was mad to open an all-out attack on the Catholic Church, it was mad to potter with the land question; but each section of the Right and Left wanted its own absolute without compromise and without even some small show of practical sense. Each party fell into the hands of its own extremists.
Now Spain is exhausted and cynical and silenced by guilt about the Civil War. They do not care much to talk about it, and, indeed, it is a long time ago.
Industrialism and modern life come in, a quiet process of Europeanization goes fitfully on: the factories go up, the roads are built, the dams are constructed, the movement to study abroad—begun in the early years of this century—has not been stopped. The Civil War itself was a revolution which got out of the hands of the victors and the losers, for the village pattern was broken up by massacre, exile, travel, the flight to the big towns. In industrial regions, like Catalonia, a younger generation regards the ageing heroes of the Civil War with respect, but also with wonder and amusement. This young generation accepts the break with custom and traditions eagerly.
In the meantime chauvinists and the Falange are exuberant about the huge increase in population. When one asks how a poor country like Spain is to support such a population, they answer that industrialism will support it. They talk of new hydro-electric plants and factories. They talk of tractors—which would destroy the soil of Castile in a single summer. They ignore the new slums, which recall to the English reader the terrible history of the English industrial cities when the peasantry swarmed into the towns. Certainly in the big Spanish cities there is a façade of luxury; there is a fantastic luxury for the rich; there is a vulgar luxury for the small middle class, at any rate for the young of that class on whom the burdens of Spanish life have not yet fallen. The popular night clubs and cinemas have a cheap popular luxury. But millions of Spaniards in town and country live far below the level of these pleasures.
As one watches the General drive by, one sees the head of a state which is trading on its chance of surviving on American money. Since a great deal of foreign money is pouring into Spain from tourism—which is admirably organized—and because of America’s strategic interest in Spain, the appearance of prosperity increases. It is a picture which could, no doubt, be matched in most European countries since the war—but what happens when the war-scare goes, and when we no longer live on the mysterious capital of our strategic importance?
Chapter V
In Italy we are all the time aware of our civilization and of the substance and lineaments it has inherited from Greece and Rome. We are conscious of the heroic pagan world in Sicily and everywhere of Greek and Roman art and the pagan sun. Not so in Spain, except a little on its eastern, Mediterranean coast. There is something, of course, to remind us of a pre-Christian world. We can begin with the cave drawings of Alta-mira; we can see the beautiful Greek Lady of Elche in the Prado, which still stores the Mediterranean honey in its stone; we can see the mine shafts of the Carthaginians in Murcia. At Mérida, ther
e is a very great deal of Rome; at Toledo the Roman bridge; and in the east are the Roman triumphal arches that stand, still golden, where the bees hum in the ilex on the Valencia road, and in the enormous walls of the castles there. But no temples, no populations of statuary; even when the Renaissance comes to Spain it is sedate.
The Spaniards are patently Christian soldiers and Christian totalitarians. They built for fortification, for the display of state and power, for use and the prestige of families. In all towns one finds the massive, plain wall, with the noble gate and the extravagant scutcheon over it. In the works of art, the impression is of how important were the dead of the town, now redeemed by the blood of Christ, the intercession of the only true Church. Spain is a country of great shrines and great tombs. We think of the shrines of Covadonga and Montserrat—alas, now branches of the religious tourist industry—of St James at Campostela and of the Virgin of the Pilar in Zaragoza; of seminaries like those of Salamanca and Comillas; of monasteries like the Escorial, Guadalupe, and half-ruined Poblet in the Catalonian mountains, of the Charterhouse that stands outside Burgos on the edge of the dunes; of innumerable smaller religious houses with their hard, dead, bucketing bells; gravity, power, and reserve from without, ease and fantasy within. Their high and massive dusty walls are not to be argued with; within are their carved cloisters and colonnades, the useful refectories, the sombre, gold-laden or sugary chapels, and those sweet, watered gardens with their flowers and their cool, timeless silence, shut away from the dust, the wind, the raucous extremity of Spanish life. How simply, frugally, nobly, how decorously and with what simple family naturalness the Spaniards have lived in these walls amid the harsh life of their country! One travels from sumptuous tomb to tomb; from one heavily populated altar with its huge progeny of saints, prophets, and apostles to the next. The clever Italians find this sombre, monotonous, and anti-human: what a narrow passion for immortality the dramatic Spaniard had! How easily he shut himself up within his own skin or within monastic or cathedral walls, in conventional and passive contemplation! The monastic population was once immense in Spain, as one can see from the history of Guadalupe or in the massive fortified ruins of Poblet. This was the richest monastery in Europe, favoured by kings. It was pillaged by the Napoleonic French, who stripped Spain of as much art as they could carry away. Poblet was less a monastery than an immense agricultural estate, the mill and granary of a region, landlord, market and borough in itself. Under the impulse of the present Catholic drive in Spain great sums are being spent on Poblet, and the Spaniards are excellent and scholarly restorers. A small religious order lives there, and one peeps through the small glass window into the modern dining-hall of the order. Decently done in the light polished oak, it suggests the modern college or hostel, the seat of a solemn summer school. One realizes how rich and how tenaciously interrelated the modern Catholic bureaucracy is.
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