In Europe (45 page)

Close to here, in Coustouges, at the top of an icy pass, the republican soldiers were forced to turn in their weapons. Some of the farm boys were still clutching a fistful of earth from their native villages, a handful of dirt as a souvenir. Others were singing. The French border guards upended their duffel bags on the dirt road, their last few possessions were swallowed up in the mud, photographs blew away across the slopes. A little further along were the freight wagons full of the Russian munitions, aircraft parts, artillery and other assistance the French had impounded. The republicans had made their stand alone in Europe.

Now there is a little monument beside the asphalt, placed there on the fiftieth anniversary of the
Retirada
of February 1939. ‘Across this pass came 70,000 Spanish republicans. The hearts of one out of every two Spaniards froze.’ If you drive on, you see forests of cork oak and wheat fields with poppies, and after that the earth turns dry and red.

Right-wing movements come from the countryside, left-wing movements from the cities, at least that's the idea. Farmers, and certainly large landowners, stand to profit from the preservation of property and the status quo, while workers have everything to gain from change and even, if need be, revolution. The social democrats and communists always focused on the urban proletariat, and did not know what to do with the farmer's problems – their theories did not seem to work in the countryside. The Bolsheviks solved the conflict between city and countryside by simply lumping the farmers together in a
kolkhoz
, by deporting or starving them. The rest of the left tended to leave this political terrain largely for what it was, and so to all intents and purposes left it to the Christian
Democrats, the conservatives, the extreme right and the many farmers’ parties that arose after 1918.

There were exceptions, though. The left-wing Radical Party in France accumulated many supporters among the small farmers, because they were able to mix classic left-republican ideas with the protection of small landowners. In Italy, the communists and the socialists had a firm grip on the rural workers’ unions: around 1920, a farmers’ war was actually waged in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna between the Fascists and the ‘Red barons’. And in Spain one had the anarchists.

In 1935 and 1936, a young English violinist in search of the meaning of life wandered through Spain, living from his music as he went.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
is the name of the book Laurie Lee wrote later, and his story is characterised by the same nonchalance as the title. What he describes is fascinating. The Spain Lee crossed in the 1930s was not a different country, it was not even a different world, it was a different era. He describes the makeshift farmers’ huts in the mountains, the houses that contained no more than was necessary for a simple life: work and the animals during the day, food and stories in the evening. ‘So it was with us in this nameless village; night found us wrapped in this glowing barn, family and stranger gathered round the long bare table to a smell of woodsmoke, food, and animals.’

In the Sierra Morena he arrived, after walking for three hours ‘up a rope-ladder of goat tracks’, in a high, chilly ‘huddle of rough-stone hovels, primitively rounded and tufted with dripping moss’. For a bottle of wine and a piece of hardened cheese he played his violin. ‘I felt I could have been with some lost tribal remnant of seventeenth-century Scotland, during one of their pauses between famine and massacre – the children standing barefooted in puddles of dew, old women wrapped in their rancid sheepskins, and the short shaggy men whose squinting faces seemed stuck between a smile and a snarl.’

Spain was, in some ways, an extra-European territory. Anyone crossing the Pyrenees arrived in a country that had gone its own way, and that had skipped a number of major European developments. Karl Marx once called Spain ‘that least understood of European countries’. Everything there was earlier, or later, or more extreme: the Moorish invasion in the Middle Ages, feudal relations that came too late and had to be
imposed with the use of great force, a church that repressed the Enlightenment and intellectual progress, a powerful group of large landowners who blocked all economic modernisation, the eternal hatred between the regions and the central seat of power, the liberals and the traditional Carlists, the farmers and the enormous dead weight of nobility, church and army and the country's obsession with remaining a world empire, even though it had long lain crippled beneath the weight of that ambition.

‘One half of Spain eats but does not work, the other half works but does not eat.’ This centuries-old saying accords well with the facts: according to a 1788 census, almost fifty per cent of the male population was not involved in any form of productive labour, and the nineteenth century did little to change that. The country had once been one of Europe's major producers of grain; now the forests had been razed, the arable land depleted. As late as 1930, a third to a half of the population could not read or write. Fifty per cent of the land was owned by less than one per cent of the population. Between 1814–74 thirty-seven coups were attempted, twelve of them successful. By the early years of the twentieth century, Spain was almost bankrupt: the army had one general for every hundred soldiers, and a half of all the country's farmers lived on the brink of starvation. During strikes in Barcelona between 1918–20, the employers and the police hired
pistoleros
to kill union leaders. The unions fought back in kind with their own snipers. Police Commissioner Miguel Arleguí finally put an end to the uprising within two days by gunning down twenty-one union leaders, at home or on the street.

The Spanish Civil War was not the first, but the fourth civil war within a century. The country had been fighting itself for more than 150 years, in a continual back-and-forth between absolute monarchists and free citizens, between bedrock conservatives and communists, between changing nothing and changing everything.

In this polarised world, in which all of the participants in the Spanish drama of 1936–9 grew up, anarchism played a central role. The philosophy of Mikhail Bakunin, like that of Tolstoy, harkened back to the ideal of the
mir
, the free, autonomous Russian village community. Bakunin's body of thought found adherents everywhere in the countryside of Southern Europe, but in Spain ‘the Idea’ was generally embraced as a
new religion. In both city and countryside, the anarchists were far and away the most important revolutionary movement.

By 1873 there were some 50,000 followers of Bakunin in Spain. Anarchist teachers and students made the rounds of the villages, the way mendicant monks had for centuries before them, organising night schools and teaching farmers to read. By 1918 more than 200 anarchist newspapers and periodicals were being published in Spain. The anarchist union CNT had more than 700,000 members; the socialist UGT at that point had no more than 200,000.

Anarchism could become so popular because it was, in essence, a nostalgic rural movement. It appealed to a kind of homesickness that was felt as strongly by the farmers as it was by the workers of Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid; most of them, after all, were the children or grandchildren of farmers. Landlordism was theft. Land and factories belonged to their workers. A fair exchange of goods and services had to be achieved. Just as in Italy, the central state was alien and hostile. In its stead, a system of communities – of villages, neighbourhoods and factories that ran themselves and made mutual agreements on a voluntary basis – was to be established. (The urban anarchists later developed a more complex model of ‘syndicates’, while the rural anarchists stuck to the original village model.) A general uprising was all that was needed, in Bakunin's words, to unshackle the ‘spontaneous creativity of the masses’.

It seemed like a paradisal dream: the definitive answer to the rigid centralism of Madrid, the corruption of the church and the government, the oppression of the nobility and landlords. But at the same time it was a movement whose ideal lay in the past, in the days before the modernisation of Europe, in the medieval urban and village communities. ‘Those who would have been bandits in the 1840s became anarchists in the 1880s,’ writes the historian Hugh Thomas. ‘Anarchism was thus more a protest against industrialisation than a method of organising it to the public advantage.’

Sometimes I think: the left lost the civil war more than the right ever won it.

When I wake up in Barcelona, it is Sunday. My van is parked on a camping ground in a no-man's-land near the city, a place where billboards are the only thing sprouting from the soil. Hundreds of tents and mobile homes
stand glistening in the sun, right in the path of the local landing patterns. Every five minutes a shiny Boeing belly comes roaring over us.

It is already hot outside.
Das rollende Hotel
, a bus containing three dozen Germans who all sleep in an enormous trailer, piled up in little berths like sausage rolls in a vending machine, has settled down in front of me. They are on a three-week tour of Spain and Portugal. ‘It's not that bad,’ an older man tells me. ‘It's sort of like a ship's cabin.’ Some of the tourists hardly leave the bus at all, they stare mutely out of the window at what the new day will bring.

Late that afternoon I wander down Las Ramblas, the city's grand promenade and marketplace. There are flowers and fighting cocks for sale, along the street are beggars with stumps bared and little dogs on leads, there are ventriloquists and dancing Gypsies, and through it all shuffles and drums the procession of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

A South American music group is playing in the Plaça de Catalunya. A retired couple is tripping the light fantastic; he has liver spots on his bald pate, her hair looks like lambswool, together they run through all the steps and pirouettes of half a century ago, right there in the middle of the street, and all time is forgotten.

On the quiet morning of 19 July, 1936, a young man came bicycling down Las Ramblas, his wispy red hair flopping, shouting again and again: ‘The soldiers are at University Square!’ Everyone began running. ‘It was as if the lad had an enormous broom on the front of his bicycle which swept the people out of Las Ramblas towards the university,’ an eyewitness said later. That was the start of the popular left-wing resistance to General Franco, who had set his military revolt in motion that weekend.

Spain was unlucky enough to start a civil war at the same moment that the tension between left and right had come to boiling point everywhere else in Europe. All parties saw Spain as a touchstone for good and evil, as an experimental plot for new tactics and weapons systems, as a dress rehearsal for what was about to happen.

Yet still, the civil war remained a Spanish affair above all. It was an unprecedentedly cruel and apocalyptic war, a struggle seen by both sides as a battle between good and evil. The anarchists fought with almost religious abandon for their New Jerusalem, the communists, socialists and
liberals fought tooth and nail for the achievements of the Enlightenment, Francisco Franco's rebels felt like crusaders defending the sacred values of old Spain. Never before had ‘the enemy’ been demonised as he was in the Spanish Civil War.

General Franco's coup, which triggered the conflict on 17 July, 1936, had been on its way for a long time. During the chaotic 1920s the army had already seized power once, in September 1923, when it installed General Miguel Primo de Rivera as dictator, to rule alongside the king. ‘My Mussolini’ was how King Alfons XIII once introduced him to a foreign guest, an accurate representation of the new situation.

The only thing was, Primo de Rivera was not a Fascist, and definitely not a Mussolini. He was an aristocrat from a prominent family, a father figure who had made a cautious start modernising the country. He dealt with anarchists and liberals with an iron fist, but was not, like Hitler and Mussolini, out to destroy them physically. His personality was both sympathetic and bizarre: a widower, he sometimes withdrew into his work for weeks on end, then lost himself for days in bouts of drinking and dancing as he drifted from one Madrid café to the next.

Primo de Rivera never succeeded in gathering around himself a major popular movement. He governed in the same way he was accustomed to live, as an old-fashioned landowner, an enlightened despot who had nothing but contempt for the law and the subtleties of the establishment. Once he had accumulated enough enemies, his fall came of its own accord: in an attempt to defend an Andalusian courtesan known as ‘La Caoba’ (literally, ‘the Mahogany Girl’), he ordered the judge to dismiss the case against her – a narcotics charge. When the judge kicked up a fuss, Primo de Rivera had him transferred, then he sacked the supreme justice of the Spanish court for supporting the judge, and finally had two journalists who were pursuing the story sent into exile on the Canary Islands. On 28 January, 1930, the king ordered his dismissal. His final communiqué read: ‘And now, now a bit of peace of quiet after 2,326 days of continuous malaise, responsibility and effort.’ He left Spain. Less than seven weeks later he died, alone, at the Hotel Pont-Royal in Paris.

King Alfons decided to test the mood of his country. He saw the municipal elections of Sunday, 12 April, 1931 as a litmus test for his own popularity.
The results were ambiguous. All over the countryside his supporters maintained their majority, but in the cities the republicans won resoundingly. Rumour also had it that many villagers had been pressured by their landlords into voting for the royalists.

The next day, in a number of provincial capitals, the republic was proclaimed. The day after that the streets of Madrid filled with demonstrators. In the end, Alfons bowed to their demand that he ‘leave the city before sunset’. It was the only way, he said, to prevent a civil war: ‘Last Sunday's elections showed that I am no longer loved by my people.’

Power, from that moment on, lay for the first time in the hands of the reformers, in the hands of a ‘young and eager Spain’. All over the country, construction began on new schools, hospitals, playgrounds, residential districts and holiday centres. But Spain soon became unmanageable. The Archbishop of Toledo refused to recognise the new republic – and was promptly forced into exile. New laws on education and divorce were not enforced. Rather than enact a single agricultural reform, the landowners preferred to chase the small farmers from their land. A general strike, and a miners’ strike in Asturias, were violently crushed.