Helen Graham

`Against the state': A genealogy of the Barcelona May Days (1937)

For a European audience, one of the most famous images fixing the memory of the Spanish Civil War is of the street fightingacross-the-barricades which occurred in Barcelona between 3 and 7 May 1937. Those days of social protest and rebellion have been represented in many accounts, of which the single best known is still George Orwell’s contemporary diary account, Homage to Catalonia, recently given cinematic form in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. It is paradoxical, then, that the May events remain among the least understood in the history of the civil war. The analysis which follows is an attempt to unravel their complexity. On the afternoon of Monday 3 May 1937 a detachment of police attempted to seize control of Barcelona’s central telephone exchange (Telefónica) in order to remove the anarchist militia forces present therein. News of the attempted seizure spread rapidly through the popular neighbourhoods of the old town centre and port. By evening the city was on a war footing, although no organization — inside or outside government — had issued any such command. The next day barricades went up in central Barcelona; there was a generalized work stoppage and armed resistance to the Catalan government’s attempt to occupy the telephone exchange. Who, then, was mobilizing and why? To answer these questions we need to explore three separate but interwoven conflicts: first, the battle between political advocates Helen Graham

The Popular Front in Europe

Notes on the Contributors - The Popular Front and the Struggle against Fascism H.Graham and P.Preston - The Object Lesson: the Division of the German Left and the Triumph of National Socialism S.Salter - The Austrian Left and the Popular Front M.Kitchen - The French Popular Front, 1936-37 D.A.L.Levy - The Creation of the Popular Front in Spain P.Preston - The Spanish Popular Front and the Civil War H.Graham - Togliatti, Italian Communism and the Popular Front D.Sassoon - The Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front, 1936-39 J.Haslam - Index

The Popular Front and the Struggle Against Fascism

One of the more bizarre consequences of the Bolshevik revolution was that the years from 1918 to 1939 were an era of virtually uninterrupted working-class defeat. There were innumerable heroic episodes but the overall trend was catastrophic. The crushing of revolution in Germany and Hungary after the First World War was followed by the destruction of the Italian Left by Mussolini, the establishment of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal and the defeat of the General Strike in Britain. The rise of Hitler saw the annihilation of the most powerful working-class movement in Western Europe, and within a year the Austrian Left suffered a similar fate. Austria stands out because there, for the first time, workers took up arms against fascism, in 1934. Tragically, it was too late and the domino effect continued across central Europe.

Casado's Ghosts: Demythologizing the End of the Spanish Republic

Abstract The article analyses the war-induced circumstances that permitted the success of the March 1939 Casado rebellion inside an exhausted and fragmented Republican zone. In displacing Prime Minister Juan Negrín, it destroyed all possibility of realizing his plans for an orderly evacuation of those most at risk from Francoist reprisals. The article examines the attitudes to the rebellion of Spanish socialists and communists, whose organizations articulated the mass social support that had sustained the near three-year-long Republican war effort in ever more gruelling and psychologically erosive conditions. It concludes by considering the corrosive effects of the rebellion on the political culture and collective memory of the left—especially the Spanish Communist Party—both in the immediate postwar period and, more speculatively, over the longer term.