50th Anniversary : Civil War Still Painful to Spaniards

Fifty years ago, on July 17, 1936, units of the Spanish army, acting in advance of the hour set by the conspirators, took over the town of Melilla in Spanish Morocco in the name of Gen. Francisco Franco.

Franco, who months earlier had been shunted to the Canary Islands, flew to Morocco the next day to take command of the troops in their rebellion against the democratically elected leftist government of Spain.

“Spain has been saved,” he said in a broadcast to the nation. “You may be proud of being Spaniards.”

Throughout the country, military garrisons rose up against the Spanish Republic. Franco’s speech on July 18 officially marked the start of the Spanish Civil War.

Momentous Event

The war is usually counted among the most momentous events of the 20th Century. It ravaged the land and imposed a 40-year dictatorship that oppressed and darkened the spirit of Spain. It served as a prelude to World War II, pitting Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on the side of Franco against Josef Stalin on the side of the republic.

For many foreigners, among them Ernest Hemingway, the war had a grim and terrible romance and became a touchstone of commitment. For years, men and women were judged, sometimes harshly, by whether they had stood for the fascists or the republic.

Many foreigners died in the war. Their numbers, though, were meager when compared to the slaughter of Spaniards.

A host of images came out of the war: The destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the bombers of the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany; the enormous mural by Pablo Picasso memorializing the horror of Guernica; the young Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade singing war songs to the tune of “Red River Valley”; George Orwell’s disillusion with communism; the murder by fascists of the sensitive poet Federico Garcia Lorca outside Granada. It was a time of tragic terror and great meaning.

Will Not Be Ignored

The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the war this week will be muted this year in Spain, but it will not be ignored. A dozen or so new books on the war have reached the market. Newspapers are serializing histories of the war in their Sunday issues. Government television is scheduling a series on the war for the end of the year.

The government is not planning any major ceremony or pageant or any other kind of emotional event to mark the anniversary.

‘The War Is Present’

“The Civil War still hangs over Spain,” Spanish historian Angel Vinas said at dinner on a recent evening. “It is in the back of everyone’s mind. Of course, there are young people who see it as something very remote. I have students, for example, who were perhaps 12 years old when Franco died (in 1975). They do not remember much about the dictatorship. For everyone else, however, the war is present. But it is a delicate matter for the government.”

Franco and his army defeated the forces of the republic in 1939 and, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the war came to an end. But it did not end in Spain. Suppression of the enemy went on.

“Its real end,” Spanish historian Javier Tusell wrote recently, “were the elections of June, 1977 (the first democratic elections after the death of Franco). The regime of Franco was nothing else than a continuation of the Civil War.”

The war, in short, is too close to commemorate.

“I am sure that the government does not want to reopen old wounds,” a Western ambassador said in Madrid. “After all, there was no reconciliation here. For 40 years, if you were against Franco, you were against God and Spain.”

‘One Side Is Buried There’

The ambassador brought up the Valley of the Fallen, the huge basilica dug into the rock of a hill outside Madrid during the dictatorship. Franco is buried in the basilica, and most Spaniards regard it as a memorial only to the soldiers who died on his side in the Civil War.

“There is a Valley of the Fallen,” the ambassador said. “But who is there? One side is buried there. The other side dug it.”

There is an obvious difficulty for the Socialist government of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. The dictatorship celebrated the 18th of July as a national holiday, commemorating the anniversary of the beginning of the war--the day Franco flew to Morocco, proclaimed his defiance of the republic and waited for German and Italian planes to ferry his troops to the mainland of Spain.

For many years, Francoists would gather in public squares to mark the holiday, to lift their hands stiffly out in the fascist salute, and chant, “Franco, Franco, Franco.” Long after the defeat of the republic, they would remind themselves of their so-called crusade against godlessness and the Reds.

The Franco regime missed no opportunity to glorify the day. Every year, just before the holiday, workers were given an extra month’s salary, known as “the payment of the 18th of July.”

After Franco’s death, and the transition to democracy, the new government abolished the holiday. Die-hard fascists still gather on that day to pay homage to Franco and his crusade, but they celebrate by themselves, isolated from the Spanish state and from the mood of the nation. Employers are still required to give their workers a bonus in July, but it is now called “the payment of July.”

The Socialists who now run Spain clearly do not want to revive a national holiday that once celebrated their repression. It is simply too soon to try to turn the day into the commemoration of a terrifying tragedy.

A few months ago the city of Valencia, with the support of its regional government, celebrated the city’s role as the temporary capital of the republic at a time when Madrid seemed in danger of falling. Rafael Alberti, the leftist poet and artist, was asked by the regional government to design a poster for the event. He came up with a design that featured the tricolor flag of the Spanish Republic.

When officials of the regional government saw the Alberti poster, they panicked. They denounced the design as controversial. That flag had been banned under Franco. Although Spain is now a democracy, it is not a republic but a constitutional monarchy, with a national banner of red and yellow depicting the national arms.

Somehow, the regional officials of Valencia had expected that a poster commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil War and Valencia’s part in it would have no reminder of what had happened. The regional government dropped the poster. The members of the city council published it themselves.

Although a British historian, Hugh Thomas, has written what is regarded as the most thorough account of the Civil War, more and more Spanish historians are delving into the war these days, assessing it, destroying old myths about it, trying to find the essence of its meaning. Few Spaniards now accept the old Francoist idea that the war set good against evil, the church against the godless, the state against traitors.

In a thoughtful essay, Manuel Tunon de Lara, the historian, tried recently to assess some of the concrete costs of the war: 300,000 dead in the three years of fighting; 28,000 to 30,000 executed by Franco in the decade after the war; 300,000, including some of the best educated, driven into exile.

Yet half a century later, Tunon de Lara wrote, “none of the fundamental political changes introduced in 1939 continue to exist in Spain today.”

“In a word,” he went on, “the principles of liberal democracy that ruled the life of the country from 1931 to 1936 have returned in force.”

Tunon de Lara recognizes that the new, stable democracy of Spain is not just a simple reversion to the days before the war.

“It is erroneous to believe that 40 years of history can disappear without leaving a trace,” he said. “. . . Nothing of present-day Spain can be explained without taking into account the legacy and vestiges of Francoism.” But Tunon de Lara makes it clear that Franco, with his war, his crusade and his dictatorship, tried to move Spain against the tide of Europe and failed.

For several years after Franco’s death, Spanish politicians could hardly take a single step toward democracy without hearing the echoes of the Civil War. The memory did not immobilize them as much as it troubled and slowed them and made them seek consensus instead of confrontation. Everyone whispered and fretted about the army.

The memory of the Civil War made the Socialists, the party of the republic, accept a constitutional monarchy. The memory of the war made an old Communist warhorse like Santiago Carrillo assume the role of an almost mild-mannered conciliator.

This feeling of living under the constant weight of the war did not dissipate until a band of military conspirators tried to carry out a coup d’etat in a comic opera plot in 1981 that disintegrated before the resistance of King Juan Carlos I. In retrospect, the plot looks ludicrous, but it helped Spanish politicians get some of the old fears out of their system.

The overwhelming electoral victory of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and his Socialists in 1982 and their reelection with ease in June this year has helped put away more of the fears. The great enemies of Franco--the godless Reds--are back in power after 50 years, and the result is not disaster but stable, moderate, well-run government.

But feelings about the war are not buried. A director tried last year to make a comic movie about the Civil War. A lot of Spaniards filled theaters to see it, but the movie was not really very good and did not tell very much about the war. It is too soon to laugh about the Civil War. And it is too soon to celebrate it.