In 1961, 25 years after the military coup that sparked off the Civil War, two important books on the conflict appeared, one in English (The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas) and the other in French (La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne by Pierre Broué and Emile Témime). These were perhaps the first books written by a generation of historians uninvolved in the events themselves, all being children in the 1930s . To mark the sixtieth anniversary of their publication we publish this blog-post on these two books and their reception in the 1960s. 

La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne is a remarkable work which is divided into two parts; the first, by Broué, examines the revolutionary process in 1936-37 while the second, by Témime, is an account of the international aspects of the war and the construction of the Francoist Dictatorship. In the introduction the authors explained this approach, admitting their differences of sympathy –  Témime being more sympathetic to the “progressive Republicans and the moderate Socialists in his concern with organisation and efficiency and the world balance of power” while Broué felt that “those who fight revolutions half-heartedly are merely digging their own graves” (p 14). Their aim was, they added:

“in the face of ignorance, neglect, and falsification, to recreate this struggle in the most truthful possible way and to rid it of the legend which had prematurely buried it.” (p. 7)

It was the first part which received most attention. The attempted military coup of July 1936 which sparked off the Civil War also provoked a widespread social revolution in the areas of Spain which resisted the coup. Yet, in the years after the war this revolution had been largely ignored by historians or treated as insignificant.

Using the concept of “dual power”, evocative of events in the Russian capital Petrograd after the collapse of the Czarist regime in February 1917, Broué explores the complex situation produced by the collapse of the Republican state and its replacement by the local committees which sprang into life in 1936. He traces the stages by which, against the background of the defeat of Republican forces on the battlefield, the Republican state was rebuilt under the government of Largo Caballero (Sept 1936-May 1937). The tensions this produced and the rise of the Communist party as the party of counter-revolution formed the background to the crisis which erupted in Barcelona in May 1937, after which the revolutionary groups and parties were marginalised under the new government of Juan Negrin.

In the second part of the book Témime argues that the failure of Britain and France to support the Republic was crucial for the war’s outcome, turning almost inevitable defeat for the rebel generals into almost inevitable victory. This points to the tension in their accounts: Broué sees the defeat of the revolution as depriving the Republican war effort of the enthusiasm of peasants and workers, while Témime identifies fear of social revolution as a key motive for the hostility towards the Republic of the British and French upper-classes. 

The book was enthusiastically reviewed by the U.S. historian Gabriel Jackson, whose own account, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939, was published in 1965. Writing in the Hispanic American Historical Review in 1962 Jackson praised the work as “the best general interpretation available concerning both the revolution of 1936 and the war”, adding that:

“it is especially valuable for analysis of the C.N.T., the P.O.U.M. and the anarchists in both the industrial and rural areas of Catalonia.” 

In France the reviews were more mixed, with Antoine Prost in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (October-December 1962), pointing to the authors’ lack of an adequate analysis of the pre-war Republican period and of the agrarian problems of Spain. Prost, however, praised the work as an important advance in the study of the conflict, adding that further research was necessary and that the history of the war remained to be written. After the book was finally published in an English-language edition in 1972, the U.S. historian Temma Kaplan described it as the “best single volume” on the Civil War in a review in the Hispanic American Historical Review (1974).  

Both authors went on to enjoy distinguished careers as historians in France but, sadly, La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne was never updated to take account of new sources and new interpretations.

Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War quickly became the standard work on the subject in English, bringing the author fame and wealth. Thomas had no background in Spanish history – and, indeed, had to start his task by studying Spanish. Like Broué and Témime he benefited from being able to interview many of the surviving key figures involved. Perhaps reflecting his brief previous career as a British diplomat, Thomas stressed the international and diplomatic aspects of the conflict. His approach is best described as “narrative”; at times this leads him to shift in the space of two or three pages between concurrent developments in several different locations (Salamanca, Barcelona, Bilbao, Washington, London etc). This narrative approach was, perhaps, the key to the book’s success: telling the story of the war to a generation of readers outside Spain who had no memory of the events as well as to an older generation whose memories were patchy. 

The Spanish Civil War received enthusiastic reviews in the British press, including from journalists such as Claude Cockburn who had reported on the war, as well as from Peter Kemp, one of the few British volunteers who had fought in Franco’s rebel forces. In the United States, Vincent Sheean, who had covered the war for the New York Herald Tribune, praised it in the New York Times (9 July 1961) saying

“there is something quite wonderful about a book which is written on a thing which the author never saw and never could have seen. (…) (Thomas) has understood it incredibly well and has written it superbly”.  

Some historians were, however, less impressed. In the review in the Hispanic American Hispanic Review cited above Jackson criticised the author for relying too heavily on accounts by Francoist historians such as Manuel Aznar. This, he argued, led Thomas to accept what Jackson describes as “an obviously forged document” alleging a Communist plot to overthrow the Republic (the claim of such a plot was the basis of the military rebels’ attempt to legitimise the coup and the Franco Dictatorship).

He also criticised Thomas’s acceptance of the Francoist figure for the number of people murdered in the Republican zone– which was taken from the Causa General, the Franco Regime’s mammoth general prosecution brought against people alleged to have committed crimes in the “red zone” during the war.

Jackson also criticised what he called “the tone of unpleasant scorn” adopted in discussing the repression “as though dealing with the melodramatic customs of a barbarian people”.  He concluded that

“in a strict scholarly sense it can be recommended for its coverage of the international aspects, but as military and political history of Spain it spreads more confusion than light.”

Inside Spain The Spanish Civil War was reviewed in academic journals such as the Revista de Política Internacional (No 60, 1962) and the Revista de Estudios Políticos (No 161, 1961), but Thomas recognised that there was no prospect of it being published in the country. 

Despite this, it would become an important work in Francoist Spain as a Spanish translation was published by Ruedo Iberico, which had been established in Paris to challenge the regime’s control over publishing inside Spain. The book was smuggled across the frontier and sold clandestinely. The first Spanish print-run of 5,000 copies sold out very quickly.

The book’s popularity in Spain forced Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Spanish Minister of Information & Tourism (1962-1969) to establish a centre of Civil War Studies under Ricardo de la Cierva, in an attempt to reassert the Franco regime’s version of the Civil War as a “crusade” against Marxism, liberalism and freemasonry.  

A revised English-language edition of The Spanish Civil War was published as a paperback in 1965 and it was revised substantially for third and fourth editions which were published in 1977 and 2003. By this time the author’s political views had changed significantly, leading him to become a key advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. The later editions are much longer than the original, carry much more extensive footnotes and respond to some of the criticisms of the first edition. In particular, Thomas expanded his discussion of the revolutionary process of 1936-37, which he, like so many other writers before Broué and Témime, had badly neglected in the first edition. His account of the Second Republic was also improved and extended with the assistance and advice of Paul Preston, who had been his doctoral student. 

Sixty years after their publication, how are we to assess these two books?  The authors had the advantage of being able to interview many of the survivors but, at the time, many of the archives were closed, particularly in Spain where the regime maintained a close watch on challenges to the official version of the country’s history.  Both La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne and the early editions of The Spanish Civil War have long been superseded by the work of later historians, but the authors were pioneers in the field and had a lasting impact. Their books introduced new generations of readers – inside Spain as well as outside – to the history of the war and some of these readers themselves went on to research and write on the subject. 

Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne, Les Edicions de Minuit, 1961. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1961.

PHOTO COLLAGE: Original 1961 book covers

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During the Civil War thousands of people from other countries volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic against the insurgents led by General Franco. Most of these joined the International Brigades. Volunteers were usually recruited through the communist parties of their own countries and travelled to Spain by crossing the French frontier, often illegally, or by ship from Marseilles. There were about 35,000 volunteers, though fewer than half of these were involved at any one time. Recruits came from many countries, with the largest contingents from France, Poland, Italy, Germany, the United States, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Although a small minority were writers, artists and intellectuals, most came from working-class backgrounds. Most had little military training or experience, and, on arrival in Spain, they were sent to Albacete for training. They fought in most of the major battles of the Civil War. On 8 February 1939, as Catalonia was occupied by Franco’s forces, the last Brigade units crossed the Spanish frontier into France. To mark this anniversary, we are publishing a review of a recent book on the International Brigades, which was published in English and Spanish last October: The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, by Giles Tremlett (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

Apart from the memoirs of former brigaders, there have been many histories of the International Brigades. Most have focussed on volunteers from particular countries  – or, in some cases, on those from individual cities. What distinguishes this volume by Giles Tremlett, the former Madrid correspondent of The Guardian, is that it attempts to cover all of the brigaders, regardless of countries of origin. In this sense it is “international” but, unlike earlier accounts of this sort, it has benefited from the opening of the Russian State Archives, which the author has used extensively along with archives elsewhere including Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the USA.

The book is organised chronologically in a series of time-specific episodes, but many of these episodes are used to explore broader themes and issues. Although the Brigades were formally established in the autumn of 1936, Tremlett begins before that by including earlier volunteers. Most of these were in Barcelona at the time of the military coup in July 1936, when the city was preparing to celebrate the opening of the “Popular Olympics” (organised in protest at the “Nazi Olympics” in Berlin). Some of the athletes were among the foreigners who joined the militias which fought to resist the army. Tremlett ends his account, following the military defeat of the Republic in early 1939, with a discussion of the post-war experiences of volunteers.  

Tremlett’s research in the Soviet archives reveal that volunteers came from more countries than has previously been established – from sixty-five of the sovereign independent states then in existence. 

As he explains in the introduction, most volunteers came from two overlapping categories of people, which he calls “the devout” and “the displaced”. The devout were often, but not always, members of the Communist party. Party leaders attempted to vet volunteers on the basis of motivation, military experience, political views and physical fitness and over half of all volunteers were party members. 

However, in the 1930s Europe housed large numbers of political refugees from repressive regimes. Although the most recent of these were from Germany and Austria, there were also refugees escaping political repression and anti-semitism in Italy, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Longer established refugee communities included those who had fled the anti-semitic pogroms in the Czarist Empire and people displaced by the Russian Revolution and by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires at the end of the First World War. To these should be added economic migrants, especially following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Depression.  

The importance of such refugee communities for recruitment is clear from Tremlett’s account, particularly in the case of Polish volunteers. There were large Polish communities outside Poland, especially in France and Belgium. Only around twenty per cent of Polish brigaders were recruited directly from Poland, the remainder coming from as far away as Argentina. Some 350 Polish volunteers came from Belgium, of whom 131 were Jewish. Of the 1,900 volunteers from Belgium, 800 were, in fact, recent immigrants to that country. Jews accounted for about ten per cent of all volunteers, including 200 of those from Belgium. Volunteers from outside Europe also frequently came from migrant communities: the majority of Ukrainian volunteers, for instance, came from Canada. 

How important was the contribution of the Brigades towards the overall Republican war effort? Tremlett rightly avoids exaggerating their role. They played a crucial part in preventing Franco’s forces from taking Madrid in the winter of 1936-37. In the battles of Jarama in February 1937 and Guadalajara a few weeks later, they helped stop rebel attempts to surround the capital. They were used as shock troops throughout the war and deployed in most of the key battles. Foreign medical staff, often women, attached to the Brigades, played a crucial role in establishing and training the Republican forces’ medical services. The Brigades were, however, always deployed as part of the Republican army and their contribution was limited. They did not fight on the Northern Front, where the Basque Provinces, Santander and Asturias were isolated from the rest of Republican territory. As the war progressed and the Republic trained a new army, the relative importance of the Brigades declined. The five Brigades became decreasingly “international” as their ranks were augmented by Spanish troops and as some of the surviving brigaders  were deployed in the rearguard, in some cases training Spanish recruits. 

The Franco Regime and some historians outside Spain have portrayed the Brigades as a Communist army, under the control of Moscow. The importance of party members, especially among the officers and political commissars, is well known. But different units had different political characters :Tremlett portrays the German-speaking Thälmann Battalion as more thoroughly under Communist party leadership than the Garibaldi Battalion, whose leadership reflected the more diverse nature of Italian anti-Fascism. While figures such as the Frenchman André Marty and the Italian Luigi Longo played key roles at the Brigades’ base in Albacete, Soviet “advisors” occupied many of the leading military posts. The most important of these were not Russians but Hungarians, Poles and Ukrainians, who operated under assumed names. These included the Hungarian Paul Lukacs, the Ukrainian Emilio Kléber and the Polish General Walter, all of whom had served in the Red Army. 

The Brigades suffered very high casualty rates –  about a quarter of volunteers from the United Kingdom, France and Canada were killed and Tremlett estimates overall deaths at about twenty per cent, with a high proportion of the survivors wounded. The reasons for this are clear from Tremlett’s account. Their use Brigades as shock-troops, especially in the early months when the Republic was struggling to train an army to replace the improvised militias who had resisted the military coup, meant that the brigaders were often thrown into battle with minimal training and with antiquated weaponry. Until their withdrawal in September 1938 they continued to be involved in much of the heaviest fighting, with resulting heavy casualties. Capture by Franco’s armies, especially during the Republican retreat in Aragon in early 1938, often resulted in immediate execution, though hundreds survived to be used in prisoner exchanges after being subjected to brutal treatment at San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos. 

The Brigades were withdrawn in September 1938 and given a formal farewell in a grand parade in Barcelona the following month, where famously they were addressed by “La Pasionaria” (Dolores Ibarruri). Their subsequent fates differed starkly, as Tremlett outlines in one of the most interesting chapters. Some brigaders, such as the British, US, French and Canadians made their way home, often to be treated with suspicion – in the 1950s they were accused of “premature anti-Fascism” in the USA. Their former comrades from Germany, Italy and other European dictatorships were often less fortunate. In January 1939, some 3,200 volunteers, mainly Germans, Italians, Poles and other east Europeans, were still in Spain because returning to their own countries would mean imprisonment or death. As Franco’s forces advanced on Barcelona they were called upon to return to the battlefield in a vain attempt to help avert military defeat.

By March 1939, following the fall of Catalonia, over 5,700 brigaders were detained in camps in France. Some would play important roles in the French Resistance, others would be deported to Nazi camps where few survived. Some of the Polish volunteers made the journey via North Africa to the USSR where Stalin recruited a Polish army against Germany. Former volunteers would also make important contributions elsewhere, notably in partisan forces operating in Italy and Yugoslavia, where all four of Tito’s partisan armies were led by former brigaders. Some of the Eastern Europeans survived to play important political roles after 1945, notably in the German Democratic Republic, where six former brigaders would become government ministers while others played key roles in the army and security forces. 

Over eighty years later how are we to view those who volunteered and risked their lives in the International Brigades? In the past many writers have seen them as heroic figures who left their homelands and risked death to stop the spread of Fascism. To the Franco Regime – and to Cold War warriors in the West – they were mere adventurers or an invading army of Marxists under the control of Moscow. Tremlett manages to avoid either characterisation, pointing out that they were not uniformly good people and that, as in any large group of people, they included cowards and psychopaths as well as those who were prepared to risk their lives in the pursuit of a noble cause. This recognition of the variety of the brigaders as well as the breadth of the sources used make this a genuinely international history of the Brigades which should be read by anyone interested in the Civil War or interwar Europe. 

The most comprehensive database on membership of the International Brigades is SIDBRINT of the Universitat de Barcelona, which includes a database of over 30,000 volunteers.

Giles Tremlett, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

ABOUT THE SAN PEDRO DE CARDEÑA PHOTO [Note added on 3 March 2021]: Our photo shows prisoners of war from the International Brigades giving the straight-armed Fascist salute. This was required of all prisoners – Spanish and non-Spanish – in San Pedro and in other prison camps. According to the American volunteer, Carl Geiser, who was imprisoned in San Pedro between April 1938 and February 1939 the imprisoned Brigaders – mainly British and American – agreed among themselves to give the Fascist salute to avoid the beatings which were given to prisoners who refused. He adds “the sergeants ignored sloppy salutes as long as the fist was not closed” (Carl Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 1986, p. 129).  The obligation to give the Fascist salute, which was accompanied by the shout of the Dictator’s name, along with the beatings administered to prisoners, were among numerous contraventions by the military rebels of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. 

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MAIN PHOTO: Members of the XV International Brigade, possibly the English Battalion, being farewelled during the Battle of the Ebro in the football field of Marçà (Tarragona), October 1938. Author: Concern Illustrated Daily Courier – Illustration Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.