Julián Casanova

Anarchism, the republic and civil war in Spain : 1931-1939

Note to the English Edition Part One: Power in the Street 1. History Accelerates 2. The Seeds of Confrontation 3. The Symbols of Identity 4. On the Road to Insurrection 5. Correcting the Route Part Two: The People in Arms 6. The Summer of 1936 7. War and Revolution. 8. Decline and Fall. Epilogue: The Uprooting. Appendix: Anarchism in Spanish Contemporary History

La historia social de los vencidos

The history of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s Dictatorship still arouses passionate opinions rather than historical debate and it is no longer the exclusive preserve of historians. This article examines the different stories devoted to the vanquished in the War during the last years, the result of painstaking work by dozens of historians who have been conducting constant research in archives, press repositories and libraries. Beyond the testimonial and dramatic recall of those who suffered political violence, we as historians need to follow the path cleared in the last two decades, with serious, well-written and well-distributed studies, and to fight to these views to be heard in.

Terror and Violence: The Dark Face of Spanish Anarchism

This article focuses on the various examples of anarchist violence, from terrorist action in the 1890s to anonymous bombs of the first decade of the twentieth century; from the tyranny of the Star pistol in the 1920s to the uprisings and revolutionary terror of the Second Republic and the Civil War. What follows is a story that is contradictory, heroic, and menacing.

Anarchism and Revolution in the Spanish Civil War: The Case of Aragon

transformations which took place in the wartime Republican zone. Inevitably, anarchist historiography is concerned to recapture the exemplary character of those revolutionary experiences, while the Communists who witnessed collectivization produce diatribes against the experiment. What is surprising, however, is that works of certain prestigious authors take as their starting point the opinions and accounts of contemporary observers and travellers often foreign

Republic, Civil War and Dictatorship: The Peculiarities of Spanish History:

The civil war is the central event in twentieth-century Spanish history. Since that summer of 1936, essayists and historians have attempted to explain its causes and consequences, the most intense conflicts and the politics that shaped them. No period in the history of Spain has generated so many books, testimonies, debates and such bitter disputes. Yet in spite of everything that has been said and written, propaganda, manipulations, subjective narratives and black-and-white explanations have made any basic agreement very difficult. The long dictatorship of Franco, who for four decades, until the very end, killed, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated the defeated, those in the resistance and dissidents, blamed the Republic and its leading figures for having caused the war, stained its memory and millions of Spaniards grew up with that memory in national Catholic schools. The transition to democracy did nothing to recover its more positive side, that of its laws, reforms, dreams and hopes, lumping together the Republic, the war and the dictatorship, a tragic past it was best to forget. Nor is it easy to overcome the quite widespread essentialist view that the civil war was the result of ancestral hatreds in a country with a historical identity and destiny very prone to ‘fraternal’ violence. Following decades of Francoist propaganda control over republican guilt, since the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy a kind of moral equivalence in sharing out the blame for the causes of the war and the violence unleashed, an inevitable conflict due to those unresolved festering historical animosities, gained ground. Against that political use of the past, a diverse group of Spanish historians who came into the universities at the end of the dictatorship and the early years of the transition to democracy, following the path opened up by the work of Hispanists – particularly from Great Britain and North America, the first to challenge the myths of the Crusade with academic methods – uncovered new sources, discussed the

Reviews : Graham Kelsey, Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State: The CNT in Zaragoza and Aragon, 1930-1937, Kluwer/Inter national Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 1991; ix + 312 pp.; L66.00

is least successful. He attempts to place the record of Dutch imperialism within a historiography that has generally emerged from the British experience. While he sees the Dutch as having been forced into expansion by the fear of pre-emption and the propinquity of the turbulent frontier, his economic material (to be fair, by his own admission) is tentative and inconclusive. His treatment of the periphery is cursory, with little to say on local ’collaborators’ and a very narrow perspective (almost imperial in its focus) on the Acheh war. His anxieties about the word ’imperialism’ are stimulated by that turgid, narrowly based and far too influential book of semantic history by Koebner and Schmidt. As a result, his purposes are sometimes confounded by an inability to distinguish between the contemporary debate on imperialism (from which the Dutch were of course eager to absolve themselves) and a modern historiography that must use the word differently, his tendency to be far too sympathetic to the Dutch concept of ethical empire (all imperial powers paraded ethics to cover their own beams with the motes of others), and his failure to notice the peripheral class and racial structures of the Indonesian empire. This is, however, a long book, and that is perhaps to demand too much of it. For readers unable to use so many of his sources in the original Dutch, this is a remarkably valuable survey of Dutch imperialism within its international context.