by Geert Mak
‘All the parents in Lamanère,’ Isabelle says, ‘pushed their children to go to work for the post office, the customs department, the police or the army. The young people were simply chased out of this village. Becoming civil servants, moving to the valley, that was the only way to escape feudal life. After that came the city folk and the hippie farmers. They enjoyed life here for a while, invested nothing, then left again. The people who were born here, they still love the land, and the old trees. But money ruins everything.’
I look out at the snowy peaks. The silence here is unbelievable: this exists only at Europe's outer reaches. At night you can hear the beat of an owl's wing. The starry sky makes you dizzy. It is as though all this has existed since time began, the endless forest, the village, the quiet breath of the land.
I talk to another neighbour, Patrick Barrière. Like all farmers, he starts off with stories about his animals. ‘One of my calves died last week,’ he says. ‘I thought: here comes one of those hang-gliders. It was an eagle. It stood there beside that dead calf, it was the size of a big sheepdog. After that came the foxes and the lynxes: within three days, that calf was picked clean.’
Then he talks about the land, says there is nothing eternal about it. ‘Oh, Monsieur, these woods never used to go on like this. In my father's day this valley was full of people, and every piece of land was put to use. It was a mixed landscape: woods, but also lots of pastureland and little fields. Not long ago there was a forest fire here. You saw all those old terraces reappear. Yes, the old folks worked their fingers to the bone. And for what? Poverty and a little food and shelter, that was all.’
Eugene Weber compared these farmers’ views of the world to the look in the eyes of terrified men in desperate circumstances. In their eyes the village was ‘a lifeboat struggling to stay afloat in heavy seas, its culture a combination of discipline and reassurance designed to keep its occupants alive. Insecurity was the rule, existence consistently marginal. Tradition, routine, vigorous adherence to the family and the community – and to their rules – alone made existence possible.’
The big turnaround came to Lamanère in about 1940. While the rest of Europe's farmers were turning to mechanised agriculture, in these mountains there went on working with oxen and their own bare hands. There was no way they could compete. The farm children were driven into the factories like lambs to the slaughter. The coup de grâce came when the government offered them an attractive price to take over their land and turn it into forest. Within ten years, half the farms, gardens and orchards had disappeared. Today, backed by piles of European cash, a monotonous layer of ‘new nature’ is being laid across the land. Old oaks and chestnuts are being chopped down without mercy. Varieties of trees that have never grown here before are being planted, trees that grow quickly and efficiently. Patrick Barrière has almost no neighbours these days. That, too, is something about which these families knew nothing: loneliness.
We drink another pastis, and talk turns to history. ‘I've always found bullets lying around the countryside here,’ Patrick says. ‘There were some goings-on around here, let me tell you! In winter 1939 a couple of hundred thousand Spaniards actually came across those mountains. They had lost the civil war and now they could choose: run or die. Over in Prats-de-Mollo it was just like Kosovo: they had to pay for everything, the farmers around here took those rich Catalans for everything they could get. A loaf of bread cost one gold piece. Lodgings for the night cost a painting.’
‘I'm a grandchild of one of those refugees,’ Isabelle said.
Patrick's grandfather saw it all first-hand when thousands of republicans crossed these mountains into France after the fall of Barcelona. The head of their diplomatic service, José Lopez Rey, talked later about how he had pocketed the key to the last republican ministry of foreign affairs – a village school on the border – and stumbled into France dizzy with scurvy. During his last six months in Barcelona, all he had had to eat was dry rice.
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 ec
onomic 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 def
end 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.
