It’s as if he’d never existed

Letters

Vol. 7 No. 16 · 19 September 1985

From Peter Todd Mitchell

SIR: Military governments are tiresome, even Fidel Castro’s. But so are Leftist litanies, and in his review of The Transformation of Spain by David Gilmour (LRB 18 July), Anthony Pagden uses them to oversimplify both the complicated character of General Franco and the diverse motivations of his regime. If the Republicans in the Civil War were often referred to as ‘Rojos’, it was because many of them were Reds, and proud of it, too. Pagden has only to turn back to George Orwell to find their effect on the Loyalist cause. He places Franco himself in the 15th century, with an understanding of modern political societies ‘practically non-existent’: ignoring his very shrewd statesmanship. How else can one explain his stunning marathon interview with Hitler, who arrived expecting Spain on a platter, Gibraltar for dessert, and control of the Mediterranean thereby – and who left with little more than a sick headache? Compare it with the performance of Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, for which millions are still paying, when they had to face Stalin. If it is ‘15th-century’ to be astute rather than gullible, then our leaders should rush to reread Machiavelli. Even more fragile is the currently obligatory accusation of anti-semitism: particularly when I think of many of my friends who managed to reach a haven South of the Pyrenees during the war. Some were so grateful that they returned as residents to a country where they had been better treated than in their homeland (France). On a different level, it was during Franco’s regime that the first Centre of Studies of Sephardim Culture was set up; but I suppose that is 15th-century too. It was a complex century – just like our own.

Peter Todd Mitchell
Sitges, Spain

From Maria Eugenia Frutos

SIR: Two small points about Anthony Pagden’s excellent review of David Gilmour’s book The Transformation of Spain (LRB, 18 July). Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero’s failed coup happened on the afternoon of 23 February 1981, not 1980. And the view that ‘the regionalists in Catalonia by and large got the measure of autonomy they had asked for’ is not one, I believe, that is shared by the vast majority of the Catalonians themselves.

Maria Eugenia Frutos
Barcelona

Vol. 7 No. 19 · 7 November 1985

From Anthony Pagden

SIR: I can only apologise. Antonio Tejero’s attempted coup took place, as Maria Eugenia Fuentes says (Letters, 19 September), in 1981 and not, as I stated in my review of David Gilmour’s The Transformation of Spain, in 1980. As for her other point, I can only reply that it is obviously the case that no set of political claims is ever likely to be met to the full satisfaction of all the claimants, particularly if such claims demand the partial dismemberment of a nation state. I would still maintain, however, that ‘by and large’ the more moderate, at least, of the Catalan nationalists have ‘got the measure of autonomy they asked for’. That the ‘vast majority of the Catalonians themselves’ have often wanted more than their able and honest politicians were able to secure for them, or wanted other things, I don’t doubt.

Mr Todd Mitchell, on the other hand, on the same Letters page, seems consistently to have missed – or, enraged by my ‘Leftist litany’, has wilfully distorted – every point he raises. I did not deny that many Republicans before the outbreak of the Civil War (and a great many more after) were ‘Reds’. My, or rather Gilmour’s, point was that before 1936 their numbers were too small to constitute a threat to parliamentary democracy and certainly too small to legitimate an assault by the Army on an elected government, and that, in the official historiography of the war, the Republican cause and the ambitions of the Communist Party were made synonymous. Nor, of course, do I ‘place Franco in the 15th century’ (however that might be achieved). What I said was that Franco’s political values were largely modelled on a fantastic vision of those of 15th and 16th-century Castile who believed that Spain could only be una, grande y libre if it became, once again, a Castilian society (hence the fierce suppression of all separatist ambitions), stamped out the hated liberalism which had lost Spain its empire, and closed its frontiers to foreign ideas and foreign values, though not, of course, to foreign capital and foreign technology. Nor does this claim in any way deny Franco’s skill as a negotiator. Franco could be – since Mr Todd Mitchell urges us to rush to our Machiavelli – as much a fox as he was a lion. He could hardly have remained in power for so long if he had not been. But that does not make him a ‘statesman’, much less does it make him the architect of a ‘modern’ political regime. We still know too little about what took place during Franco’s famous meeting with Hitler at Hendaye railway station. But it clearly suited Hitler in 1940 to have a ‘non-belligerent’ ally at the entrance to the Mediterranean. A German occupation would not only have meant a further extension of German military forces, since the Spaniards had none of their own worth speaking of, but would have obliged the Reich to shore up an almost bankrupt economy, in addition to granting Franco, as the price of his continuing co-operation, an African empire.

As to accusations of anti-semitism. The only ones I can find in my review are a reference to the ‘Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy’ and the claim that, for Franco, the Civil War had been a ‘crusade’ against ‘liberalism, Freemasonry, anti-clericalism and Judaism’. Since the first is a phrase used by Franco himself and the second could be found, when I was a student at Barcelona University in the early Sixties, in any of the accepted histories of the war, I see no reason to recant. Castile, as Mr Todd Mitchell must surely know, has a longer history of anti-Judaism (although an ambiguous attachment to the image of Al Andalus has precluded simple anti-semitism) than any other European state, and something of this attitude persisted under the Franco regime. But that regime did not persecute Jews – I never claimed that it did – although in the early days of the regime it did not make life easy for them either. As for the Centre for the study of Sephardim culture, well yes, it is ‘15th’, or at least ‘16th-century’ in a way. The first Hebrew studies in Spain, after the Reconquista, were in fact established at Alcala de Henares in 1527.

Anthony Pagden
King’ College, Cambridge